Monday, December 17, 2012

Interesting Links 17 December 2012

Five school days until Christmas. Well at my house at least. Are you taking some time off for the holiday season or will you be filling a lot of the time with grading, teacher prep and other school work? A lot of teachers will but I hope most will find some time to have some fun, catch up on sleep and generally recharge for the start of the new calendar year. For those of you who want to catch up on new things I hope to have another good wrap up of links for you next Monday as well as today.

Tornado Maker: Real Science, Real Learning by Outthink Inc. is a Kickstarter project to create an educational game that is both fun and a good learning experience. 

One of the things I stumbled on during CS Education Week is that there are some CS educators on Twitter who should have a lot more followers:
  • @CSEdWeek The official twitter account of computer science education week
  • @ruthef Ruthe Farmer is the chair of CS Ed Week and someone very active in working to get more women in computer science
  • @lsudol Leigh Anne Sudol-DeLyser is a PhD student in CS education at Carnegie Mellon and a consultant working with the Academy For Software Engineering – a magnet HS in NYC.
  •  @guzdial Mark Guzdial is a professor at Georgia Tech and probably the most important researcher in CS education in my opinion
  •  @csteachersa The official Twitter account of the Computer Science Teachers Association
  •  @alfredtwo This would be me. Smile

Speaking of Mark Guzdial, in a recent post he shares an announcement that Beth Simon has a new resource for CS teachers interested in using Peer Instruction http://www.peerinstruction4cs.org/

The Flipped Classroom: It's Got to Be Done Right nice post on the Flipped Classroom by Mark Frydenberg.

From the Microsoft Safer Online twitter account  @Safer_Online: I see that they now have a Safer Online Challenge poster (PDF) great for pass-along, bulletin boards & class handouts: Read about the challenge at this blog post.

For a complete list of Challenge rules, eligibility, and entry requirements, please see http://aka.ms/SOTeenOfficialRules.  To learn more about Microsoft’s work in online safety and security, consult our Digital Citizenship in Action Toolkit.  “Like” our page on Facebook (another Challenge featured property); follow us on Twitter, and let the Challenge begin!

Under the do your students know this comes - According to Forbes, 6 of the top 18 jobs in 2013 are in Information Technology.

Award winning teacher Don Wettrick@DonWettrick has a new web show called  The Focus (Finding Outstanding Classrooms Using Social media). Take a look.

TouchDevelop – Making apps for mobile devices on mobile devices. TouchDevelop now lets one develop on the web for Windows Phones. Pretty cool stuff.

Girls Who Code is an interesting and from the looks of things successful program to help girls get involved in Computer Science.  Watch Girls Who Code: A Future for Girls in Computer Science to learn more about this program.

Tara Walker posed the second in her series of Windows 8 Game development blog posts last week. Take a look at  Windows 8 Game Development using C#, XNA and MonoGame 3.0: Building a Shooter Game Walkthrough – Part 2

From my friend Randi Guthrie I see that Microsoft is looking to get students to write Windows 8 apps over the holidays. Windows 8 Student Holiday App Challenge: Microsoft Gives You $$ If You Publish an App :

The $100 gift card promotion is only open to students attending school in the United States, but the learning resources and tech support are available to anyone; student, faculty, or hobbyist.

The relevant links are:

Google is continuing the quest for future computer scientists with CS4HS with a Google Research grant for CS teacher training.

Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) began five years ago with a simple question: How can we help create a much needed influx of CS majors into universities and the workforce? We took our questions to three of our university partners--University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and UCLA--and together we came up with CS4HS. The model was based on a “train the trainer” technique. By focusing our efforts on teachers and bringing them the skills they need to implement CS into their classrooms, we would be able to reach even more students. With grants from Google, our partner universities created curriculum and put together hands-on, community-based workshops for their local area teachers.

Vint Cerf  one of the creators of the Internet urges computer science to be included in EBacc

Lego-powered M&M sorter pleases your palate's imagination (video)via @engadget now this is an interesting robot.

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