http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog Thoughts, ideas, notes and experiences from teaching high school computer science Sat, 18 Nov 2006 22:47:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/11/18/30/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/11/15/toilets-from-around-the-world/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/30/watch-this/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/23/data-information-and-knowledge/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/18/too-blood/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/11/hotpotatoes/ 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, ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/10/programming-concepts/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/02/now-were-programming/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/02/nextfest/ 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 ... http://tech.modiolus.net/csblog/2006/10/02/binary-unplugged/