The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (Photo credit: mrbill)
Are you in need of some programming reference materials? Maybe you need a book to help you brush up on your C++ or Java or to start learning Ruby but are a little short of cash? Well, then there’s a new GitHub repository for you!
Victor Felder has taken an old StackOverflow thread listing free, online programming books, cleaned out some dead links and added some new ones and put it all on GitHub. He’s hoping this will make it easier to crowdsource the list and, based on the initial activity, it seems to be working.
In the world of cloud hosted computing platforms it is fair to say that Amazon have taken the lead with their Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC). The newest contender to their crown comes from Microsoft. The Azure infrastructure provides a global backbone suitable for building, deploying and managing applications and services.
As a test of the suitability of Azure for these types of deployments I chose to deploy and build a new WordPress instance from scratch. This seemed a reasonable, albeit fairly simplistic, way of testing each part of the processes in turn:
Implementing a new computing instance
Installing a standard piece of open source software
While Azure as a platform supports many more technologies including XML, ASP.NET and Node.js the standard WordPress combination of PHP and MySQL provides a test that will cover a large percentage of implementations.
Sign Up
The sign up process for Azure is reasonably simple for those with one of the many incarnations of a Live account. (If not creating a new account at outlook.com is fairly painless.)
Once logged in the sign up requires verification delivered via either a texted code of a phone call followed by payment details. Payment is only required where usage exceeds the fairly generous trial limits.
Shortly after you find yourself confronted with the management portal.
Azure Management
Azure instances fall into four general themes:
Compute: including web services and virtual machines
Creating a new instance of one of these is as simple as following the options. For this test I chose to create a new web service form the app gallery. This is a continually expanding set of pre-cast applications such as ASP.NET, Drupal and Joomla. Creating my new WordPress site is easy.
Choose WordPress and click next
Give the database a name
Keep the default “Create new MySQL database” option
Choose the region where the database is to be stored. For those of us in Europe that have to comply with data protection legislation this step should be given some serious thought
Press the tick and off you go
The new web site is then created and made available. (I’ve skipped over the WordPress setup.)
I’m sad to report that that’s it. The new instance is made available and is ready to go right here
In some ways I would have preferred a longer, more tortuous set-up. As an IT guy I can always charge more for obfuscation but in this case that won’t be possible. The only thing that remains is to try the other facilities.
My iPhone apps as of February 2010 (Photo credit: dougbelshaw)
Having been teaching with a tablet in my classroom for nearly a year it has become evident that the market for Education apps still isn’t quite right. I think this is most evident in the fact that the course I run training teachers to use an iPad effectively in the classroom features almost no ‘education’ apps. I do one session (out of 7) that revolves around subject-specific apps, but other than this, the apps that are used on a day-to-day basis are commercial, and often free.
That said, even these great apps, that no doubt you read about all the time – Evernote, Dropbox, iMovie etc, don’t do everything we need them to do.
The key to successful technology integration in schools is to get the staff on board. To get the staff on board, you need to show them how much easier life becomes with the technology, as well as how much better/enhanced the learning can be. There will always be a core group of teachers who get on board without much fuss and these people are what keep you sane when you’re trying to push things forward. I will discuss the role of ‘champions’ in a future post.
Back to what we need to get devices functioning at a higher level in a classroom. My wish list includes the following:
Finding the best education technology tools is a time-consuming task. It may even be viewed as a chore (for some). Typically, one tracks down a handful of useful apps or web tools and puts them through their paces at home. Then you probably don’t use any of them because each tool took far too long to understand, use, become accustomed to, and actually implement in a classroom.
That’s why I was so excited to find this Symbaloo created by user lcobbs detailing 50 great classroom tools that are all easy to implement into just about any classroom. From Animoto to Prezi to Dropbox to Stixy (wait what?), there’s a lot to check out. Don’t know all 50 tools? I didn’t! Click on each icon to get an idea about each tool and learn more.
Google Docs is such an incredible tool for college students, offering collaboration, portability, ease of use, and widespread acceptance. But there are so many options, both hidden and obvious, that there’s a good chance you’re not using Google Docs to its fullest capability.
We’ve discovered 50+ great tips for getting the most out of Google Docs as a student, with awesome ideas and tricks for collaboration, sharing, and staying productive.
There are a couple dozen ways to ‘use’ technology in education. There are also a couple dozen ways to integrate technology in education. Think those two things are the same? Think that throwing a few iPads and a few Edudemic blog posts into a classroom is the best way to launch a 1:1 initiative? In case you couldn’t guess, it’s not. So here’s a hypothetical to clear up my rhetorical questions even more:
Students of Saint Mary’s Hall (Photo credit: Robert of Fairfax)
Class discussions that can occur any time of day and students engaged in that discussion. It took me a while to get my head around ‘online’ discussion and I used the experience of other teachers in my school who’d tried it. I currently use this with my Independent Directed Study students (Japanese language) and will be expanding it to my Year 4 students next year. What to consider? Here’s a few of my thoughts:
The increasing numbers of students opting to enroll with an online learning institution, combined with the continual evolution of the digital age, has prompted professionals within higher education to address the effect of this growth on accreditation.For centuries, educational accreditation has provided a quality assurance usually by way of governmental or semi-governmental organizations. If a college or university has an accredited status, the qualifications it awards its students are deemed to be fit and proper by potential employers. Critics of this tradition have pointed to escalating tuition fees as a primary cause for disenfranchising middle-class and working class students. These learners, therefore, may be more likely to pursue a course in distance education as it is more financially viable, despite the fact that some of these universities and colleges possess an unaccredited tag.
education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
At a recent Stanford forum, NYU Education and Sociology professor Richard Arum, even raised the call for the pressing need for educational reform, and for the overall re-appraisal of accreditation standards.
