If you have an HP Prime (if you haven’t then naturally, you must get one!), plug it into your computer via USB, launch the connectivity kit and prepare to be amazed by the smoothest upgrade you’ve ever seen! On launching, the connectivity kit asks if you want to upgrade the kit and the calculator. You certainly want to do both. When the connectivity kit is finished, launch it again and turn the calculator on. You will be promPted to continue, but aside from that it will get on AND update the calculator’s firmware. Total about 3 minutes, with the the calculator part taking a minute or so.
This sort of thing really matters in schools where their arrival of an update is greeted with utter dismay in the maths department, who look down at their box of graphing calculators and decide if they are going to lose them for a couple of months to the IT technician (err sorry IT techs … many of whom will do it the same day, but well, maybe just sometimes there is a delay … !) or spend an evening doing it themselves and it never works properly. So, seeing this work so smoothly and so easily is a major thing. You can get on with your marking with a pile of Primes beside you and just plug the next one in every minute or so and hit return and that’s it. All in your control and all done.
This time it is a big deal. Your students will no doubt have tried pinching the screen on a graph to zoom in and out. Well you could swish, but you couldn’t pinch. Now you can. The final piece in the graphing puzzle is there. This will make it perfectly natural to all of your students and make exploring graphs seamless. There are also some additional statistical functions (chi-squared and regression) and the dynamic geometry has been substantially uprated, but that will need another post.
The other bit of major news is that the HP Prime wireless system has been announced and is available for order. See the specification sheet. But mostly look at the connectivity kit after the upgrade and imagine what you could do if every students’ machines were connected the same as your current USB connection, but simply, wirelessly, because they were in the room. Double click on the screen shot to project it. Send messages to yourself. Set up an instant poll and analyse you response! Start planning for the first time you can get true dialogue with your students while they have dynamic software in their hands. This is a whole new world and it looks seriously exciting.