Group items tagged

"Programming is magic. It's the ability to create things from pure imagination. We started CodeCombat to give learners the feeling of wizardly power at their fingertips by using typed code. "As it turns out, that enables them to learn faster too. WAY faster. It's like having a conversation instead of reading a manual. We want to bring that conversation to every school and to every student, because everyone should have the chance to learn the magic of programming. "CodeCombat is a community project,with hundreds of players volunteering to create levels, contribute to our code to add features, fix bugs, playtest, and even translate the game into 50 languages so far. Employees, contributors and the site gain by sharing ideas and pooling effort, as does the open source community in general. The site is built on numerous open source projects, and we are open sourced to give back to the community and provide code-curious players a familiar project to explore and experiment with. Anyone can join the CodeCombat community! "

"These videos give you an up to date outline of using the program Blogger. They start off with how to create your first blog all the way through to adding more pages and authors to your blogs" R.Stannard takes you through the updated Blogger program. I have used Blogger for years, but now tend to just use Diggo and Scoop.It, the latter for the more reflective, pedagogically oriented discussions. Blogs are very helpful as a place for student portfolios, and are easy to tag and search.

E-Teacher Scholarship Program

This brief article by Tom Robb outlines a great new Moodle application that is free if your school already uses Moodle, or accessible online where you can have your own page for quiz access. The add-on offers a short quiz of 10 randomized questions for almost 2,000 commonly read books used for extensive reading programs with the major graded reader series. See the http://MoodleReader.org site.

Amazing list of video tutorials on various tools and programming languages, including Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweater, etc.

A huge list of materials online related to listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and general study skills. Teachers need to review and select from sites to use them effectively in an academic program. Prepared by Christine Bauer-Ramazani for her Academic Skills courses.

An interesting use of social media. You create a profile with a little text and video from your Webcam. Others come to the site to ask you questions, while you question others. Great for class interactions, and can also be used in a distance class. Some channels have artists and book authors, too. Don't know how you might control predation, however. Training video by R. Stannard walks you through creating a "wait" video and a "response" video (an OGM), and how students would create and write questions and interact with the program, e.g., reading ealier question and listening to their responses.

A screencaster on the Internet--nothing to download. For Mac or PC, you can record anything within a limited frame for 5 min., so this would be nice to help students start running a program or to create their own short presentations. Easy to upload to YouTube, embed on a Website, send to a smart phone, share by email, tweet, or download as mp4. See R. Stannard's instructional video

"Description: A breathtaking array of 'learn to code' Apple, Android and Windows phone apps. Learn C++, Python C#, HTML, SQL, JavaScript, Java, CSS, php and Swift via the site or apps. These are 'must try' tools for anyone starting out with coding. The site even has a 'Code Playground' to experiment with your code." I haven't had a chance to try out any of these, but this should be an interesting starting point to get students coding.

This is a smart little app to create and edit your own apps for Apple and Android, and both Mac and Windows PCs and tablets. Be forewarned that it has to leave cookies on your machine, but you can supposedly develop and run your edits in your own web browser. Clever students will figure out ways to use it constructively.

Create and share your own interactive games, activities, art projects

This page holds a list of essential sites for teaching computer science and coding to high school students. Spark interest by having students create their own games and apps while learning math.