Interesting Links 27 September 2010

Last week I wrote a post about the Imagine Cup. (Imagine Cup–Solving the Worlds Problems Through Software) A couple of things I should have mentioned about it though. One is there is a chance for students who enter to win an Xbox 360 console with the new Kinect each week to one random Imagine Cup registrant .Read the full rules at Imagine Cup Rules. The other thing I should have emphasized is that the Round 1 quizzes for the Information Technology (IT) Challenge have started. You can get the full schedule at IT Challenge web site. It’s not to early to work at qualifying for Round 2.

Brandon Watson @BrandonWatson announced that Visual Basic is now available to support Silverlight development for the  WindowsPhone7. Visual Basic Comes to Windows Phone 7 As a big VB fan boy from way back this is pretty exciting to me.

The World Wide Innovative Forum is coming up this week in South Africa. Leading up to it Tony Franklin has been posting some guest posts from the US teachers who are going.

• Gamer Girlz by Pat Yongpradit
• Innovative Education Forum A Celebration of Learning and Culture by Cheryl Arnett and Rawya Shatila

@weemooseus Twittered a link to a post by a student who wrote up his list if the Top 5 AP Computer Science Tips. It’s an interesting list with some good suggestions.

What does your school need? The team at Bing is running a contest to provide money to schools. Check the program out here. Learn more about Bing programs for educators, visit bing.com/education

In other links, Ken Royal @kenroyal had an interesting article on  Top 25 Ed Tech Trends. Well worth the read.

Most Popular Posts From August

It turns out the be complicated to figure out what the most popular blog posts are for a particular month. There are two sets of data I look through. One set, from Feedburner, shows (in theory) the top number of posts read by subscribers to this blog. The second set of numbers, from the hosting service, shows (again in theory) the top posts as read by web browsers. There is a lot of similarity in the two lists but it is not exact. For one thing the web traffic comes in large part from search engines. It looks like a lot of people in August were searching for things related to “What do you do on the first day of class” which led them to a post from September 2007! My posts from July of this year on Visual Programming languages and the new Microsoft Technology Associate certifications also received a lot of web traffic in August. The top 5 based on being on both lists is below though.

1. Non-Myths About Programming
2. Computer Science is NOT Boring!
3. Free Microsoft Office Add-ins for Education
4. Windows Phone 7 Sample applications
5. Girls, Games and Software Development
   

I hope you’ll read through these if you missed them. Many of them have some comments which are often well worth the read. I encourage you to add your opinions to those and any other recent posts. And of course any I post in the future. Comments make it all much better for everyone. Are any of your favorite posts from August not on this list? Or any you think were worthless? I could always make a least popular list but somehow I think I would find that less personally satisfying.