Interesting Links August 24 2009

As I put this summary together I’m just about ready to head to Redmond WA by way of Seattle in the morning. Early in the morning. Even earlier than my wife gets up to go to school.  It’s my first trip to  the Microsoft headquarters area in over a year so I am really excited that I’ll be seeing some people I haven’t seen in a while. It will be a week of meetings to kick off the new fiscal year. In some ways it will be like the pre-start of school meetings that a lot of teachers are going through these days. We’ll be meeting some new team members for the first time. And learning about rule and process changes. And getting training on various programs. This is the first big sign of summer heading to a close. Sigh. I’ll have a hard time keeping up with Twitter, blogs and email this week because of the meetings. So I’m not sure if I’ll have a good list on the 31st. But I have a few for you now.

Matt MacLaurin (@mmaclaurin) Posted a link to a video that the whole #kodu team is watching with their jaws on the floor. This video shows examples of Kodu worlds that even the development team isn’t sure how they were done. Any doubt that a creative person could do amazing things with Kodu is gone now. Matt also twittered about a “fantastic in-depth Kodu video tutorial - best I've seen yet.”

For people interested in Scratch, Peter Vogel (@PeterVogel) retweeted an announcement that the Scratch Ed site has been officially launched.

The TeachTech blog (on Twitter @TeachTec) had an interesting blog entry.  Or is it the start of a debate? Why showing movies in class is a good thing. Student and teacher generated movies that is. Interesting read.

Interested in Tablet PCs in education? Check out "WIPTE"? which is a great conference for tablet pc educators - Register before Sept 14 and save! Jim Vanides from HP has some of the news.

Look like there is a CSTA K-12 Computing Teachers Workshop at Grace Hopper 2009. Looks great. Wish I could go.

There is a new version of Small Basic released. The good news for me is that the documentation as been updated and includes arrays now. Good stuff for beginners.

On the lighter side, do you ever talk about network device handshakes? Cartoon about wireless devices connecting.

Talk about irony. From Peter Vogel I found a link to an article about famous hacker now security consultant Kevin Mitnick who is having trouble with script kiddies who attack his site & cell phone account. It seems that his Internet and phone providers are finding to too hard to defend him and want to drop him as a customer. Interesting on two levels. On one hand he is getting a taste of his own medicine. On the other it makes one worry about overall network security on the Internet and cell phone services. Something to talk about in class perhaps.

Have you seen AutoCollage? From the Teacher Tech teams (@TeachTec) I learned that teachers can get a  FREE copy of Microsoft AutoCollage if you join the US Innovative Teachers Network (free!). Free is good!