Insights from a seasoned Computer Science Trainer
There are 43 entries for the tag
software
If you are in the Orlando, FL area during the first week of May then you should head over to the Orlando DotNetNuke user group meeting. Nik Kalyani will be the speaker and you will learn a great deal from him. DotNetNuke Module Development with the MVP Pattern This session focuses on introducing attendees to the Model-View-Presenter pattern, support for which was recently introduced in the DotNetNuke Core. We'll start with a quick overview of the pattern, compare it to MVC, and then dive right into ......
Moodle is a free elearning content management software program. It does take a great deal of time to set it up because you need to upload your Office files to Moodle. Now, Microsoft has made that job easier with their new Office Add on. With it you can save directly into Moodle. Here are the instructions on how to use. Just change the URL you use for your Moodle site. 1. Go to this site and download and install the software. http://www.educationlabs.co... ......
I've been looking at this skinning creator program for $129.95 from Artisteer for a while now and sure enough DotNetNuke skinning rookies will be able to create their own skins and apply them on their own sites. It appears that the DotNetNuke community is starting to endorse this product as well. The product has been out for a while now and its advertised as a way to change your theme using Joomia, Drupal and WordPress. Now, they have added support for DotNetNuke skins and DotNetNuke users have started ......
So I just spent an hour attending the DotNetNuke Corporation Webinar entitled DotNetNuke Demonstration. Needless to say, I'm a fan of DotNetNuke and I can't get enough knowledge of the product. Nik began the session by defining what the product DotNetNuke is and how easy it was to design a site. He then gave a brief explanation of the community and professional version of DotNetNuke. Next, he spoke briefly of the technology used which consisted of DotNetNuke, ASP.NET, .NET. IIS, a Windows Server ......
Will Strohl was able to get Joe Brinkman from the DotNetNuke Corporation to do the Keynote at the Day of DotNetNuke to be held next month in Tampa, FL. Joe Brinkman Joe Brinkman (MVP) is a co-founder and the VP of Core Technology of DotNetNuke Corp. With over 22 years of IT experience and a Computer Science degree from the United States Naval Academy, he brings broad experience in a variety of software and hardware architectures. Joe was the CTO for DataSource Inc. where he led the development of ......
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 students and 2500 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of ......
Here's what's happening: Attendees: 428 Sessions: 73 Speakers: 49 Tracks: 15 Sessions: ASP.NET Make your Data Dance with ASP.NET Dynamic Databy Shawn Weisfeld + Show Description ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a framework that lets you create data-driven ASP.NET Web applications easily. It does this by automatically discovering data-model metadata at run time and deriving UI behavior from it. A scaffolding framework provides a functional Web site for viewing and editing data. You can easily customize the ......
This is from Shawn Weisfeld [MVP] blog. A few weeks ago I got a copy of Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (http://www.amazon.com/Prof... Figured since I had been to presentations by 3 of the 5 authors I just had to have the book. Brian Scarbeau, Stan Schultes and Ryan Morgan are avid speakers in the Florida .NET community and knowing ......
I just received an email that there are 72 sessions for this code camp and registrations should break 700. Several years ago, I spoke at this code camp in Ft. Lauderdale, FL and the numbers were very impressive. I remember code camps being small and very intimate but the need for knowledge is there and many people come out for them in recent years. I look forward to seeing the co-authors for the new DotNetNuke version 5 book. Darrell Hardy, Ryan Morgan, and Stan Schultes will be presenting at the ......
For the past ten months, I have been waiting and waiting sometimes patiently and sometimes not so patient for the DreamSpark program to be available to high school students. Back in February with a huge announcement by Bill Gates about the DreamSpark program, I have been waiting. So here's the program: The Microsoft DreamSpark student program www.DreamSpark.com makes available, at no charge, a broad range of development and design software for download. The program is now available to more than 35 ......
I have been pursuing when high school students will be getting the free software that Microsoft promised with the DreamSpark announcement back in February. I finally have been communicating with the team that is in charge of this and I've been told not to announce the release date but only to tell you that it will be soon. Real soon! The distribution will be different from what college students have been doing. The high school computer science teacher must register. The high school administrators/faculty ......
Last February, Bill Gates announced a free software giveaway to college university students and high school students as well. Here is what was offered to them: Microsoft developer tools. Visual Studio is the Swiss Army knife of computer programming. These professional-grade products provide a security-enhanced and reliable environment, enabling students to program everything from a cell phone to a robot or to create their own Web page. Students will also be able to invent compelling new gaming content ......
Microsoft just released some cool software to mesh photos together. After taking several photos, the array of photos stitched together to recreate the scene. in three dimensions. It's one of those deals where you have to see it to believe it. The product is called photosynth and you really need to think out of the box and be created to mesh your pictures together. The site has existing projects to view along with a blog. This information is from the site: You can share or relive a vacation destination ......
Starting in mid July, Microsoft will be selling Office by subscription. Including Office will be a security software program called Live One Care. The costs will be $70 a year. Even though Google has free web based programs that compete with Office, many students and teachers still prefer to use Office. This announcement is a win win and you can purchase the product at Circuit City. Technorati Tags: Office,Microsoft,Circuit City ......
Yes indeed! If you are a member of the Computer Science Teachers Association your school can get this offer. We invite you to try Microsoft® Expression® Web, the next generation of Web development software – at no charge. We’ll also give you a tutorial and curriculum unit - that were designed by a CSTA member - and tested by teachers and students in 10 schools this fall. Microsoft will provide FREE Expression Web software for your entire school to the first 150 US high school teachers who respond ......
I'm sure that Alfred Thompson from Microsoft will be blogging more about this free giveaway. Great news if you are a college student you can get Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Expression Studio, XNA Game Studio 2.0 with a free year-long subscription to the XNA Creators Club, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition. When Windows Server 2008 is released to MSDN, it will be available to students as well. Bill Gates ......
If you are teaching a web design class and if you want your students to learn how to create a web portal using open source software called dotnetnuke then there is some curriculum that you can have for free. There's even a forum to post questions and you can download videos of the lessons to use to learn dotnetnuke. The curriculum will have your students create a web portal for Comp Sci High School. They will create pages and add modules to those pages. In addition, they will learn how to skin modules ......
According to TechSmith, JING is a project and not a product. Whatever they want to call it, JING is an excellent communication tool where you can capture a screen, add your voice and voila you have yourself a movie file to share with anyone. In education, this is great. For example, I can use this on any of my powerpoint slides or software demos that I use in class and put them on my website for students to view as a review. What's even better is that you save on 200 MB of space provided to you by ......
All of my students went on a field trip today to visit the Orlando Science Center and participate in workshops that instructors from the Full Sail School in Winter Park, FL put on. The Instructors were extremely knowledgeable and had a great deal of patience answering questions from teenagers. The Science Center sponsored Otronicon over the weekend and the field trips were part of it. One workshop was on 3d modeling with Maya software and the other was on designing games using FPS Creator. Students ......
The alliance that I'm referring to is the Microsoft Academic Alliance which allows any high school computer science department and computer science students to install Visual Studio. In addition, you get the following: Three Microsoft e-Learning Library (MELL) collections: General Programming Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Programming in Visual Basic .NET Teaching Tools CD Student Tools CD Teaching Tools Manual Student Tools Manual Introductory Kit Monitored Newsgroups MSDN Library Documentation Technical ......
So today was our first day back to school after our Christmas break. We had meetings in the morning and we get the rest of the day to get ready for the next semester. I have 20 new pc's in my room so I needed to windows update each one along with installing the software for the xbox controller that the students will use in my XNA class. Here's a picture of the lab. I was able to write my lesson plans for each class that I'll be teaching and put the finishing touches on the Honors Programming II class. ......
Google has several products available to educators that you might find of interest to use yourself or with your students. Google is getting education friendly and now has a website for us to use. They have the tools categorized: Search, Communicate, show & share and newly featured products. I use some of these products and I'll share how I've used them. Under search you'll find book search. Google Book Search allows you to search the full text of our large and growing index of books, from popular ......
Recently, I blogged about Alice and since then I've been exploring the different books that you can get to use while teaching Alice. The book that I'll be using with my students is called Learning to Program with Alice by Wanda Dunn, Stephen Cooper, and Randy Pausch. ISBN 0-13-187289-3 Pearson Prentice Hall. The book comes with instructor resources and sample syllabi which I found to be very helpful. The book is broken down into 4 parts. Part 1 is an Introduction to Alice; Part 2 Object-Oriented ......
After waiting several months now, I finally got my hands on this new book. The author has a nice blog on game development and he has created a series of videos on game development in directx where he created the rocket commander game. I'm hoping that Benjamin can create the videos on how he created the rocket commander game with XNA. One bonus for this book is that it's not just about coding games using XNA. The author adds input to his own experiences on creating games and emphasizes making a plan ......
My last post was created with Live Writer. Usually, I'd login and create my blog online but using this software was a new experience. First off, it was easy to create my weblog settings and no sooner do I save my post, I click Publish and voila it's already sent to the geekswithblogs site. I haven't used the photo or map publishing yet but they look easy to use as well. I'm not a hard core blogger but for my needs this fits the bill. Technorati tags: Live Writer ......
For the past three months, I've been working with an open source course online management system called moodle. Moodle is free and has many features such as: Forums Content managing (resources) Quizzes with different kinds of questions Blogs Wikis Database activities Surveys Chat Glossaries Peer assessment Multi-language support (over 60 languages are supported for the interface Moodle has gained in popularity amongst educators and the statistics have proven that with a user base of 18,204 registered ......
Alice is a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world. Although computer programming has existed in its modern form for half a century, it still eludes all but a small fraction of society. While programming is an inherently difficult activity, there are ......
There is always some time left after the AP exam to teach our students more before we leave them for the summer. In Florida, we have a couple of weeks to learn more and if you’re from different parts of the country you may have even more time to teach students something new. I am really sold on having students learn about creating games so that’s what I’ll be doing with my students. There are several options available for you to do with your students and several languages to use as well. If you want ......
In preparation for the gaming course that I'll be teaching next school year, I came across these interesting facts about the industry that is put out by the Entertainment Software Association: TOP 10 INDUSTRY FACTS US computer and video game software sales grew six percent in 2006 to $7.4 billion – almost tripling industry software sales since 1996. Sixty-nine percent of American heads of households play computer and video games. The average game player is 33 years old and has been playing games ......
I got permission from the speaker at the MVP Summit last week to blog about some of the things that I learned last week at the Microsoft MVP summit. The session that I attended was on emerging technologies in education and they talked about three products. The products covered were multipoint, steady state and grava. Today, I'll write about steady state which is also called shared computer toolkit. Computer teachers in computer labs, libarians who manage computers and school IT department will like ......
By SETH SCHIESEL Reaching out to millions of aspiring game developers around the world, Microsoft plans today to announce a contest that will award $10,000 and the opportunity to entice millions of eyeballs to the next great digital diversion for the company’s Xbox 360. In addition to the game console’s snazzy graphics, the Xbox Live online service has been the most important component of the Xbox 360’s success since its debut in 2005. And perhaps the most popular aspect of Xbox Live has been the ......
USA TODAY reports that Computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. said Monday that it had begun to make its Java technology an open-source software project available for free on the Internet. The announcement represents one of the largest additions of computer code to the open-source community — and it marks a major shift for a company that had once fiercely protected the source code used in 3.8 billion cellphones, supercomputers, medical devices and other gadgets. I wonder if other ......
Google has some free software that some Math Teachers may want to look at and use with their classes. The software is called SketchUp and it’s a simple but powerful tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying your 3D ideas. Click on a shape and push or pull it to create your desired 3D geometry. Experiment with color and texture directly on your model. Real-time shadow casting lets you see exactly where the sun falls as you model. Select from thousands of pre-drawn components ......
For the past several years, the Lake Highland Upper School Computer Science Department has sponsored a Tech night for students and parents. In the past, we have had some very good speakers and a good crowd as well. This year we plan on having our tech night on Thursday, January 25th and we have an outstanding speaker as well. Tom Carbone who is the Technical Director for the Florida Interactive Academy , Orlando, FL, will be our speaker. His talk will be about how Math & Science are used to create ......
I often receive e-mails from computer science teachers asking what I do in my Programming class at my school so I thought I'd share my response to a teacher in New Hampshire who recently e-mailed me. You ask an excellent question and I’ll try to answer as best that I can with the experience that I have on teaching programming to students. (21 years, 5 college and 16 hs). The first thing you need to know as a teacher is the math ability that your students have coming into your class. Also, what standards ......
I read with great interest in the ACM Communication magazine, a letter from the President David A. Patterson. The article is entitled “Computer Science Education in the 21st Century.” His letter is based on his position statement for a workshop on the preparation of IT graduates for 2010 and beyond. His opening paragraph starts off by admitting that in the past we created obstacles to reduce the number of CS majors and he states” we should take advantage of reduced pressures from ......
I took a virtual lab today on What's New with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0. This type of training is ideal for classroom teachers who want to introduce new concepts to their students without having to install the software in their lab. Many teachers that I've talked to always tell me that they would love to train their students on new technology but their computers are slow or the technology department will not allow them to install new software in the lab for some reason. These frustrated ......
Imagine that you are the only one who can save a person, a city, or even a nation. And imagine that you must provide the right combination of strategy and programming skill to save the day. The Project Hoshimi - Programming Battle brings to life the world of Professor Hoshimi and his crew of scientists and programming experts in a fantasy of life and death. This competition uses a background story, comic-style graphics and coding challenges to test the skills of student programmers from across the ......
Well I thought I'd share the results of the 20 teachers who responded to my poll about their technology skills. Here's some background about our school at Lake Highland Preparatory School in Orlando FL as far as technology tools that teachers use. First of all, every teacher has a computer in the class to use for classroom management which incudes e-mail,internet access, attendance reporting, and grading. Most teachers have their computers attached to a smartboard which allows them to project on ......
Laura Turner from THE JOURNAL put together a nice list of technologies that present day teachers should know. As we all know, technology in the past 15 years has changed rapidly and Laura put together some nice links to check out for teachers to learn more about technologies that they don't know. Here's the list: Here are 20 basic technology skills that all educators should now have: Word Processing Skills Spreadsheets Skills Database Skills Electronic Presentation Skills Web Navigation Skills Web ......
LEARNING HOW TO CREATE PORTALS USING DOTNETNUKE Brian Scarbeau Brian.Scarbeau@gmail.com The future of internet applications is based on the creation of portals to deliver web based services. Organizations that have a great deal of information are centralizing their applications by an information portal. More specifically they are solving their problem by creating an Enterprise Information portal to share information on databases over the web using applications that are created with object oriented ......
What would you do with $1000? To find out, enter the Games 4 Girls game design competition! All you have to do is get together with a few friends and create a computer game that is FUN for middle school or high school girls. Submit your game to the Games 4 Girls contest, and if our panel of high school girls, game design professionals, and UIUC computer science faculty thinks your game is the most FUN (and original and creative and technically interesting) then you and your teammates each win $1000! ......
If you tuned into the NBC show called Three wishes that was aired on Friday night you would have the answer to my question. The show is about how people send in their wish and the night of this show there was a young man who wanted to be an astronaut so his wish was granted and he went to Huntsville, Alabama for some training. A young woman was granted her wish to be an actress so off to Hollywood she went for acting lessons and a chance to try out for a small acting role which we got. Finally, there ......