Introduction to programming part 1 of ?

Are you teaching an introduction to programming class? One of the main goals should not be to teach how to create a computer program, you should teach students basic skills that, once built on top of each other, will allow a student to create programs in the future. Your main goal should be to gain a students interest, and to make them see how easy it is to accomplish something, even if it is not especially useful.

For example:

First class: Create an HTML document that has the students name

This involves no more than opening a text editor, such as notified, having the student type their name, and saving it as an .html document.

Now that the students have built something the first day, and they see how easy it is to create a webpage (although a very basic one) you can build on this.

In the following classes, add to the original webpage. You can: Create a link to their favorite website, change the background color, make bold, italicized, and different sizes of font, create a numbered and unordered list, center, and right justify your text. Most of the above commands only require one opening and one closing tag.

If the students are ambitious, you could lead them down the road of creating tables.

If you took the advice from my previous article, and have access to a networked classroom of Linux computers, you can create a webserver on one of the central computers, which will become a part of the instruction later in this blog, or perhaps in another blog, depending on how much I feel like typing tonight.

I will leave the next programming language up to you. I am partial to php and Perl, but you could also teach a flurry of other languages, such as python or basic. The one thing I would stress is to stay away from a visual programming tool, so that the students will focus more on the programming than making nice gui's.

The idea of this second programming language is to create a smart program, that can handle conditional statements, and loops.

Are you teaching, or talking?

I recently attended a conference where there was a number of different speakers talking about everything from time management, to classroom activities, to contract negotiations. While a few of these speakers were not very informative, there was one speaker who stood out in my mind. This speaker talked about teaching to the student, which sounds easy enough, but there are a number of teachers who don't do this.

What do I mean when I say teach to the student? Well, if you look at your teaching style, do you know what your students abilities are? How do you know these abilities? Lets just take a computer class for example. Do you have students who only know how to turn on a computer? Maybe the majority play computer games or surf the internet all night when they get home. Some might have a basic, or not so basic website or computer program that they created. How do you know this without some detective work? Many students don't think of these things as skills or talents, but rather as just something that they do.
A great way to get students thinking, and find out about their talents is a simple worksheet with some open ended questions:

• How many hours a day do you use a computer?
• What do you mainly use your computer for?
• Have you ever thought about writing a computer program, or creating a website?
• If so, have you ever done so?
• What would you like to learn from this class?

These simple example questions will give you better idea, after the first day of class, where your students are positioned. You will undoubtedly get a variety of answers, from the most novice to the most experienced users, but you will know who to spend more time with, and what main points to focus on.

This will also cause you to change your teaching plan, because no two semesters or classes, for that matter, will be the same. If you change your teaching plan, your students should get more out of it, and feel challenged. Otherwise, if you stand in front of the class and talk about things they already know, are they really learning anything? In the end, a little work on your part will be worth it. If you give a student a challenge, and the resources to complete it, you will be surprised with the results.

Open Source in the Classroom

With the miserable pitance that a teacher gets to support his or her classroom, it is no wonder that students today are using computers that are 3-5 years old. While this is understandable for a typing or research lab, modern equipment needs to be used in tech ed classrooms. While the hardware may be old, the real downfall for the students is the software that is ran on the computers. While I don't want to turn this into a Windows/Mac v Opensource, it doesn't take a genious to see the benifits of using open source in the classroom, even more so now than 5 years ago.

The open source community has developed a grand number of programs, that very closely resemble the very same programs that cost hundereds or thousands of dollars. For example:

Microsoft office v OpenOffice

OpenOffice has come along way since it was first developed, and it is gaining market share with the general public. There are a few features that I really enjoy about this program, including the smart type. Open office will complete your words for you, after you type three letters. While I had found this cumbersome in other programs, it is designed very smoothly in OpenOffice. Another feature that I enjoy is the PDF conversion that is built in. Click file save as PDF, and your document is saved in an uneditable form to distribute freely. Open Office also contains a handy feature which opens all Microsoft documents, including Office, Excel, Powerpoint, and others, so anything you may have written will not be left out in the cold. This does not go the other way, Microsoft will not open an Openoffice document, but that is OK because you can save your Openoffice document as a Microsoft document, and open it just fine.

Internet Explorer v Mozilla

Tabbed browsing, need I say more? Many of the features that you will see in Internet Explorer in the next version, have been in Mozilla for over a year, including tabbed browsing, which is hard to explain if you have never seen it, but if it were the only difference in the two programs, it would be worth downloading. Another thing that Mozilla had at least a year before Microsoft came out with service pack 2 is popup blocker.

Any video rendering program v Cinelerra

Price Price Price. Cinelerra is a fully functional video rendering program, which is free. All other comparable programs would be at least $1000.

Windows/Mac v Linux

Microsoft: 100.00/computer Mac: 100.00/computer Linux: Free
Can you see the benefit here?

VB/.Net v PHP/PYTHON/

PHP and Python are not only free, many of the applications developed in these programs run cross platform on Mac,PC, and Linux. Also, it has been my experience that these programing languages are easier to learn.

There are many more examples of these comparisons, but if you look at the bottom line:

Windows/Mac Computer: 1000.00
Office: 200.00
Internet Explorer: 0.00
Movie Rendering: 1000.00
Operating System: 100.00
Programming Languages: 500.00
Total: 2800.00

Linux Computer: 1000.00
OpenOffice: 0.00
Internet Explorer: 0.00
Cinelerra: 0.00
Operating System: 0.00
Programming Languages: 0.00
Total: 1000.00

With just these options, you could have 3 times the computers in your room, giving more students access to a computer. This would decrease the learning curve, and give more students access to an operating system that is talked about but not extremely popular to youth.

Introduction

Hello World,

I am Tech Teacher, and if you have any experience with technology, you get the humor in hello world. This is my first attempt at a blog, so hang in there with me while I share my feelings and opinons on technology and education.

I should start off in saying that I am not a teacher, although I am going to school to become one. I have a degree in computer science, and after spending some time in the field, I decided that I would rather teach than do what I was doing. When I made the decision, I was a system admin at a medium sized bank. We had 15 location, over 1500 end users when I left, 12 windows 2000 servers, one unix box, we ran a compiled network of everything from dial-up users on modems, to dedicated lines between the remote sites and our unix box running at 1200bps, and had 6 locations converted to T-1 lines, with IP phones at 3 locations. This was in 2005, and the IT staff, including me, was two people.

Before I started working at the bank, I had some IT friends who told me that a bank is very tight with their money, and they don't like spending it on IT related items. This, to a certain degree, was true. While I was there, we built two new locations, and remodeled another location. These were the three locations that ended up with the IP phones. The bank had no problem spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at these locations on IT related items, but as far as the other locations, as long as they worked, why upgrade them? It made no difference to them that when we had to do upgrades to computers at the remote locations, we had to drive there, or if they had a problem with a computer, 6 times out of 10 we would have to drive there. Many loan officers did not have e-mail, or even internet access, and the ones that did were connected at 56kbs.

Most end users were less than inclined, and many of the problems that consumed our day could have been resolved if the users had been a little more computer literate. The mentality at the bank was that the end users only needed to know enough to get there jobs done. Although this may have been a good mindset in most cases, if something small were to disrupt a user, they would not know how to recover.

It was these issues that made me decide to go back to school. I had always had an interest in teaching, as half my family either teach or have taught at one time. I have a year before I start my student teaching, and this is where I plan on keeping my thoughts throughout the next year and beyond.

Updated -- Oct. 28, 2005
As I am writting some of these posts, I have decided that this is where I am going to put some of my ideas, before I become corrupted by the system. Hopefully this will help me with my grass roots, real world teaching skills, that I want to teach to students.