Published by November 18th, 2006
in thoughts.
Google is Cool
Today I’m playing with Google and hopefully this just worked. Earlier I embedded my swimming calendar in to a moodle page. I’ve set up a course for my swim team and I didn’t want to duplicate my calendaring (not a word, I know) efforts.
After I finished messing around with the calendar I had some ideas for programing assignments . I wanted to get them down but didn’t want to fire up OpenOffice for just a few notes so I switched over to the Google Docs and Spreadsheets to get them down. I noticed a little button on the top right that said “publish”. Could I also embed this document into my moodle page? This would save me so much time. Right now if I want to post a file I have to make it, save it, upload it, and create a link to it. Uploading the file really slows down the process. After a minute of tinkering I got it to work. So I’m thinking how could life get any easier now. The Google Docs and Spreadsheets doesn’t do everything OpenOffice does but it does alot.
While I was publishing I noticed a button that said “publish to blog”. Can I get this to work? It took some configuring but I think I ready to hit publish.
The best thing is that all of the google tools are free to use. This may change someday but as I write I don’t see any ads.
Second Try - It worked the first time but the post didn’t have a title. I think it will work this time, I saved the
Third Try - Still no title. Lets see if it works this time.
Fourth Try - Nope. Had to cheat. I’ll firgure it out some other time. Any tips?
Published by November 15th, 2006
in thoughts.
One of my classes can be a challenge. Its near the end of the day and most of the students are ninth graders. If you don’t know what that this is like some day around 1:00 in the afternoon convince 24 people to drink three or four cups of coffee and and ask them to act like they know everything but really know nothing. Make sure these people are really horny and throw in a few overly aggressive males to get the full experience. Now try to keep them busy for 40 minutes. This would probably similar to my experience.
I’ve been trying to capture thier attention. Engagement is key and if the TV can keep them busy for hours at a time then I should be able to get them to watch me. Today I found something that really got them tuned in.
We’ve been learning about processes and I asked them to write a “How To Guide” on whatever thing they could think of. Someone cracked a joke about “How to use the bathroom” (in cruder terms). After I corrected his language I decided to run with it. I told them this was reasonable and I started talking about squat toilets I’ve seen with a bucket of water next to them and no toilet paper. How would they use the bathroom? When I told them the process of going to the bathroom in this sort of set up they started asking me questions. The fact they were asking me something other than “Why doesn’t this program work?” and “What am I supposed to do?” got me going and I kept the conversation running for a while. This wasn’t the good day though.
Today I opened class with a picture of a squat toilet I found on Google. They were quiet while they waited to hear what it was and how it worked. We even got into a discussion about how people might try to use a western style toilet if they had never seen one before. Then I told them what the assignment was, they were quiet, moved quickly to their computers and worked quietly for the rest of the period. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe there was something else going on that mellowed them out but if the secret to managing this class is showing them pictures of toilets from around the world then I will search for Albanian toilets tomorrow and I won’t stop until I get to Zaire.
Published by October 30th, 2006
in resources and thoughts.
At least once a week I try to show my students a video about cool new technology or something. I figure its a good way to get them to hear and use computer related vocabulary without them even knowing it. The following are a few resources that have and have not been successful with students.
Campaign for Real Beauty - A time lapse flash movie of a model going from just woke up to billboard. The best part is when they photoshop her face. The students gave it good reviews.
South Korean Video Gamers - New York Times audio slide show about video gaming in South Korea. I can’t get a link to it working but its on the right side of the technology page. The best reaction was, “10, 12, 14 hours of school? I can barely handle 6 as it is.”
David Pogue’s Technology Blog - Also from the New York Times, short video clips about new technology. They’re tough to see but the students like seeing the new gadgets he reviews.
CPU Overclocking - Who knew people videotape their CPUs? A search on Google video for “CPU” got me this one. There are others but this the only one with two French talking about how “extreme” it is. I told my students it didn’t have any sound.
Published by October 23rd, 2006
in thoughts.
At an urban high school its difficult to recruit students for the swim team. I am now the team’s coach and I often hear something to the effect of, “Are you crazy? I can’t even swim!”, when I ask students if they want to join. I’ve been looking for ways to focus my efforts and the other day I got a gift that with a few clicks of a mouse I had one more swimmer.
Last Tuesday they sent us a spreadsheet with the results of a career interest survey the freshman had taken. It was cool to see the different jobs they chose but I was wondering, the data freak that I am, what I could do to make the data tell me more. Then I noticed that two of the columns were interests Some students chose some pretty random things like scuba diving and cave exploring but most picked basketball and football. As I was going down the rows swimming caught my eye. After filtering out the students who chose swimming and the boys in that group I had a list of ninth graders who like to swim. This was cool.
I scanned this short list for guys in my classes. I picked up on one in particular and when came into my room that day I asked him if he wanted to join the swim team. He said he hadn’t thought about it but he did like to swim, so yeah, he would join the swim team. I couldn’t believe it was that easy.
Experiences like this are why I like computers and am convinced they make life easier and more interesting. Before the end of the week I plan to use this list to get enough swimmers for two relays in every event. Otherwise its back to convincing football players and guys who don’t make the basketball team that swimming is a good way to stay in shape for next season.
Published by October 18th, 2006
in experiences.
One of the things I’ve noticed about teaching programming is that a good work day, when they’re just typing along, is a pretty quiet day. Until the students get to debugging they are pretty content.
Yesterday as everyone was working out of nowhere someone yelled, “OH SHOOT, I AM TOO BLOOD.”
Everyone looked and it was a student I had given a little extra work too earlier. He finished the first program, our first step into variables, and I told him to add his own variables and print.out statements of his own. I also told him he had to figure out how to do it on his own (gasp!).
When he got his program to compile and run I guess he was just too excited to contain himself and just had to remind himself how good he was. I thought it was pretty cool that he could get so excited about programming. As we get deeper into writing programs I’m hoping that even more students will get so excited that they can’t contain themselves.
Published by October 11th, 2006
in resources and notes.
Hot Potatoes is a free software for generating digital quizzes, cloze activities, matching questions and crossword puzzles. I found it a while ago but never got around to using it until today. What motivated me was the fact that it is integrated into moodle. I took hello world, pasted the code into a cloze activity, made some gaps, uploaded it to Moodle and Voila! I had part two for my test today.
It took everyone a few minutes to catch on to what they were supposed to do but once they figured it out I think it was a pretty successful learning activity. At the very least it offered them another way to interact with the code.
Published by October 10th, 2006
in thoughts.
Now that we have started programming I’m faced with the challenge of getting students to understand what they are doing. Of course it really isn’t enough for me to just give them programs to copy. The other day I spent a fair amount of time looking for research, web sites, articles, whatever I could find about teaching programming conceptually. In the end I didn’t find a whole lot, just a few books. Most of what I found was also written at the college level making it way out of reach for my students.
One of the more interesting threads I followed started with the blog post below. I’m not convinced but I’d like to try giving my students some of the test questions to see if I get similar results.
Coding Horror - Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
“A bunch of people have linked to this academic paper, which proposes a way to seperate programming sheep from non-programming goats in computer science classes– long before the students have ever touched a program or a programming language:”
Published by October 2nd, 2006
in thoughts.
It all started with a little program called “Hello World”. Who knows where we’ll go from here but today was our first day of programming. I learned a few things about how to structure a programming lesson and by the end of the day everyone was clicking away. I found having the students highlight the beginning and end of the program and relevant points in between to be pretty successful. They had the hardest time figuring out what information on the page was actually supposed to be typed. Many of them were trying to figure out how to get the header (Name, Date, Period) formatted just right. I had pulled the assignment from another teacher who had modified another teachers and so on. Looking back I probably should have modified it myself.
One of the things I have to work on is getting the excitement level up. “You just wrote a program!”. Because everything happens in the Windows environment, command prompt and all, I don’t think they realize that they are giving the computer instructions at its very basic level. I have to figure out a way to get this point across.
Published by October 2nd, 2006
in thoughts.
The WIRED NEXTFEST was last week in New York City. If I had known ahead of time I would have been on a $35.00 Chinatown bus Friday night with my free ticket for emailing ten of my friends. Anyway, on their website there is some neat futuristic technology and a contest for students to imagine the next great technological advancement.
Published by October 2nd, 2006
in lessons, experiences and thoughts.
Last Thursday we tried the binary counting activity(pdf) from the Computer Science Unplugged site. All in all I’d say it was a great way to introduce them to the concept. I had to make my own worksheet, the one included on the page was a little simple and complicated at the same time and the one I made allowed me to make the jump to ASCII and what the binary numbers actually represent. They really seem to enjoy writing things in code and working out all of the zeros and ones was a great activity to keep some of them busy while I helped the slower students out. The activity itself only includes five cards or bits and I don’t know if I clearly explained the need for eight bits to everyone. The students who worked a little faster than everyone else seemed to get it. I was able to extend the activity for the faster ones by asking them to make the extra three cards, they had to figure out how many dots should be on the next three cards. Drawing 128 dots meant they were busy until at least the end of class.
At out last department meeting there was extended discussion about whether binary numbers should be included in the curriculum for the Intro to Computer Operations classes. Personally I think students should grasp it conceptually but its not really important for them to be able to figure out what number 00110011 represents. This activity is perfect for just this purpose.
Today I followed it up with some True/False questions.
- The zeros and ones in binary code really represent off and on.
- There are people in South America that speak in binary code.
I am happy to say that more students got number one right than number two wrong. There were a few however who thought the idea of people in the Amazon walking around going “zero,zero,one,zero,one,zero,one,zero” seemd perfectly reasonable.
