FYI - Free Programming Animation Tool - ALICE

I attended the itWorks Conference last year in Columbus and sat in on a session where they talked about a FREE programming language for teaching in High School that is revolutionizing the industry. I thought I would share this with you. It's name is Alice and you can get to what you need at this link: Alice . It is a pretty neat tool. Developed at a university and now wholly supported by an entire users group and Carnegie Mellon University. If you would like the Alice Newsletter please email me at rkayser@greeneccco.com and I will email you the February edition.

A direct quote from the front of the book on Alice states: "Our approach allows students to author on-screen movies and games, in which the concept of an 'object' is made tangible and visible. In Alice, on-screen objects populate a 3D micro world. Students create programs by dragging and dropping program elements (if/then statements, loops, variables, etc) in a mouse bases editor that prohibits syntax errors".

Does this sound too good to be true or what. I have used Alice just a little bit. It does look good, but having been a professional computer programmer for 28+ years I am still skeptical. Will be until I dig in and actually use it. I am trying to figure out how to make this a part of my class curriculum.

Thought I would throw this out for anyone that might be interested. Free is definitely the right price. Let me know what you think!

Blogs I have commented on Week 9

I commented on Lexi's Blog # 8 today.

Commented on Herb's blog.

Commented on Mary Barry's blog

Blog # 9 - Changes I Notice in my Understanding and Skill with Technical Resources used in class.

I have noticed a very large change in my understanding and use of technical resources and concepts we have covered in this class. This past month I have incorporated the making of a video into an assignment for my senior IT Students. This was a terrific break in the monotony of the Network+ textbook. We actually spent almost two full weeks of class/lab working on these videos. I felt very comfortable in guiding students into Photoshop to manipulate jpeg images that they had created or found for use in their videos. Same for using the Windows Moviemaker tool and the Sony Vegas 7.0 software. Within an hour I had students working furiously on editing video clips and putting still pictures they had touched up via Photoshop into their storyboard in Moviemaker. My only real drawback was tyhe contention for the equipment (vido cameras and especially the usb microphone for narrating). I will have to address the hardware issues this summer in my budget.

I have even taken a stab at putting the vdieo tapes of my basketball teams games into DVD movies to hand out to my players as keepsakes as well as putting together highlight clips to send to college coaches that contact me looking to recruit my players for college. I will probably spend my spare time now that basketball is over converting all my games from the camera tapes into a moviemaker format and adding text to them - putting them into a movie format. Beginning - movie - trailer with score and other info. I actually spent my own hard earned dollars and bought AVITools to help in the import and conversion of the movies from my Sony Handycam to the PC in a format for Moviemaker. Very worthwhile tool.
Photoshop and movie editing no longer scare me the way they did at the start of thiss class.

Blog # 8 - How I Plan To Use Video Production Professionally

Video Production in the classroom is a very powerful tool. I plan to make tremendous use of it by turning my classroom and Information Technology program into one that uses the IPASS system. IPASS is a program that was designed and developed by one of our very own Greene County Career Center teachers. Bill Poe has taught drafting at GCCC for almost 30 years. He has had many national winners in his CTSO competitions. Years ago Bill saw the need to be able to have a curriculum that would allow students of all abilities to work at their max pace. He developed IPASS to do this. The teacher becomes more of a facilitator and a tutor under the IPASS program.

I plan to turn my A+ PC Repair and Troubleshooting, my Network +, my Visual Basic Programming, and my Visual C++ programming strands all into individual IPASS strands. This will take a couple of years to complete. I will video every lesson I present and turn these videos into DVDs that student may check out and do. The concept of IPASS is that a student does not move on to a new concept or lesson until he/she has sufficiently mastered the current one. It is entirely up to each student as to how much or how little they do. It is spelled out in black and white on a chart what their grade for the period will be.

Getting the videos together will be the biggest challenge. What I have learned the last few weeks with photoshop and moviemaker and the other tools I have played with has made me even more eager to get started on this. I have been putting it off because it seems like a huge undertaking (it is) and I could not decide where to begin. No I have an idea.

The videos under IPASS will allow me to let students work at their own speed. No longer will I hold anyone back while waiting on slower students to catch up or catch on.

Powerful tools we have these days!

My IT Classroom at Greene County

Here are some pictures of my classroom / lab at the Greene County Career Center. I designed and had built the counter tops for the lab area. Made them high so the students can stand coppmfortably at them - with the intent they would not pursue playing video games if they had to stand up the whole time. I WAS WRONG !!!

My classrom desks where we have a computer connected to the GCCC Network and do our programming in Visual basic and Visual C++.


The LAB area where the counters are high and filled with Lab PC's connected in our own little in-classroom Network. The juniors are Windows XP Peer-to-peer and the Seniors are using a Windows 2003 server. Guess who runs faster when playing their Counterstrike game?

My Students Working on Their Movies

As I stated in an earlier blog, I made my Final Video project into a project for my Senior IT class. So far we have spent 8 complete class/lab periods on this. They selected their own groups of 5, with some choosing to work alone, and of course two or three stuck working together because they are left and no one selected them for a group. Funny how this worked out - I was sure I would use my "A" groups video, but in fact one group I didn't expect much out of turned in perhaps the best movie and best effort during this project. They had "WAY TOO MUCH FUN" doing this assignment. I had a ball working with them. Their video is entitled "The Pill" and is about "the affects of video games on the human brain" and the pill they created to cure this.

The group I thought would be my best is Team Awesome. Some very talented young men from four different high schools. They have not finished their video as yet. They are still working on the final touches. With this group I constantly worry about the cleanliness of their work. They love the bad words, the hip / vulgar music, and the innuendo type plot. I think I am getting credit as the "technical scrooge" from this group because I made them bleep out the F word in their favorite song and they had to clean up the plot a bit.

Max Fueger is one of my "work-alone" guys. He doesn't like to depend on others for his grade. He is doing a movie on building with plastic bricks. I had to figure out how to set the movie to use a 2 second clip of each picture instead of the 5-6 seconds it defaults to. His movie is going to be pretty cool when finished. This idea I think is stolen (as is some of his video clip ) from a project he did at his home school (Beavercreek High School). I know this because I remember my son doing something similar when he went to Beavercreek and had one particular teacher. Oh well, I didn't require that they be original.

One group of two is doing a movie titled "The Chronicles of Wimp-Man" and it is based on one student who is very large in size - and I don't mean fat. He is the one in the silly hat.
The rest of the group is shown below. Sean is large and clumsy so they decided to take advantage of that trait and make him a movie star.











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My last group is also a solo in the form of Dennis Cobb.Dennis is the one in class that NOBODY wants to be stuck working with. He is very (sometimes overly) personable. In other words he never shuts up and drives everyone nuts. I kinda like Dennis. I have to ask him to lower his voice a zillion times a day, but he is a very nice young man once you get past that. I am not sure what his movie is going to be about.

Now I have to select only one to turn in for my Final. What to do ????