Interesting Links 13 November 2011

I spent a lot of time watching the Twitter feed and reading blog posts about the Microsoft Global Forum last week. And some watching the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing as well. A good number of this week’s links are to posts related to the Global Forum. Let’s start with post event reflections from three attendees who were there in different roles.

• Lee Kolbert (@TeachAKidd) was one of the judges: What's in Your Heart? My Reflections as a Judge From The Microsoft Global Forum
• Johnny Kissko (@johnnyeducation) is a teacher who represented the US at the Global Forum. Reflections from Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Global Forum
• Doug Peterson (@dougpete ) was there as a blogger/reporter My Takeaways from the Partners in Learning Global Summit

Two more teacher reflections

• A Partner in Learning
• How time changes everything...

Doug Peterson had a series of blog posts from the Global Forum and between his tweets and posts I feel like I had a good idea (in a very small way) of what was going on. Here’s a bit of the day by day as Doug experienced it.

• Warming up for PILGF
• PILGF, Day 1
• PILGF, Day 2
• Closing Keynote

Here is the list of the 2011 Global Innovative Educator Award winners!  If you are interested in participating in 2012 follow the Microsoft Partners in Learning Facebook page. A few more news pieces from the Global Forum

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to the group and throws a fish!  Also Microsoft announces partnerships to inspire and support educators around the world:

Kinect was big at the Global Forum and coincidentally there is a new home page for Kinect for Windows kinectforwindows.org

From Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Ed Donahue (@creepyed) send out an invitation to heck out the flickr group, This is what a computer scientist looks like,  A great collection of women of all types who are involved in computer science. Chances are good that girls you know will see imagines of women like them.

Also at GHC, Ashley Myers (@OrganizeFISH) Tweeted this interesting tidbit “AP Calc and AP Stats have almost 50/50 female/male. AP CS ~16% female. ” Make you think doesn’t it?

Launching the 2nd Annual CSEdWeek Ideas for colleges from Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) that apply to many businesses as well.

Bob Familiar (@BobFamiliar) blogs about a new program for app developers.  [Your App Here] offers opportunity to have your Windows Phone app featured

      

Interesting Links 7 November 2011

Andrew Parsons has written an amazingly complete blog post about Create and publish your own Tower Defense game for Windows Phone 7. It you want one place to send a student for a “how to” this is the place. For high school students the DreamSpark piece is a little different in that they should get an access code from a faculty member at their school. That is a minor detail though and shouldn’t cause anyone any real issue.

I found a couple of new (to me at least) computer science teacher blogs last week:

• Super Computer Science by Rebecca Dovi
• CS Principles @ North by Deepa Muralidhar  - This is a blog following the journey of teaching a CS Principles pilot. Their curriculum is growing at http://hcps.us/phhs/comsci/cs_principles.htm

Have you seen the Kinect Effect video? Or read about how ‘Kinect Effect’ Magic Pushes Beyond the Living Room. It’s pretty cool and full of ideas and potential. last week Vice President for Education at Microsoft, Anthony Salcito, talked about The Kinect Effect in Education. What are some of your ideas?

For more on Kinect, it’s been out a year now, you may want to see this article on Silicon Valley’s Kinect Contributions.

I’d like to point out a few great blog posts by others in the last week or so.

• Computer Science needs good bait  by Garth Flint
• Stats, data, and answers, as to why there are so few women in technology fields. by @RachelAppel
• The Role of Academic Blogging by Amy Bruckman
• High School CS Teachers as the New Computing Professionals on the blog at @blogCACM written by Mark Guzdial
• Resources and Content from our Phone Camps by Kenny Spade

One last interesting article. How one woman technologist single-handedly created thousands of jobs article and video interview on| Venture Beat. Very cool way that one person used the power of the Internet to solve literally thousands of small problems for lots and lots of people

Writing My ISTE Keynote

I had mail today saying that ISTE was looking for nominations to present a keynote in San Diego this summer. They asked “could it be you?” Well unlikely it would be me but I asked myself “what would I say if I was asked to give the keynote at ISTE?”

So I sat in my hot tub for a half an hour and now have a basic outline ready. I am thinking that I will write it up over time and post in on my blog. Either this one or that one. Why not?

The next thing I thought is that everyone in education should write their own ISTE Keynote and publish it online. If you don’t have a blog I’d be willing to post some of them here. But really, isn’t it time you started your own blog?