We have Visual Studio 2003 on our computers, and I had a spare moment today, so I took a few minutes and wrote a quick and dirty VB program, created the CAB and downloaded it to my phone. Same level of program my regular CS kids are writing and creating.
I am not sure they got how cool it is that it is THAT easy to do, hopefully they will. I’m going to show all my classes that today.
By the way, I got the idea of doing it from Alfred Thompson’s blog!
Alfred and I are having a conversation on what is computer science…
And part of the problem, is that I do teach the office products during the first weeks of class. I take it MUCH faster than BCIS (what we call our office applications class). I did Word in a week, Excel in 3 days, etc.
I basically want my students completely comfortable with computers as tools before we start programming.
After we do the tools, and I include the internet, email, searching, etc. with that, we do basic hardware and software. That takes up about 9 weeks of the first semester and we’ve yet to even think about flowcharting in that time.
That drove me crazy last year, but never had time to research it.
And an addition. If you are using a network share, for your URL, put
file://SERVER NAME/DIRECTORY/*
With Visual Studio .NET (including 2002, 2003 and 2005) files on a network share may give an error. This error is caused by a security setting designed to protect the machine that Visual Studio .NET is running on. This is a set of instructions on setting the network share as trusted so that you can operate without the error message.
Threads in Computer Science (Education Blog On 10)
This definately seems to be the wave of the future. I think Carnegie Melon is already doing that.
But students still need a broad introduction, in my opinion before they pick.
Chron.com | Textbook funds can’t be used for laptops, AG says
I really can’t decide how I feel about this. Though I’m not sure that the taxpayer should be required to buy computers for students to take home.
Our local paper — Dallas Morning News — has a blog that their columnists contribute too, and their education guy made the followig statement. — Correction — he’s the highway guy. The education columnist got it better.
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The Dallas Morning News | Bold Types Blog E-mail This Entry
Teachers also have a lot of opportunity in summer to earn extra income.
Certainly worth discussing here.
I will start out by saying, I’m pretty happy with my pay and life these days, BUT when I started out teaching, the pay cut was a bit tough to take.
There are many reasons that I left programming as a profession and went to teaching, but I will have to state that the pay cut was hard. It was easier because I went without pay at all for a couple of years while I was getting my teachign certificate, but it was still hard to take.
I started teaching during a time period when it was not hard to get teachers for our district. In fact, the district had a reduction of force.
The good news is that I am able to pick up a few thousand dollars extra each year, but the bad news, is that I don’t come near close to making up the $24,000 I lost each year by going into teaching. And that doesn’t take in account the raises I would get.
This summer, I’m doing summer school, district finals, and I’m going to get paid for setting up and teaching an online course. I also get extra money for tutoring for TAKS, AP incentives, and this year I also got a math stipend. All told, I get about $4000 extra. Like I said, not the $24,000 difference.
It was real funny but until after I completed a year of teaching, my husband thought the same way. He even encouraged me to try to find extra money.
But as each year goes on, he encourages me NOT to find the extra money. He didn’t want me to teach summer school for example. Why? He wanted me to recharge and relax.
Teaching is stressful and a lot of things get neglected. Summer gives me a chance to clean the house really well, assses what needs to be repaired/replaced and get that sort of thing done. Same thing goes with the cars, and other things in our lives. He prefers that I take the summer to deal with that sort of thing.
So the point of this — have you managed to make up the pay cut YOU took to teach (as there isn’t anyone teaching high school CS who hasn’t taken a cut in pay). And if you do, does it take away from your energy during the school year? In other words, what is the true cost?
The education columnist has a better editorial at http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/all/stories/071706dnmetbenton.3598a74.html and isn’t part of the Bold Types blog. His editorial shows how the starting pay is not going to keep teachers because our raises from one year to the next are pretty flat.
My district is starting at $39,150 with a Bachelor’s and with a Master’s Degree and 14 years experience, I’m getting just above $49,000. That doesn’t seem quite right, does it?
The latest issue being attacked at DISD is the P-Card, or procurement card program. I actually have a friend that has one — she teaches the business variety of Coop along with other things.
I get things the old fashioned way. I get a budget with x amount of dollars, I spent it, mostly through the warehouse (there is a better name for that), and through Office Depot. Mostly paper, toner, blank CDs and a few electronic items to make my students life a bit better. I have purchased a scanner, hard drives for our server, and a few other things. I also get books through Borders.
It takes several months to get the items after I ordered them and I always lose a bit of money in the budget, any left overs are put in the general fund and occasionally I’ll get to order items from that.
Coding Horror: The Noble Art of Maintenance Programming
Timely Post
I will admit that I didn’t try hard enough, but the only programming jobs I could get was as a maintenance programmer, and the hardest part of that was the hours. I literally was on call almost before pagers and cell phones, (back in 1983) almost every night and almost every weekend. The only way I could get off call was to go out of town and be unreachable. We used to take turns. Hmmm, I could have lied, but I lived to close to the worksite, and knew I would get caught. In fact, I think I did once.
As a teacher, sometimes I think all I do these days is maintenance — fixing the kiddos programming mistakes!
Students find ring tone adults can’t hear – Wireless World – MSNBC.com
I really haven’t discussed this with other teachers but as long as the phone doesn’t distrupt my train of thought, I don’t really care.
In fact, I told my summer school students today, as I made sure that my ringer was off, that if they needed a calculator, feel free to use the one in their phone — and then whipped my phone out about 20 minutes later when I needed a calculator.
I honestly don’t even care if they text message as long as it doesn’t bother my train of thought and they aren’t cheating.