Interesting Links October 5 2009

Today is World Teacher’s Day. On behalf on myself, thanks for all you teachers do every day. I hope your students, their parents and especially your administration appreciates you. And now a few links that I hope you will find useful and interesting.

Grace Murray Hopper was a personal hero of mine. I was able to meet her when I was in college. Several of us students had lunch with her. She also gave a talk that I remember to this day over 35 years later. If you never had the chance to hear her live you might enjoy an 60 Minutes episode that highlighter her and showed her explaining nano seconds among other things. Part one is here. Part two is here. There is also a slide show of some of Grace Hopper’s more creative quotations. If you do a search of YouTube for “Grace Murray Hopper” you will find more video of her as well.

One of the teachers I talk to regularly, I’ve been on his school’s advisory board for a number of years, pointed me to a site called ICT Mindtools. From the sites description:

By ICT Mindtools I refer to ICT tools that necessarily engage users in higher order thinking.  Students cannot use Mindtools without thinking deeply about the task at hand.  Mindtools require students to be creative and to think and make connections for themselves.

I’m still looking through ICT Mindtools but it sure looks interesting . The teacher who created it also has some Visual Basic instruction that looks pretty good.

Have you heard people say that they can get by being computer illiterate? A recent article on MSNBC explains that lack of computer skills is keeping many people from getting jobs. In this economy people need every edge they can get and they need to avoid issues like this that can be fixed with a little training and practice.

Have you seen the "I am a Technical Woman" video from the Anita Borg Institute yet? It’s a pretty cool short to show students that there are technical women out there. And they have fun as well.

@woscholar on Twitter sent me a link to a cool video trailer for the edublogger event in Austin prior to this winter’s TCEA conference. I’m going to try hard to make it. I usually go to TCEA and this is just one more good reason for the trip.

From the Making Teachers Nerdy blog is a post titled 10 Microsoft Word Tricks Every Teacher Should Know. Good stuff you may well find useful.