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October 2007 - Posts

Wednesday, October 31, 2007 5:03 AM

New Community Site for Robots in Education

RobotEvents.com is a new community portal for robotics and technology in education. Highlights include links to various robotic competitions for school students, lists of workshops and camps and discussion forums. Their mission: RobotEvents.com exists
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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Tuesday, October 30, 2007 3:37 AM

Security V. Ease of Use

I've run into lots of security talk lately. I visited a school last week where the programming teacher is having some issues because the IT department wanted him to try letting them manage the lab's new computers. Sort of "let's see if it makes things
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Monday, October 29, 2007 3:47 AM

Tablet PC Tips on Video

The Tablet PC Education blog points out that Jim Vanides has created some videos to show instructors how to get more out of their Tablet PCs. SO far there are three in his series: How to use ink to annotate PowerPoint slides - did you know you could do
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
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Friday, October 26, 2007 3:28 AM

When Programming was Women's Work

These days when the picture one automatically gets when they hear the words "computer programmer" is male and white and dorky it is easy to think it was always that way. But actually it hasn't always been that way. In fact in the beginning programming
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, October 25, 2007 10:00 AM

HP Technology for Teaching Grant Initiative

I spotted this program on Jim Vanides blog recently. (Emphasis mine) The HP Technology for Teaching Grant Initiative is designed to support the innovative use of mobile technology in K-16 education, and to help identify K-12 public schools and two- and
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007 3:42 AM

Cyberbullying - Let's All Fight It

I came across a moving video on cyberbullying last week. It is remarkably well done and tells the story that cyberbullying is bullying and that it really hurts people. The video can be found here . There you will also find a teacher's guide to help use
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 3:35 AM

DigiGirlz Days are scheduled

The DigiGirlz Days schedule is out (actually I got a sneak peak - thanks Diane ) and there are more of them in more places than ever before. What is a DigiGirlz Day ? During the event, students interact with Microsoft employees and managers to gain exposure
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 5 Comments
Monday, October 22, 2007 3:56 AM

Please Help Me Understand Who Is Reading

I have created a very brief (five questions, multiple choice) survey to try to better understand who is reading this blog. Please take a minute or two to answer these questions for me. I'd really appreciate it! I am particularly interested to see if there
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Friday, October 19, 2007 6:04 AM

CS Degree Starting Salaries Are Up

Last week I posted about information that I thought guidance counselors should have about the CS/IT field. Someone said in a comment that I didn't really make the case that students should actually go into the field. On one hand I do believe, as I heard
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Thursday, October 18, 2007 3:30 AM

Do Your Students Understand this Cartoon

Lots of people pointed out this cartoon recently. It's an example of an SQL Injection exploit of course and all the people who referenced it knew that right away. But how many regular (ie. non-geek, non-computing people) do understand it? Probably not
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 5:53 AM

Reals and Integers, Apples and Oranges

Do you remember when you first learned about real numbers? I do. Things had been so easy when all I had to track was whole numbers. Even division was nice and neat. If you couldn't divide evenly you just moved the remainder of to the side. Nice and smooth
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 3:50 AM

Threat Modeling - How it Works at Microsoft

When internationally known security expert Bruce Schneier recommends a series of blogs on threat modeling ( and he did ) you know it has to be good. Larry Osterman has written a 13 part series on threat modeling using the PlaySound API as an example.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 15, 2007 6:02 AM

Phun with Phishing

OK maybe phun (or even fun) isn't quite the word but some people at Carnegie Mellon University Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory have come up with an educational game to teach young people about phishing attacks called Anti-Phishing Phil . It's a
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, October 12, 2007 3:12 AM

PowerPoint as a Random Access Device

Here is something completely different. What I love about this idea is that it is really thinking outside the box. I love that it takes something familiar and uses it in a new and creative way. So here is the story. Mr. Chun was teaching PowerPoint. Specifically
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Thursday, October 11, 2007 3:33 AM

What Guidance Needs to Know About Computer Science

When ever computer science teachers get together and talk about what makes their life difficult school guidance counselors come into the discussion. Listen in and you will hear stories of guidance "dumping" unqualified students into CS classes to fill
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 6 Comments
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 3:28 AM

My Game Builder - An online tool for building simple games

My Game Builder is a project being developed by David Golds in his spare time. He's either got a lot of spare time or (much more likely given his day job) a lot more smarts and energy than I have. Why? Because My Game Builder is really cool! My Game Builder
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, October 09, 2007 3:39 AM

The Five Essential Gaming Methods in XNA Game Studio

The folks over at Channel 9 have posted a really good video on the five most important methods in XNA Game Development called - XNA Development Part 3: The Five Essential Gaming Methods Jennifer Marsman walks through the essential methods that you need
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 08, 2007 3:15 AM

When the Second Programming Language is Harder to Learn

Mark Guzdial had an interesting blog post recently titled " Why is assessing learning about computing so hard? " The post is mostly about the limited amount of research available on computer science education. That is a problem I've worried about more
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, October 05, 2007 3:42 PM

How many posts are too many posts

This is sort of a meta post. That is to say it is a post about posting. I've been thinking a lot about how often I post here. How much is too much, how much is not enough? What I try to do here is to post information that is useful/helpful/interesting
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 8 Comments
Friday, October 05, 2007 3:37 AM

Worldwide Teacher Appreciation Day

By designation of UNESCO today October 5th is Worldwide Teacher Appreciation Day . I am very lucky that every day I get to talk to and work with some of the best, most caring and hardest working teachers in the world. Frankly there are a lot of great
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, October 04, 2007 3:41 AM

How would you improve K-12 Computer Science Education

Chris Stephenson is the director of the Computer Science Teacher Association and recently her Advisory Council put some interesting questions to her: " What would CSTA do if it had unlimited financial resources? What projects would it undertake that would
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 2:50 AM

ACM Student Memberships

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the professional society for people in the computer science field. While most people know about professional societies not as many seem to be aware that many of them have student memberships that can be very
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, October 02, 2007 2:11 AM

Free Book On Building Great Web Sites

The Microsoft Office Live team has created a free book entitled " Build a Web site That Sells " that may be useful in web design classes. The book " includes tips, techniques, and tools to help you design an effective and engaging Web site, generate more
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Monday, October 01, 2007 6:10 AM

Top Links from September

I thought I might review some of the things I linked to that seemed to be the most interesting to the most people in the last month. Tablet PC Stuff The IEEE Computer Society magazine issue with a bunch of articles on Tablet PCs in education is available
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
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