Monday, April 13, 2009

Links Twittered April 13 2009

Once again I have found myself Twittering a lot of links in the course of the week. Here, in hopes you will find one or more of them interesting and or useful, is the most recent collection. If you want to see these in a more timely fashion I invite you to follow me at http://twitter.com/alfredtwo.

Before I start though let me remind people that there has been a lot of conversation on two of my blog posts from last week. I would seriously welcome more comments on both. And if you have a blog and could link to one/both of them to seed more people my way I would really appreciate it. Or Twitter about them – lots of new traffic coming to my main blog from Twitter lately. They are:

From @NCWIT: I found this article about Computer Science majors not lacking for jobs. One interesting quote from the article is a professor who says "I have more recruiters here than I have seniors"

From @NCWIT @ghc  and @anitaborg_org I found out about an African-American Women in Computing Science (AAWCS) scholarship program.

From an email from a friend (thanks Brian) I found out about some interesting looking tutorials for developing games using XNA.

A lot of people were talking about this Wired Campus article from Chronicle.com  Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter Would you do things this way in your classroom? How about in a business lecture/meeting? 

Microsoft Learning has released 2 courses for Windows 7 early adopters. Perhaps something for school IT people who have to think about when (or if but I hope when) to upgrade to Windows 7.

From @alexbarnett and @dhinchcliffe  I found a link to something called The Programmer Competency Matrix It looks really interesting and gives one something to think about in terms of where students are compared to where, perhaps, they need to be some day.

Discovery Education is running a contest. You can enter to win a wireless lab for your school!http://cdwg.discoveryeducation.com/1208/enter.cfm

An interesting video from ZDnet (found on TechRepublic) about deciding on the proper IT Tech support to user ratios. The video talks about a ratio of between 60 and 120 users to 1 tech support person in business. Most schools seem to be more like several hundred to 1 How about yours? Perhaps this is a video to show you school board while they do budget planning? :-)

Friday, April 10, 2009

Teacher Tech Tuesday Erin Gruwell of the Freedom Writers Foundation

Teacher Tech Tuesday: LIVE Webcast with Erin Gruwell, Founder and President of the Freedom Writers Foundation

Join Microsoft Education for a LIVE webcast with Erin Gruwell, Founder and President of the Freedom Writers Foundation, as she discusses her upcoming book Teaching Hope: Stories from the Freedom Writer Teachers launching later this year. Erin will discuss how she and 150 teachers across the US wrote and collaborated on the book using Microsoft and HP technology.

Teacher Tech Tuesday: LIVE webcast with Erin Gruwell

• April 14th, 2009 at 4:00 PM Eastern

• May 5th, 2009 at 4:00 PM Eastern

Register for the webcast at: http://www.microsoft.com/education/events/teachertech.aspx