This is a first response to my day today. I'll post this intro now and then add more in a later post. I spent today with 40 of my Sarasota County Schools tech related collegues in an all day training session. It all started as part of a laptop initiative that our district started this past summer with several schools piloting the program. It gives (loans) each ninth grade student an (HP) PC laptop for the duration of their high school career in Sarasota. Since many schools in our district are predominantly...

For the past couple weeks in my Visual BASIC .NET class (9th and 10th grade novice programmers), we have been dealing with subroutines. The rationale for using them is another entire post. I want to focus on parameters. The key point is to distinguish between ByVal and ByRef. Since ByVal parameters receive a copy of the argument when the Sub is called, they are the perfect tool for protecting your data. Now beginner programmers are not really familiar with the concept of or need to protect your data,...

Welcome to my blog! I am here as part of the growing community of support for Computer Science Teachers. This blog is a vehicle for relating lessons and experiences that may be helpful to others in teaching CS to high school students. In this post, I will introduce myself and provide some background info. I teach Computer Science and Astronomy at Pine View School in Sarasota County, Florida. I am in my 32nd year of teaching and 18th year at Pine View. I teach in a lab with 30 Dell computers running...