Cartoons in the Classroom!

Found a wonder blog that features lots of lovely tools for technology in education. Not sure how I happened upon Creating Comics Online, but I'm glad I did: cartooning makes teaching storyboard design relevant, and the online tools are much easier than demonstrating my stick figure storyboards and having students draw on sheets of paper.

He ends the article with 20 Ways to Use Comics in Your Classroom and More than 100 Editorial Cartoon Lesson Plans which makes cartooning immediately relevant to the classroom.

Embedding Blogger into Google Sites

I wanted to embed my Blogger into my Google Site without reinventing the wheel...this article provided the code to make it happen.

Single feed from Blogger

1. Insert> More Gadgets > Search for "Generic Feed Reader"
2. insert "your blog url"/atom.xml ---> Blogger's built-in RSS feed

Feeds from Multiple  blogs

1. Insert > More Gadgets > Search for "RSS News Feed Scoller"
2. add blogs to gadget

Include gadget for Google Sites

I've been using [free] Google Sites for years to organize my lessons, present to students, and have students access resources and lessons. Google Pages, the precursor to Google Sites, was more flexible in formatting different pages: I had 1 site but could change the design of individual pages. Because Google Sites does not have this functionality (I really needed to differentiate between my regular site and pages for a Computer Science Education Week), I built a new site just for CS Ed Week. The problem was how to direct students to the site without too much interference in the normal procedure (ie. going to the regular website).

Solutions

• refresh the homepage to the new website: functionality not available
• embed the new site: embed did not work but ....
• Solution: Include gadget: embeds a URL like an iframe

Not as elegant as a dynamic refresh, but it kept the interface familiar and I could direct students to working from that website.

Update: Robotics are the new programming

I read somewhere [link coming] that there is grant money for student robotics competitions to prepare the next generation of computer scientists.