I wish I could use the embed option from Storify to include in WordPress, so we’ll have to go the old fashioned way.
Here’s a link to the complete Storify.
Day: July 11, 2012
Field Trip to UCI
After a great day of hands-on workshops at the CSIT Symposium, the participants were in for a real treat. We all climbed into a bus and headed to the University of California Irvine to visit the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science for “tour” and “reception”. I’ve been on these tours before but this was a real treat. It wasn’t just walking down the halls, looking left and right. After a greeting from the dean, we were invited to take in various stations in the beautiful six floor building.
Sadly, we weren’t there long enough to visit all the stations, but I did manage to get to four.
Software Design Sketching
I think we’ve all seen interactive white boards in action. But, imagine taking a big screen and dividing it according to working groups or project development teams and then pulling it all together. The focus is on ease of creating content and not the final look good. Focus on the end. It was an interesting concept and seeing the IWB work with a tablet was very cool. The software is supposedly open source and available on GitHub. Another to-do project!
Understanding the Daily Activities of People from Camera
I thought that this would be so helpful for the next time I can’t find my keys! A mountable camera keeps track of your entire daily movements and through object recognition helps you navigate or see things or help you when you can’t remember things! I sure could use that! The potential for those with visual problems or in Alzheimer’s Disease are a big target.
Alan Turing’s Influence on Computational Biology
In tribute to Turing, I thought that this was a must-see. Perhaps those coded messages are based on celery research? This was a fascinating talk and demonstration about how biology and computer science and simulations all merge. I’m not strong in Biology so this was really over my head…and yet you can’t help but be impressed that there are people that live and breathe this stuff.
Computer Game Science
This has huge student interest everywhere I think and so it was interesting to sit in the lab and talk about the program at the school and where it fits into CS Majors and students who take the course for general interest. A demonstration that we saw came from the Ucigame Java Library for 2D games which students use as the basis for their own projects. Check out a few of them at http://frost.ics.uci.edu/CSITGames/
It was over all too quickly. It was mentioned and certainly evident that there is a huge breadth of courses available for students to take. I know that this would be a terrific tour for high school students interested in post-secondary opportunities.
For the conference attendees, it certainly was a rare and unique opportunity to go back to school. It was the perfect ending for a long and motivating day.
OTR Links 07/11/2012
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You knew Twitter could keep you updated on your friends’ activities, but did you know it’s capable of so much more? Did you know it can teach you to cook, remind you to water your plants, or instantly poll your friends? Here are 25 wacky, fun and sometimes useful ways to use Twitter:
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ScootPad :: Practice. Learn. Succeed!
ScootPad is the ultimate way to engage students in mastering skills
with personalized, self-paced and stimulating practice. -
Classroom Resources for Interactive Whiteboards.
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Tips Every Teacher should Know about Google Docs in Education ( Great Easy Guide )
Google has recently released a new service to the public called Google Drive. This is basically an online storage system that provides up to 5GB for free.
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HTML5 Rocks – A resource for open web HTML5 developers
HTML5 is the ubiquitous platform for the web. Whether you’re a mobile web developer, an enterprise with specific business needs, or a serious game dev looking to explore the web as a new platform, HTML5 has something for you! Choose your path:
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iMovie for iPad – Storyboard help sheets for trailers | Tech-Info-Maths T.I.M.
iMovie for iPad – Storyboard help sheets for trailers
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There is a weather app for the iPhone that is getting a lot of press lately. WTHR is said to be inspired by Braun design… best known for simple and easy to use interfaces. You knew looking at their devices; what they did and how to use them. The WTHR app is iPhone only and is having GPS issues so you may want to explore the next version for your iPhone (not a universal app).
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Bill Hammack’s Video & Audio on Engineering
Make called Bill a “brilliant science-and-technology documentarian”, whose “videos should be held up as models of how to present complex technical information visually” Wired called them “dazzling.”
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Old and New Dogs – New Tricks | doug – off the record
The Computer Science Teachers’ Association recently posted an entry entitled “Who Teaches CS?“. That caught my eye and set me about thinking. Some of the facts presented in the post are:
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Readability Introduces Curated Reading Lists Plus Various Enhancements — AppAdvice
Readability, my read-later app of choice, has just received a substantial update. The update improves its core functionality and enhances its capacity for quality content discovery.
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Pinterest Traffic Passes Google Referrals, Bing, Twitter & StumbleUpon | TechCrunch
Online sharing service Shareaholic just released new data showing that Pinterest is now beating out Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google in referral traffic (not Google organic, of course). The study is based on Shareoholic’s network of over 200,000 publishers, which reaches more than 270 million people monthly.
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10 reasons Apple, Facebook & Google chose North Carolina for their mega data centers
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School is too easy, students report – USATODAY.com
Millions of kids simply don’t find school very challenging, a new analysis of federal survey data suggests. The report could spark a debate about whether new academic standards being piloted nationwide might make a difference.
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12 Essential Social Media Cheat Sheets
Getting around a social media site is not always easy. For some users, it’s a matter of getting used to social media. For others, the issue is keeping up with constant updates and changes to features, privacy settings, and account specifications. This, of course, is why social media cheat sheets exist.
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iPads More Fragile Than Expected and Other Lessons From First Year of Zeeland High Schools’ iPad Program
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