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November 2005 - Posts

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 6:45 PM

Time for Teacher Training

Chap Percival has been blogging about some ongoing training for teachers in his Florida school district. One of the things he talks about is how the course is somewhat rushed and condensed. The teachers, many of whom are moving from Macs to PCs, are not
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, November 30, 2005 11:40 AM

Absolute Beginner's Video Series to Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions

Do you have some students who want to learn Visual Basic .NET or C# on their own? Or perhaps you want to learn them as part of your own professional development. Well if so, Microsoft has a free series of lessons for absolute beginners. They look pretty
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, November 28, 2005 8:10 AM

Getting students involved

Last week Brian Scarbeau installed a new departmental server at his school. He blogs about it here . One of the things he does that I think is great is that he involves his students in the process. They helped with the setup of the software and the migration
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, November 23, 2005 8:43 AM

Useful Articles on Coding 4 Fun

Arian Kulp has a simple time-tracking application . This little project creates an application that sits in the system tray and allows the user to collect information about how long one spends time on different tasks. Useful things demonstrated are: Creating
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, November 22, 2005 5:35 AM

Help with creating Gadgets

I wrote about gadgets for Windows Live about a week and a half ago. Today a friend of mine [thanks Daryll !] pointed me to a gadget creation starter kit for use with the Visual Wed Developer Express Edition. The gadget starter kit and the article that
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Sunday, November 20, 2005 10:02 AM

Blogger's Rights for Students

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a Frequently Asked Questions list for student blogging . This is a document that I highly recommend that school administrators who are involved in student discipline read very carefully. The EFF is
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Thursday, November 17, 2005 7:54 AM

NSA resources for students - codes and ciphers

The National Security Agency better known as the NSA has resources for students interested in codes and ciphers. If you have students interested in codes and ciphers (and a lot of students who like programming seem to also like those things) than this
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, November 16, 2005 7:16 AM

Test data? What do you mean test data?

One of the things I struggled with as a teacher was getting students to understand the importance of a test plan. Not a plan on how to take a test, although that was a topic that came up with regards to the Advanced Placement Computer Science (APCS) exam.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 7:56 AM

IronPython - yet another cool .NET language

There is a lot of interest in dynamic languages these days. These languages are often used as scripting languages and people are doing a lot of rapid development with them. Python is one of those languages and is often listed as the "P" in LAMP along
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, November 14, 2005 8:00 AM

High School Girl Wins Microsoft Contest

A 15-year old girl from Puyallup won a recent Microsoft contest that looked for people using Windows XP in interesting ways. ( News article here ) Jeannine Johnson uses a computer and monitoring equipment on her dragster to check on its performance. I
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Sunday, November 13, 2005 1:32 PM

Does Bill Gates care about Visual Basic?

Channel 9 has an interesting interview with Soma Somasegar , the VP in charge of Visual Studio. Soma talks about how much Microsoft values Visual Basic (among other things). One of the things he does is list a number of line of business applications (applications
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, November 11, 2005 11:51 AM

Building Gadgets for Live.com

You and your students have probably heard of Windows Live the new interactive home page from Microsoft. One of the great things about Windows Live is that you can add all sorts of Gadgets to do interesting things. There is a web site where you can find
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, November 10, 2005 12:56 PM

Options for getting Visual Studio for the classroom

By now most people reading blogs or news about Microsoft know that Visual Studio .NET 2005 has been released. What not everyone knows much about are the options for schools, teachers, and students to get copies. For most schools the best way to get Visual
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, November 09, 2005 10:21 AM

Project ideas - just where do they come from?

One of the things that computer science teachers all seem to struggle with is coming up with projects to assign their students. I was thinking about this after reading Robb Cutler's latest at the Computer Science Teachers Association blog. OK try and
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, November 07, 2005 6:55 AM

Choppers and computers?

You hear a lot of people, especially students, claim that they don't need computers. Or they don't see computers being involved in things they are interested it. Computers are not cool and fun to everyone. On Daryll's blog I found a link to a video for
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Saturday, November 05, 2005 6:38 PM

Debugging more than just programs

Susan Canaga has a post today that talks about teaching a student to troubleshoot a stapler. I love how she describes the moment where the student realizes that he is about to learn something - "caught in a teachable moment." I think that it is important
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, November 04, 2005 10:13 AM

School Computer Clubs

Computer clubs at schools seem to range from a complete waste of time all the way up to wonderful experiences that are both fun and educational. Organizing and running one was not, I am embarrassed to admit, one of my strong suits. I wish it had been
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, November 01, 2005 4:56 PM

ASP .NET Links for Teachers

I found a couple of gems today. Dave Jacobus links to a tutorial that he plans to use with his Advanced Web Page Design class. The tutorial is here . Dave's blog entry about it is here . And speaking about ASP .NET in the classroom - Brian Scarbeau has
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
 
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