best 7 sites for learning programming/code online

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Online learning has been around a long time but we have new tools that enable learning both on and offline. Here are a few:

To learn code/computer science/programming/design:

  • Khan Academy: needless to say it covers many topics and has a great and easy interactive interface using processing.js
  • Udacity: Advance your education and career through project-based online classes. You even get certificates from an accredited school if you pay approximately $40 at the end. This is a no-nonsense course – intensive and could last for 5-8 weeks depending on the topic with quizzes and assignments that you will need to submit.
  • Code Avengers:  requires payment but uses processing.js which enables online javascript testing.
  • Code : high-profile site – has some projects free and others paid.
  • Code school: Code School teaches web technologies in the comfort of your browser with video lessons, coding challenges, and screencasts. You may choose from their catalogue.
  • Coursera: online courses on almost everything and anything. And it’s free! Very similar to Udacity in terms of its intensive courses and assignments and lengths.
  • edX : great courses where, like udacity, you could get a certificate after completing a course.

This I haven’t tried yet but is a brilliant idea:

  • KALite: KA Lite is an offline version of Khan Academy that runs on almost anything  to help those without internet access.

There is also a training environment at Scratch which is an MIT project and is free to use and practice.

 

 

new education resources

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It’s been a while since I last blogged. However here are some great resources for educators:

  1. New Horizons has created an excellent database of reviewed learning tools and you may look for tools based on level of education.
  2. Museum Box: a fun tool for presentations especially in the humanities field [requires financial subscription]
  3. If you want to create animations similar to the RSA animations, you have the opportunity to do so via Sparkol –  fantastic tool for any kind of presentation. Pricey though.. but worth it if you can pay.
  4. Movly is another presentation and animation tool that is available for free – and you may pay for advanced features, though not as excellent as sparkol
  5. Emaze lets you create beautiful presentations but somewhat slow. However it could be downloaded in its entirety so you don’t have to wait for the presentation to load.
  6. Tagxedo, word cloud with styles – similar to Wordle.
  7. Visuwords: where you may look up dictionary words and the result is giving you the word as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. It also tells you the relationship between words.
  8. Polleverywhere: wherey ou may poll your students instantly in class.
  9. Wikihood’s ultimate goal is to organize the world’s knowledge – stored in the Wikipedia – for any location worldwide, accessible to anyone anywhere.

Besides those, one of the most exciting technologies  to-date is augmented reality. while I love it and find it thrilling as pages come to life, it is still unsophisticated. The requirement to download specific software each time you want to run an AR is daunting. I think it will take off once we can view any AR marker just by opening the camera.

Here are some tools:

  1. Aursama: either download on your mobile – which is very easy to use and create on the fly auras, or use the aurasma studio.
  2. Zooburst allows you to create animations online.
  3. Information about augmented reality in education is also on this wiki
  4. Imaginality unleashed

This is a great example of creative augmented reality: The Sancho Plan video he Sancho Plan] is a group of writers, musicians, animators, designers and computer programmers who use create interactive entertainment. On March 24, 2010 at the BBC Big Screen Millennium Square in Bristol, they created an augmented reality performance where the participants were able to control the music and movement.

 

 

EFF urges court to to affirm libraries’ right to digitize books

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged an appeals court today to affirm that the fair use doctrine protects the creation of an invaluable digital library.

For the past eight years, major university libraries have collaborated with Google to digitize their collections. One result has been the HathiTrust Digital Library (HDL). Via the HDL, more than 60 university and research libraries can store, secure, and search their digital collections. With the exception of some patrons who have disabilities, HDL does not allow users to access the digitized books in their entirety – it merely does a keyword search and delivers titles and page numbers as results, enabling students and others to find the book at a library or to purchase a copy.

Read more on EFF site

The Art of Digital Storytelling

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Guest blogger: Mercedes Bell

“the medium is the message.”

— the great Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan

More than a century ago, German composer and operatist, Richard Wagner, strove to transform musical drama into a “gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total work of art.” His controversial ideal called for the subordination of music to theater, which he felt to be the superior artform. While Wagner’s radical ideas did much to irk many of his musical contemporaries, the flawed concept of the “total work of art” has had a tremendous impact on the practice of storytelling.

Today, digital storytelling tools could become this generation’s “gesamtkunstwerk.” We say this because today’s audiences have access to enormous amounts of highly specific, interactive content online. (We’re talking about the technology used to build the New York Times’ Snowfall project, not your Facebook timeline.) So if you’ve got a story to tell, you can afford to start dreaming–there’s never been a better time to find ways in which to enrich your work with multimedia storytelling tools.

What is Digital Storytelling?

Simply put, the art of digital storytelling is all about telling stories using digital media. For example, a student may want to create a digital story using a video camera and simple video editing software to discuss a major event in their life, or even their own family history. Digital tools empower us to bring a new and vibrant dimension to our stories and the ways in which audiences experience them.

Of course, with so many tools available, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start. In addition to effectively relaying your story to a wider audience, digital storytelling can convey a sense of innovation and mastery of several different creative tools on the part of the author/creator. Below are a few examples of how digital storytelling tools are making a difference today.

Digital Storytelling in Primary and Secondary Education

The University of Houston provides an excellent resource for using digital media in educational storytelling. The primary goal of the site is to show students and teachers how digital storytelling can be used to augment various educational activities. In addition to tools and other relevant pieces of information, Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling showcases several digital storytelling projects, such as The Reality of Television, which uses digital video to explore the effects television has on life and society.

The National Writing Project and the Pearson Foundation are currently collaborating to find out how digital storytelling can help students improve their literacy and writing skills. Together, the two organizations have been hosting workshops and professional development programs to help communicate the educational benefits of digital storytelling throughout the country. This great documentary produced by the Pearson Foundation provides a glimpse at how powerful digital storytelling can be as an educational resource.

 

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