Critical Thinking

Friday is not the day to talk about thinking. I think a lot of people in general and students in particular are looking to stop thinking right about now. But critical thinking skills are something I feel is really important so when I learned today that Microsoft has a bunch of resources for teaching critical thinking including a free e-book it seemed worth a blog post of its own. (Note that this is only the latest of a series of Teacher Guides for use in the classroom from Microsoft Education)

[Microsoft] developed this critical thinking and web research curriculum with the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Lesson plans include prerequisites, rationale, essential concepts, and descriptions of related National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) and are designed for beginner, intermediate, or advanced levels, aimed at middle school and secondary students.

Students have more information at their fingertips than ever before, yet the challenge remains for them to find, evaluate, and apply the information they discover in the classroom and beyond.

Applying critical thinking skills through web research can help students:

• Improve search skills.
• Evaluate the information they find.
• Incorporate them in their work.

Explore the ready-to-use curriculum below, including detailed lesson plans, student worksheets, and class demonstrations on:

• Mechanics of searching
• Validity and reliability
• Plagiarism
• Citing web sources
• Civil discourse

Download the Critical Thinking e-book

Interesting Links 14 June 2010

Is school done for the year where you are? Here in the northeast of the US there is another week or two to go. Teachers are finishing up the year, getting their grades done, graduation events are everywhere and I think many teachers are looking to take some time off before even thinking about next school year. Others though are planning their attendance at ISTE (Microsoft and me at ISTE), getting ready for summer workshops or otherwise thinking about how they will prepare for next year.

On the O’Reilly forms is this interesting discussion on teaching programming to kids The usual suspects (Kodu, Alice, Small Basic, Scratch) all come up.

Speaking of Small Basic - Small Basic 0.9 is out .Now supporting 15 different natural languages! Wow!

Here is a video that tells how to make your own movie with Windows Movie Maker by Joey deVilla and Junior. Kids will get a kick out of it. Maybe some summer project ideas for your own kids?

From Alex Courosa (@courosa) This link to a game for color nerds. The site shows the Hex code for a color and several color samples. Your job is to identify the color with its Hex code. Not so easy unless you are a real color nerd. Web developers will want to test themselves though.

From Sam Stokes (@SocalSam) a blog post on Silverlight games on Win Phone: Rotate that triangle,

Nice video demo of designing ideas with PowerPoint including photo editing and animation. Seriously the animation at the end is worth the trip!

Who says today’s youth can’t change the world? Vote for world’s best student project.

The IC2010 Windows Phone 7 Rock star award results are out! Gotta love it when a high school team beats out a bunch of college teams :-)

From @TechFTW: Check out what it’s like to be an intern at Microsoft with the My Life @ Microsoft video series http://dld.bz/gcHv

I love the blog post called Deeper Conversations by Doug Peterson (@dougpete) on how blog comments can lead to useful professional development. The comments are often the best and most useful part of any blog post. I know that people add a lot of value to my posts when they comment. If you have something to say, please say it! The conversation is what it is all about.

New URL

My main blog, which has most of my posts, now has a new URL because of a migration. Please link to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth for my high school computer science education blog. Thanks.

Interesting Links 7 June 2010

I tried to take most of last week off. Well I guess I actually did officially take most of the week off but somehow I spent more time than I should have on email and Twitter. Perhaps I have a problem. :-) But I didn’t really blog and I avoided most real work. I even made it to the beach for a while. So I feel somewhat rested. The rest of the month will be very busy with ISTE coming up as well as some local events in New England. I did Tweet and otherwise collect some interesting links to start your week off. So here they are.

Rob over @TeachTec has been reminding people that Microsoft will be having lots of activities at ISTE. Join our Hyatt sessions including. breakfast with a  tour of Office 2010 & Web Apps Microsoft at ISTE for all the details. I really hope to see many of you there!

From the wonderful people at MIT who bring you Scratch  (on Twitter @scratchteam)  Scratch wiki: by and for Scratchers is now out. The Scratch wiki itself is at http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/

From the official Microsoft twitter account a link to a video demonstration of new Windows Live Essentials features that make it easier to organize, connect and share online.

New on the Faculty Resource Center is a new XNA Lab in a Box This is a great getting started lab that was developed to train faculty in Europe. It’s in English BTW. :-)

New on the Dot Net Rocks internet program is an interview with Lynn Langit (@llangit) and Llewellyn Falco on teaching kids programming.

From Microsoft’s Internet Safety team (@Safer_Online) came a link to a great video on how to use Windows parental controls. I wonder how many people even know that Windows has parental controls?

Kathleen Weaver (@kathweaver) follows the @MSFTCrabby Twitter account and retweeted this link to - Crabby's Daily Tip: You can use Office for THAT? — Plan your wedding with Office Now when you think about it that has possibilities for combining teaching students about planning in general, about weddings in particular, and about using software to help with it all. I could have used this when I took “Marriage and the Family” in college. :-)

Interesting Links 31 May 2010

It’s Memorial Day in the US and today we remember and honor the men and women who fought and died for our country. My Dad is a World War II veteran and has been relating some of his stories from that war. A lot went on and in his earlier days he never shared this much.  I’m glad to know it and it really brings the sacrifices the military has made over the generations real to me.

Most people in the US have a holiday today and so do I. I wanted to keep to my usually blogging schedule though. So here now some updates and interesting links.

From the Kodu team via @mmaclaurin and @scoy6 I learn that there is a new build of Kodu out with PC updates.  Information on their blog at PC build 1.0.48 is live! Get it here: Kodu Game Lab - Technical Preview

From Mark Drapeau (AKA @cheeky_geeky)  Shuffleboard: A Windows Phone 7 Sample Game XNA based and a preview of an upcoming Coding 4 Fun article.

danah boyd (@zephoria) had an interesting post titled: Deception + fear + humiliation != education about an ACLU complaint regarding a police officer "safety" lesson) We need to teach students how to be safe on the Internet but we really need to make sure we are honest about it. And it can’t be all about fear and humiliation.

I really liked this post by Garth on his CS Education blog - Programmers need to [be] smart and stupid, at the same time. “I keep telling my kids if you are going to write code you have to design smart and code stupid” An interesting perspective on coding and design and getting the messages through to students.

From @innovativeteach and the UK Education team a new Blog Post - 'Bing - Visual Search, teaching questioning skills’

Don’t confuse visual search with image search, visual search is about finding information using images rather than a keyword. Bing has number of visual data collections, some of which are ideal for creating learning opportunities for pupils, especially in developing questioning and analytical skills.

To use Visual search, go to www.bing.com and click Visual Search on the menu on the left-hand side

 

 

My friend and go-worker Randy Guthre (@randyguthrie) wrote a new blog post: - Using Self-Marketing to Maximize Out-of-Class Project Impact on your Resume Out of class projects can be a very powerful in getting job interviews and actual jobs. Students can use social networking and other tools to leverage these projects to market themselves. Randy tells how it can work.

Plural Sight Online is offering their training at half off for educators on their Pluralsight On-Demand! .NET Training Courses. Plural Sight is one of the top training organizations. How good? Well Microsoft frequently hires them to train Microsoft employees. If you are interested visit their web site and contact their marketing people for details.

An interesting story on a blog post by Cameron Evans, the national technology officer and CTO for Microsoft Education in the US, called PowerPoint Inspires a High School Student to Computer Science This is the story of how one application was an inspiration to one person to enter the computer science field. Pretty cool story really.

RT @TeachTec is offering more Tech Tips to close-out the school year. See his post  of the Top 8 tips

From @Safer_Online Who asks “Holding an online safety event? Microsoft offers FREE resources you can download and use.”

BTW I finally made someone's top 20 blog list - The Top 20 Teacher Blogs Apparently this and several dollars can get me a cup of coffee. If I drank coffee that is. :-) Still it always feels good to be noticed and there are some really great blogs on that  list.

Interesting Links 17 May 2010

I have quite an eclectic mix of links this week. Some career information, some Windows Phone programming links, Internet safety, school IT information and more. I hope you’ll read through it all and find something that is useful to you. If you are interested in more frequent update you can follow me at @AlfredTwo on Twitter. Send me an @ reply if you are on Twitter and read my blog so I will be sure to follow you back!

First a couple of IT and ICT links for you. I found this list of Worst practices in ICT use in education from a World Bank blog via the CSTA blog. Both the World Bank and CSTA posts are worth the read. Over at the Educators Royal Treatment, Ken Royal (@kenroyal) blogs a 7-Step District IT Checklist.

Some good news and some bad news about high school computer science. The good is a great program at Georgia Tech High called Operation Reboot: IT Professionals Become Computer Science Teachers. On the down side, Mark Guzdial writes about high school CS teachers under fire It is about how budget cuts and teacher layoffs are setting high school computer science back by pretty much removing it from the curriculum. It seems like HS CS takes one step forward and two steps backwards at a time when we really need some steady movement forward.

Speaking of the need – Two interesting salary reports came to my attention last week. On was Global Knowledge's 2010 IT Skills and Salary Report Download. Interesting that the average salary for respondents was $82,115. The other was a report on the 25 best-paying jobs for women. There was a gender gap in income – something that never stops amazing me as it makes little sense. On the good side the smallest gap wad for computer software engineers. Even nursing had a larger percentage gap between men and women with men making more.

The SaferOnline Team from Microsoft (@Safer_Online) Sent out a couple of useful links:

• 11 tips for social networking safely
• 11 tips for dealing with cyberbullies

On the development software side of things, check out What's New in Visual Studio 2010

My friend Sam Stokes (@SocalSam) had a couple of blog posts last week about developing for Windows Phones.

• Silverlight on the Windows Phone! (In both Chinese and English!)
• Character Pink Girl? XNA 4.0? This could be your first Windows Phone Program

I also found and tried out a the windows phone snowflake demo game from the XNA Creators Club.

From the Teacher Tech blog and @TeachTec: Partners in Learning has a free site to set up communities. Join now and $1 goes to the Boys & Girls Club.

From the UK Innovative teachers program (@innovativeteach) “Want some great ideas of How to use Excel across the curriculum? Try our Innovids” I also blogged about that and other videos in my post last week on Programming and Excel.

BTW happy "Syttende Mai" to my friends and family in Norway. (It’s Norwegian Constitution Day)

Interesting Links 10 May 2010

You have to love the Internet and especially twitter. You can hear about things that you’d never hear about from the main stream media. For example, from Andrew Parsons (@MrAndyPuppy) I learned that there is an official Geek/Nerd Pride Day - May 25: Geek/Nerd day Information and Geek/Nerd Day Facebook Page. Not sure I am a big fan of the list of rights and responsibilities on the Wikipedia page but it is an interesting idea none the less.

Looking at the network logs for links to this blog I found this list of the Top 50 Computer Science Blogs I’m pretty happy to have made this list. There are some good blogs on it but I really think there were some missing. Mark Guzdial’s Computer Science Education blog and Eugene Wallingford’s Knowing and Doing just to name two. There are several other good CS blogs in the blog roll on the side of this page (click to the blog if you are reading via RSS)

Speaking of other good blogs, Hélène Martin reminds us that while loops are more complicated than we sometimes remember  with a post titled While loops gone wild. She talks about some of the things she does to teach indeterminate loops and what works or not at times.

A lot going on around the Internet on women in computer science last week. For example, from Derrick Love (@Dlove03) i spotted a link to a blog post titled Computer Science Lacks Women, Minorities. Dan Lewis on the CSTA Blog writes What's Different About Boys' and Girls' Interest in Computing? And Mark Guzdial writes about Women in CS in Qatar: It's Complicated. That last one is particularly full of surprises. If you are all interested in computer science perceptions in different cultures it is a must read.

Interested in contests? From @ScholasticTeach I learned that you can join the Partners in Learning Network by 6/30 for a chance to win a Dell computer lab for your school. Hey, it’s all free!

A bit about professional development and other events. From Liz Davis (@lizbdavis) I learned that there is a Creative Computing workshop for  Middle & HS teachers at MIT. Looks like it is derived from the CS4HS curriculum plan developed initially at Carnegie Mellon. Should be a good program.

Liz also twittered about the Scratch at MIT Conference in August: http://events.scratch.mit.edu/conference/index.php/Scratch/2010 and  Scratch Day on May 22nd. Registration is now open at http://sdmit.scratch.mit.edu/.

Speaking of Scratch – Gail Carmichael writes about Scratch and Eighth Graders on her blog. A good blog to follow BTW. Also she has some great links to resources including many that she used with her eight grade students. Worth the visit just for all those links.

From @Safer_Online I learned about some Free printable online safety brochures available for download. Take a look – you may have a use for them.

Last but not least, I have a new post at the Educator’s Royal Treatment today - Four T’s That Spell Trouble for Technology Adoption In which I talk about some of the issues that get in the way of implementing technology programs in schools.

Interesting Links 3 May 2010

Last week was a struggle for me both blogging and otherwise. A lot of stuff going on at work and at home. Plus of course I spent a lot of my blogging energy on the Imagine Cup. I loved being at and blogging about the Imagine Cup though so it was worth it for me. I really hope a lot more top notch high school students give the IC a try next year. Hopefully we can come up with some ways to make that a but lighter weight for HS students though. The Windows Phone Rockstar award contest is still open to new entries BTW.

I have some longer single topic blog posts planned from this week but I do want to list some interesting shorts and links that I have found though. I hope you find some (even one maybe) that you can really use.

It's Teacher Appreciation Week - Thanks so much to all of you classroom teachers out there! In honor of this the TeachTech blog (ideas and resources for your classroom) is featuring guest posts from @TeachaKidd @EmergingEdTech @CoolCatTeacher @web20classroom @LarryFerlazzo

• Monday, May 3: Lee Kolbert (@TeachaKidd), A GeekyMomma’s Blog
• Tuesday, May 4: Vicki Davis (@CoolCatTeacher), The Cool Cat Teacher Blog
• Wednesday, May 5: Kelly Walsh (@EmergingEdTech), Emerging EdTech
• Thursday, May 6: Steven Anderson (@web20classroom), Blogging About the Web 2.0 Connected Classroom
• Friday, May 7: Larry Ferlazzo (@LarryFerlazzo), Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Speaking of teachers - Garth Flint (who comments frequently on my blog) has a new blog of his own called Garth's CS Education blog. One of his early posts is  and Interesting review of a bunch of programming languages and their usefulness in first CS courses. I like his discussion of what makes up a good first programming language as well. So go read his blog and add it to your RSS reader or list of favorites. This is going to be a blog worth following. Trust me!

Next some contest stuff for teachers:

There has been some changes to the Submission form for 2010 Ypulse Totally Wired Teacher Award Sponsored by Dell. You may want to check that out.

If you are on Twitter you can follow @MouseMischief for a chance at winning a Mischief Classroom Kit.

Mouse Mischief integrates into Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. See some videos at the Mouse Mischief blog.

• Reason #1 to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom: “It actively engages students and supports collaborative learning.”
• Reason #2 to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom: “Improves classroom management and overall student participation.”
• Reason #3 to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom: “It’s familiar to use and easy on the classroom budget.”

We take humor very seriously here at Microsoft and think it is important in Education as well. See Microsoft's Guide to Humor which is one part of a “complete set of professional development competencies that we developed with educators for educators. Seriously.”

I’ve been saying that game design programs attract students and the Washington Post reports that it is working at George Mason. Anyone surprised?

From @Microsoft I find this post “Prepare today for jobs of tomorrow” on “The Hill” written by Microsoft’s Fred Humphries. It says that 75% of jobs in US in next decade will require some tech skills, but only 13% US adults have them. I do not think it is safe to assume that today’s students have them either!

Online safety stuff? I see that the Boy Scouts have added two gamer awards for Cub scouts. Hat tip to @MrAndyPuppy for the link.

And from @Safer_Online: Microsoft publishes its latest Security Intelligence Report. Some great insights there!

Fun video by Joey deVilla AKA @accordionguy  Developer Jr. with Joey and Junior take a look at Kodu. Hat tip @shap for the link

Professional Development?

• From @TeachTec: has new free Microsoft Teacher Leader Summer Workshops: Dallas, Irvine, Phoenix, Iowa
• HS CS workshop on Alice at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi 
• High School (AP) Computer science teachers workshop at Carnegie Mellon  Highly recommended.

From @KidReporter and@DanKasun: Students see the forest through the tweets - Imagine Cup 2010 One last (for a while) Imagine Cup story

From @CACMmag End of an era? The end of something. Sony will stop making floppy disks by March 2011. Wait? Someone still makes floppy disks?

Interesting Links 28 April 2010

As promised here are a bunch more links that I hope you will find interesting and useful.

The CSTA blog had a couple of recent posts of interest:

• Preparing Future Elementary Teachers to Teach Computing
• Dealing with Competence Issues & Confidence

Lynn Langit (@llangit ) is a developer evangelist at Microsoft who has a passion for education as well. In a recent post she talks about Volunteering as a Comp Sci Teacher – How To It’s an interesting look at how to volunteer to teach and what it is like for a professional developer type to do it. Also check out her Teacher-for-a-Week post that tells the story of her recent experiences at the Girl’s Middle School.

I found a bunch of videos on new things in Office 2010 for teachers:

• What’s new in the Office 2010 applications
• What’s new in Word 2010 for teachers
• What’s new in Excel 2010
• OneNote 2010 for teachers and students
• What’s new in PowerPoint 2010 for teachers
• How to make interactive quizzes with PowerPoint

Looking at Windows 7? Highly recommended. If you are or if you have it check out 67 Windows 7 tips, tricks and secrets  I found things I didn't know here. Some cool stuff!

I’m a big fan of FIRST Robotics. The regular season is over but I found this list of FIRST Robotics post-season events run by local teams. If you haven't been to one you should go and see one.

From @CapstoneEdu is an interesting looking conference event event May 6th in Cambridge, MA.

Capstone Partners and Microsoft are organizing an event to discuss the education landscape from K-12 to Post-Secondary and how technology will change the experience in the future.  We will discuss challenges schools face in competing with online programs, business models that are emerging to improve education (not just test scores), and technologies that disrupt the status quo.  Topics will include:

• student retention
• lecture capture
• cloud computing & info security
• tools & apps: wikis/ phones/tablets
• online proctoring
• open-source textbooks
• learning management systems of the future
• distance learning across borders

Register: http://bit.ly/a1sWJb They really need more real educators to show up and make sure they don’t go too far afield I think.

The @scratchteam has a  new video with an overview of Scratch 2.0.

Don’t have enough time for social media? You may find this post that answer the question How Do Busy Leaders Find Time for Social Media? interesting. It was written by Michael Hyatt (@MichaelHyatt) who is the CEO of a major publishing company. And related to that Doug Peterson asks about teacher’s online footprints at 404 Educator. What do people find when they search for you

Interesting Links 27 April 2010

I twittered up quite a storm last week. Much of it was because of the US Imagine Cup which I was also blogging a lot about. I was also putting updates on the Microsoft Facebook account. The Imagine Cup was flat out busy but much fun and much excitement for me as well as all involved. I did find a bunch of useful links to share though. I apologize for them being so late this week but, well, I was busy.

First a couple of Imagine Cup links to highlight:

• U.S. Imagine Cup Winners Celebrate Victory, Share Inspiration with James Cameron and Craig Mundie from Microsoft Presspass.
• Bill Gates blogs about the Imagine Cup which is one of his favorite events.
• Team members, mentors, a mom share their experiences on the U.S. Imagine Cup Finals Videos from the Virtual Press Room for the US Imagine Cup
• High School Team Makes Mark at Imagine Cup from the Official Microsoft Blog
• Video interviews with Imagine Cup teams by Pat Godwin, Microsoft Student Insider

Looking for girls in technology? One of the very interesting people I met at the US Imagine Cup was Genevieve L'Esperance  Geek girl and video blogger. Gen is a teenager from Montreal, Quebec. Gen has a bunch of video posts and interviews on her blog GenINC.

Garth Flint has an interesting review of of programming languages and their usefulness in first CS courses. You may also find his discussion about what makes a good first programming language to be interesting as well. Garth’s blog is new but its off to a great start. I recommend subscribing.

A couple of workshops to recommend. There will be a workshop on Alice at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi in June. And a High School (AP) Computer science teachers workshop at Carnegie Mellon Judith Hromcik is one of the presenters at CMU. I’ve known Judy for years and there are few people who know more about AP CS than she does.

I’ve got still more to write up but they’re going to have to wait for tomorrow.

Windows Phone 7 Rockstar Award

If you have been reading my blog (or following on Twitter @AlfredTwo) you have been reading about the US Imagine Cup finals. Hopefully you have found some interesting things and maybe becoming interested in getting involved if you are a student or presenting the idea to your students. If so I want you to know that there are some events in the worldwide Imagine Cup that are still open to entries. One of the events that excites me the most is the Windows Phone 7 Rockstar Award.

To win the Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Award, your team is challenged to create a Windows Phone 7 application (app) in either Silverlight or XNA Game Studio.  This app needs to be designed with the consumer in mind and should be as visually compelling as possible. Be prepared to demonstrate your team’s app entry running on an actual Windows Phone 7 device or in an emulator. Mobile applications are “all the” buzz today. Windows Phone 7 is a revolutionary new platform and you have the opportunity to be a part of it. This is your chance to think of something that is truly outside the box and be one of the first developers, ever, to be building apps for Windows Phone 7.  Create an app that people will love having on their Windows Phone.

And of course there are prizes!

• First Prize: $8,000 USD, a trip to the Worldwide Finals in Warsaw, Poland from July 3-8, 2010, and a Windows Phone for each team member.
• Second Prize: $4,000 USD and a Windows Phone for each team member
• Third Prize: $3,000 USD and a Windows Phone for each team member

Get full information about the competition at the Windows Phone 7 Rockstar Award site.  BTW DreamSpark has partnered with Windows Marketplace for Mobile so you can sell your mobile applications! Go to DreamSpark to learn more!

US Imagine Cup Finals This Weekend

Today I have a presentation to give around mid-day and then I go  home to pack for a trip to Washington DC for the US finals of the Imagine Cup. Ironically last year’s finals was in near by Boston/Cambridge but I had to miss it to attend a meeting in, you guessed it, Washington DC. This year I get to go. We’ll see the selection of the top Software Development Invitational team who will get to go to the world wide Imagine Cup finals in Poland this summer. We will also pick the best (of the 10 finalists) in the US game development addition. Some of those teams are moving through the final rounds of the world wide competition which is running in parallel. Yeah, its different.

There is also a people’s choice voting for the Software design category. Visit the People’s Choice Video Gallery and vote for your favorite. Next Monday we will be running a community showcase April 26, 2010 from 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM, at the Newseum in DC. Read about the Imagine Cup community showcase here and please come by if you are in the neighborhood! I’m really excited to see the Newseum BTW. From all I have read and heard it sounds like a very interesting place.

I’ll be twittering a bit – we’re using the hash tag #ICUS10 for US Imagine Cup related tweets. Several others should be tweeting as well. I’ll be posting updates on Facebook and I plan on blogging news here at the end of the day. So I may not have a post Friday because of travel (but I may – we’ll see) but you should see posts on Saturday and Sunday with a wrap up on Monday.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,ICUS10,IC10,USIC,USIC10

New Silverlight 4 Training Kit Available

  Microsoft has just released a new free Silverlight 4 Training Kit that walks you through building business applications with Silverlight 4. You can also download the entire offline version of the kit here.  You can use the 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands on labs online or offline from links on the Channel 9 site.

The key to this training material is not the features it covers (though it covers a variety them) but rather that it teaches from the perspective of building a business application.

 

The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper that explains all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!

It really expects some previous knowledge of Silverlight but I’m going to give it a whirl myself anyway.

Teachers Don’t Talk Enough

I was invited to be on a panel at Northeastern University (I was a last minute fill-in but happy to attend) talking about Teaching With Technology. Now the difference between teaching technology and teaching with technology is a big one. And important one. I’m big on both but honestly think that teaching with technology is a better way to teach technology than teaching technology for its own sake. The panel was taking and discussion questions based in large part on the keynote presentation by Don Marinelli from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center which Don co-founded with the late Randy Pausch.

We had an hour scheduled for the discussion but we could have gone for hours. Really hours without repeating or running out of questions and discussion topics. The discussion was lively and, for me at least, very engaging. I see this with just about any panel I attend either in the audience or as a panelist. I also see “more time to network and talk with colleagues” as a major bit of feedback for most of the educational conferences I am aware of. If you’ve been to some of the major edtech conferences (TCEA and ISTE for example) you will see long conversations in the halls, outside the meeting rooms, at blogger cafe’s and just about any free space. People blog and twitter about these conversations being the best part about some conferences.

Why? Because teachers just don’t have enough time to talk with their peers in their daily work lives. Yet talking with ones peers is a wonderful way to learn new things, share ideas, ask weird but useful questions, and generally develop oneself as a person and as a professional. But teachers are locked up isolated in their classrooms most of the day. faculty lounges while occasionally helpful have limitations. Too little time in them for one thing. Too many other things going on it them. And all too often a slightly toxic atmosphere in the schools that could most benefit for helpful learning.

So what to do? I recommend blogging and twitter. Yes you have heard this from me before (well unless you are new to my blog. :-)) If you are looking for a more scholarly set of reasoning check out Rationalizing Academic Blogging by Mark Guzdial who is a tenured professor at Georgia Tech. Start with reading them and adding your input to the discussions. Really the comments are often the very best part of a blog post – especially with this blog. Then think about writing your own blog. You know stuff or you wouldn’t be a teacher – share it with others. Come on and join the conversations. You know you want to!

Michelle Hutton of the CSTA posted a good blog roll at the CSTA blog. You are following the CSTA blog right? For teachers in all areas there is a great list of blogs at the Moving Forward wiki. Start with Education blogs by Discipline and when you create your blog make sure you add it to the list.

BTW I have just updated my personal blog roll on my primary blog. The CS Teacher list includes:

Mark Guzdial – Computing Education Blog

Wicked Teacher of the West

Leigh Ann Sudol - In Need of a Base Case

Kathleen Weaver - Teaching CS in Dallas

Eugene Wallingford – Knowing and Doing

Ben Chun – And yet it moves

Stacey Armstrong - A+ Computer Science

Brian Scarbeau - A high school CS teacher in Florida

Mr. Higgins Blog (who I need to bug to update more often :-) )

Yes this is another repost but I really think these blogs deserve more link love and attention from search engines. And from you to.

Visual Studio 2010 Now Available

Well it is official – the final release of Visual Studio 2010 is not available. If your school has an MSDN AA account you can download it from ELMS now. If you don’t have MSDN AA, why not? Also for students who are part of the DreamSpark program you can download Visual Studio 2010 from there as well!

For everyone, the Express editions are also now available as free downloads/net installs from the Visual Studio Express Editions web site.

For those of you working at schools, including high school, colleges and universities, that have MSDN AA memberships Hilary Pike posts detailed steps for how to access Visual 2010 in MSDN AA, DreamSpark, and MSDN AA ELMS:

Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET 4.0 now available through DreamSpark, MSDN, MSDN AA, and TechNet

MSDN AA Admins Enable Visual Studio 2010 Downloads from ELMS

Interesting Links 12 April 2010

What does this say?

01000010 01100001 01110010
01100010 01101001 01100101

It says “Barbie” in Binary coded ASCII. See Barbie Goes Binary  for more on the display on Computer Engineer Barbie's laptop and the design on her blouse. I wonder how many little girls will notice? Well at least we geeks know it is there.

The nice people at @fuselabs retweeted this link from @planetkodu about an interesting post from the Planet Kodu Blog: 6 surprising ways Kodu can help you. If you have looked at Kodu and wondered what it would do for students that post is a great place to start reading.

The @koduteam twittered about some little-known-facts on Kodu cut-and-paste (keyboard shortcuts work!) By retweeting a link from @scoy6 to his new Kodu tutorial on programming User Interface on the Kodu blog.

Speaking of research projects that are useful for teachers, Microsoft Research just released a new Chemistry add-on for Word.

The Chemistry Add-in for Word makes it easier to insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas, and 2-D depictions, within Microsoft Office Word. Additionally, it enables the creation of inline “chemical zones,” the rendering of print-ready visual depictions of chemical structures, and the ability to store and expose chemical information in a semantically rich manner.

Joe Osborne, one of Microsoft’s Student Insiders (Twitter @joeosborne87) Twittered a link to his interview with Twitter's Raffi Krikorian. One of the things they talked about is geotagging. Information of where people are is becoming quite the issue on the Internet these days.

Last week I started guest blogging at the Educators’ Royal Treatment. I expect to blog there a couple of times a week, usually about general education technology issues rather than computer science specific topics. My first post there is called The Missing Question From Technology Plans I hope you will check it out and comment as appropriate.

Looking for Alice teaching workshops this summer? Good list at http://www.aliceprogramming.net/workshop2010.html (The Alice home page is at Alice.org)

Are you a Moodle user? @mrdatahs wrote a post on ZDNet Education about Microsoft Education Labs integrates Office with Moodle.  This is one of a number of releases by Microsoft Education Labs and it is not the only resource for Moodle users that you will find there.

Are you one of those people who likes to incorporate photos and videos in Office documents? @Officegal twittered about new photo and video tools in Office 2010 on The Microsoft Office Blog.

The Microsoft Jobs Blog interviews Microsoft Games Studio Writer John Sutherland - from Pong to Natal. An interesting story about one man reinventing himself and moving into new career options. Worth a look and not just if you are interested in game development.

Interesting Links 29 March 2010

In yet another example of how poorly I do at predicting what is going to be interesting and/or controversial almost no one read and absolutely no one commented on my post about companies getting involved in curriculum writing last week (Curriculum, Companies, Cooperation and Conflict). My asking of the question Where does Computer Science Belong? did a little better with some interesting comments. I recommend the comments at least.

Related to that last post and question, Cameron Wilson of ACM wrote a post called Computing and the Common Core that you should read. The most important part of it is his call to action.

Now the community can support this breakthrough by sending letters for support for the inclusion of computer science in the final document. The initiative is taking comments on the draft until April 2. There are two ways to comment. The first is by taking the survey, which as an additional comment area where you can express support for computer science. (Follow this link  and click on the "submit feedback" to get to the survey.) The second is by sending letters to commonstandards@ccsso.org.

Interested is seeing some good college/university projects? The US Imagine Cup finals have opened up their People's Choice – Video Gallery. Watch the videos and vote for your favorite team. Send your friends and students over as well. This will give you a good idea of what the Imagine Cup is all about. And perhaps inspire some students to enter this global competition going forward. It’s amazing.

Concerned about accessibility and how it relates to educating your students? From the UK Higher Education blog:

We’ve just issued the third edition of our accessibility guide for education, and it’s available as a download from our accessibility site. The site also includes a number of accessibility video case studies.

The Accessibility: A Guide for Educators has been updated to include information on Windows 7 accessibility features, and current assistive technology product recommendations.

Rob Miles (@robmiles) has posted some XNA videos at http://verysillygames.com/Screencasts Rob also has a blog post on Windows Phone Accelerometer Support in XNA that you may be interested in.

Are you planning for Office 2010? Have you downloaded the free beta? There is not a free e-book available called First Look at Office 2010. Get yours now?

Speaking of Office there are some interesting downloads that will be interesting to many teachers. There is a brand new Chemistry add-in for Microsoft Word at http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/ChemistryAdd-in/Pages/default.aspx There is also a math add-on for Word at the download center and math worksheet generator at Microsoft Education Labs.

Over at ZDnet Mary Jo Foley (@maryjofoley) kicked off a new blog post series last week - Microsoft Women Worth Watching. Day 1: Julie Larson-Green. Day 2 was Betsy Aoki: Microsoft Women Worth Watching.

Intel has some videos about intelligent devices - with Intel chips inside of course :-)

Rob Bayuk (@TeachTec) has been blogging and Twittering Office how-to tips including - Add sounds, movies, and animated pictures to your PowerPoint presentations. For more like that follow the Teacher Tech blog.

From the ACM SIGCSE mailing list (I think) I found this great collection of programming assignments in Python. I can see these easily adapted to other programming languages though.

Playing Video Games Will Not Get You a Job But Creating One Might

Last week I had a chance to hear Larry Hryb (AKA Major Nelson) of the Xbox Live team talk to a group of college students at Microsoft’s Cambridge (MA) facility. The audience was made up mostly of students with aspirations of making it in the gaming industry. Game programmers, graphic designers, game developers, game audio enthusiasts, and more. Larry talked about Xbox Live and Xbox specific topics for a while and then joined a panel of people in the game industry that included someone from Linden Labs (Second Life) and some independent game companies. They talked about careers in the industry. Obviously one of the things students wanted to know was what they need to do to get into the industry. One of Larry’s kick off comments was most interesting. Basically he said (I’m paraphrasing) was “I don’t care what games you play, how much you plan, or how good you play. I hear that all the time. Tell me what you have created.”

There is a huge difference between being a consumer and being a creator. Being good at one does not mean you will be good at the other. A video game company and in fact any software company is looking for people who can create. Several people on the game industry panel said they wanted to see code from potential developers. Art from potential game graphic artists. Potential game designers who are not also programmers (and there are places for those people) can create board games to show off their talents and imagination. The important thing is to show of what you can create. It doesn’t matter where you get or create your portfolio but that you have one. One independent game developer whose games are making him money on Xbox Market said to get a hold of XNA and create a game to demo. Maybe even get it on Xbox Market and have some evidence that you can create marketable products.

This idea of having a creation to show goes beyond just games though. An interview for just about any entry level software job is going to cover what you do beyond your course work. Everyone expects you to do well in your course work and to get good grades but what they want to know is what you do outside of class. Do you create interesting projects? Do you take your own ideas and express them in code? You may talk about wanting to change the world but what steps are you doing to actually make a difference?

Yes internships can help with this. But not everyone can get a great internship. Everyone can get development software and create software that can make a difference for themselves and perhaps even the world. Microsoft has programs like MSDN Academic Alliance (your school may already be a member) and DreamSpark that gives departments and students professional software for their use. Dreamspark is completely free for students as well!

There are competitions like the Imagine Cup where students create teams and compete internationally. Over the past few years many students have used their projects as portfolio projects or even to launch their own businesses. You can see what some of this year’s projects look like and vote for your favorite at the US Imagine Cup People’s Choice Video Gallery. Oh and there are several types of competitions in the Imagine Cup including a Game Design competition. If you don’t think that winning a major international development competition impresses prospective employers think again. Be thinking about entering next year!

Windows Phone 7 Series Programming

Programming phones seems to be the hot new thing these days. Yesterday Microsoft announced the availability of free programming tools for the new Windows Phone 7 Series of devices. Start with Visual Studio 2010 Express for Phone beta.

Windows Phone Developer Tools includes:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Emulator
• Silverlight for Windows Phone
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP

I’ve got the complete set and am installing it today. With the Windows Phone Emulator I can get some code developed even before the phones themselves become available. I’m just trying to figure out want to create.

Need some documentation? Charles Petzold's preview ebook Programming Windows  Phone 7 Series is now available online at http://charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html.

How about Code Samples for Windows Phone? There are some of those as well. And don’t miss out on the Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Training Kit!

NASA Be A Martian Pathfinder Innovation Challenge

Back last November I posted a short link to NASA’s Be A Martian program page. I guess I didn’t realize at the time that there was a programming competition called the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge as part of that. Not strictly a student competition but many may be interested in it. Here is the reminder announcement I received in my email today.

NASA has hundreds of thousands of images from their missions to Mars. With the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge, they want to enlist your coding skills to help them classify them. This is a unique opportunity where you can help NASA and win some great prizes by utilizing your existing .NET skills.

The Pathfinder Innovation Challenge consists of four different “leagues”.  In the Global Cooperation League, you’ll build casual games that will allow every day citizens to help classify images in a game environment (similar to the counting craters application that can be found online here – http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/maproom) and do so using Silverlight and NASAs Azure-hosted APIs in codename Dallas.  In the Intelligence League, you’ll use the power of the Azure cloud to attempt to solve the same problem by programmatically examining and classifying the images.

Full details for the competition can be found on their website at http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/pic  .  Details specific to the Global Cooperation League at http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/pic/coop-league  and details for the Intelligence League can be found at http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/pic/intelligence-league . Also be sure to check out the intelligence league site for a series of “How Do I?”  videos that show how to sign up for an use the Codename Dallas API.

In addition to helping mankind and being able to brag that your code was helping NASA, PIC winners will also win amazing prizes ranging from NASA swag, to ZuneHDs, to trips to see the launch of the next Mars Rover.