Month: February 2017

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Program or Website for Creating a 3D Gamified Literacy Test Prep Environment?

I’ve received a request from an English teacher who has an excellent idea for a program for her students. Here is her request:

I have an idea and am looking for a program to make it happen. I want to create a 3D virtual world that I can use to gamify lit test prep. I want to be able to embed challenges – or links to bring them out of the world to complete tasks. I would ideally like them to have an avatar that can wander around and find the challenges that are hidden throughout the world, and want to add layers of badges / points, etc. as well as mastery learning. I have the idea in my head, but might you know of a good program I can use to create it. Ideally there will be minimum programming as I know limited HTML but would prefer something that does the coding for me. I am happy to pay for the program, but if there is a free one that would be great too.
I can figure out how to make it happen with 2D but would ideally like 3D.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. 🙂

Continue reading “Program or Website for Creating a 3D Gamified Literacy Test Prep Environment?”

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I Hate Sand Roads!

Added as a header photo for this site.

Don’t worry, no riders were injured in the making of this photo!

After getting the bike vertical again, I elected to ride on the grassy patch along the side of the road. It was much easier!

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ACSE Conference Reminder

I’m just reminding Computer Studies and Computer Technology teachers about the ACSE conference coming up on Saturday, February, 25th at the Seneca@York campus of Seneca College, Toronto.

We’ve got a great lineup for both subject areas, including sessions on the Raspberry Pi, Vex Robotics, Arduinos, Internet of Things, Hummingbird robotics, computer security, Python, Database & Data Science, software testing, Swift, and more.

Registration is just $90 (or $45 for student teachers and retirees), but only until February 17 (this Friday), after which it goes up to $110/$55.

Some of you have asked if you can bring students along, and we think that’s an excellent idea! Just register them using the lower rate of $45 (or $55 after the early-bird rate deadline).

For further details (location, parking, schedule, etc.), see http://www.acse.net/conferences/2017.

I hope to see you there!

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Let’s Go Phishing!

In the spirit of yesterday’s Safer Internet Day…

I often get asked which is better — Gmail or Hotmail (or its derivative outlook). The answer for me is so easy: Gmail, and one of the reasons is because it handles phishing attempts so much better than Hotmail.

I only log into my Hotmail account once a month or so, just to keep it alive. This time, there were approximately 20 emails in my inbox. A few were legitimate security alerts created by my Google account, a few were from Microsoft trying to sell me something or other, but the rest (over half) were phishing attempts — bogus emails attempting to get me to click a link where they would prompt me to reveal private details such as account numbers or passwords. Continue reading “Let’s Go Phishing!”

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Tell Me About Yourself! (Student Assignment)

Many months ago I bookmarked a blog post entitled “What I want my teachers to know about me” with the intent of adapting the concept for my own classes.

In the original post, the teacher (@Allanahk) had each of her students create a slide in response to “five things my new teacher needs to know about me”. As much as I loved the idea, I wanted my students to have more privacy with this assignment so they’d be more likely to share.  So instead, I created a master template in Google Slides that each student would use, with the following prompts: Continue reading “Tell Me About Yourself! (Student Assignment)”

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Clean Dictionary File for CS Classes

For Computer Science teachers that need a “clean” dictionary file, here is one that I have on my GitHub account you can use:

The file was created as a student project by taking a “dirty” dictionary found online and using it to programmatically remove all the inappropriate words from a complete dictionary file, such as this one.

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Article: How (and why) to use Google Photos on your iPhone or iPad

Article source: https://goo.gl/OyllG4

Installing Google Photos on your mobile device is a recommendation I make to all my students.

If you take pictures with your smartphone, it’s silly not to use Google Photos. At a minimum, it serves as a safe backup for all your photos, at no cost to you. A bonus is that Google Photos creates cool content of some of your images, including instagram-stylized photos, animations, and collages. Continue reading “Article: How (and why) to use Google Photos on your iPhone or iPad”