This is a great free resource I dug up for my math teachers recently. It was a big hit, so I thought I would pass it along.

The TI-83+ is pretty much the Platonic Form of a graphing calculator. It is standard-issue for almost all high school students and instructors in the maths and sciences. It is a programmable calculator, and I'm told you can develop pretty sophisticated programs and applications for it.

To facilitate, Texas Instruments provides a neat little program that allows advanced users to work with these programs on their personal computers. This allows students and teachers to easily build and edit complicated programs, without huddling over a calculator all day long.

Fair enough. But your average high school user doesn't really need to develop custom applications, so who really cares?

This is the neat part - it comes with custom skins (you can also have a TI-84+ or a TI-73+, if you prefer) so when you run the programs you can see an exact duplicate of your TI-83+ on your screen.

So, if you load the application and press one button (debug - which essentially runs an empty program) you get a perfectly functioning virtual TI-83 on your screen - all the buttons work, it performs exactly like the real thing.

There are other free graphing calculators available elsewhere online, but my teachers like that it is an exact TI-83+ clone. They can put it up on the data projector and give clear and specific instructions and demonstrations for their students - which buttons to push, and show working models on screen of what the resulting graphs are supposed to look like.

Not groundbreaking stuff, but very, very useful for teachers.

It should be noted that the license states that you need to own a TI calculator use the software, which shouldn't be a problem for most teachers and students, since they are so ubiquitous. In any event, there are no limitations or restrictions on the software, and no registration is needed to download it.

So, no more excuses about homework and lost calculators!

Incidentally, there are also lots of classroom activities and resources available at the Texas Instruments site, if you really want to take your calculators to the next level.