Top Posts For April

To be honest I am writing this a little early because I am on vacation today. So it is possible that one of the posts from this week should be in this list but isn’t.  But I think it is safe to say that some of the early posts in April were the big conversation pieces of the month.

The post with the most comments was the one about the College Board deciding to discontinue one of the two Advanced Placement Computer Science exams. This is a huge issue in the high school (AP CS) world and it is still being talked about by teachers.

The post where I asked if there was a future for high school computer science also had a lot of comments and received a huge amount of traffic. Not surprisingly my audience believes that there should be a future but there is not a single view of what that future should be or what it should include.

Popfly was one of the themes of my month in April. I had three posts where it came up. First was my trip to Bentley College to sit in on an IT 101 class where Popfly is one of the Web 2.0 tools being used. Then there was the hands on lab I posted that steps one though creating a simple (hopefully fun) mashup. And thirdly my trip report from Summit NJ where I used the lab.

BTW I had a great Twitter experience with that hands on lab. Once I finished the first draft of the exercise I Twitter that I had it and needed someone to sanity check it for me. With in a short period of time three teachers had Twittered back, received a copy via email and replied with suggestions for improvement. Thanks to Mari Hobkirk, Kathleen Weaver, and Mark Frydenberg my directions were vastly better than then would otherwise have been and I thank them.

The last widely read post was on the need to teach security to students. That is a drum I beat pretty regularly and it always seems to get some attention.  There were a number of great comments on that post as well.

Were there any posts you found particularly useful? Or do you have suggestions for things I should write about, search for more resources about or anything else you want to suggest as ways I can make this blog more useful please either leave a comment or send me an email at AlfredTh (at) Microsoft.com. Thanks!