Interesting Links 22 February 2010
I blogged a lot of opinion pieces last week. I’ll try to have more information this week. But at the very least I have a few good links to share today. One of the best may be Teaching Kids Programming – Teaching Girls to code in Danish which is a trip report by Lynn Langit who recently took her 2 day Small Basic workshop to girls in Denmark. There is a nice 5 minute video embedded in that post that shows her taking a program that draws a box and making it a lot more interesting with a series of small changes.
The CSTA blog has been interesting posts lately. For example Build a computer science playground. The other good post was a suggested blogroll for computer science teachers. That reminds me that I really have to update my own blog roll. Look for that to happen over the next couple of days. In the mean time, are there some blogs that you think should be read by computer science teachers? Please leave links in the comments.
have you talked to your students about their digital footprint? Did you ever wonder how unique and tractable is your web browser? https://panopticlick.eff.org/ is a site that can tell you. Most people don’t even know that their web browser sends information that can be used to identify them. According to that web site mine seems to be unique among the 655,000+ they have tested. A bit scary because the more unique the easier it is to identify one single user. Its something worth thinking about and discussing.
Microsoft and IEEE Join Forces to Help the Next Generation of Engineers and Technology Professionals Succeed. Student members of the IEEE can now get a lot of professional software free from Microsoft.
John Rice put together a comparison paper of Logo, Scratch and Alice (PDF) on the TCEA web site. Some interesting perspectives.
From James Senior (@jsenior) Announcing: Three new Web App Toolkits! Calendars, Bing Maps, Freemium Apps! If you or students you know are interested in taking their web sites up a notch you may want to take a look at those. There are several other apps there and these are just the most recent.