david ellis's Profile

Our Classroom 2.0 LIVE Workshops are
two-day hands-on workshops that focus on the use of Web 2.0 in education. 
They are intended to be much like the Web itself:  free, open, engaging,
participative, and highly collaborative.

More seasoned Web 2.0 users will also learn new things from each other, as well
as helping to organize the events.  In true Web 2.0 fashion, you get to
help plan the sessions at your local workshop, and the schedule is designed to
be flexible.  Each is spearheaded by local organizers, but with support and
encouragement from Classroom 2.0, and
drawing heavily from the expertise of local educators using Web 2.0. 

netbooks in hand in the next few months. There seems to be a growing commitment
here to put technology in the hands of kids (instead of spending huge sums on
stuff that students can’t use outside of the classroom) and to thinking about

Programming -
OK, on the programming thing, here are my thoughts.

In
our curriculum our objective is not as much a specific LANGUAGE. One year I may
use HTML with Javascript, this past year I used LSL — what I want kids to know
that when they encounter programming and coding that there are certain
conventions. Some are case sensitive, some are not. How do you find out how to
add to what you know about programming? Do you know where to go to find
prewritten code? Can you hack it to make it work to do what you want it to
do?

We spend about a week – two weeks but I require they know how to
handcode hyperlinks and images – they are just too important.

But to take
12 weeks or 6 weeks to learn a whole language – yes maybe some value – but to me
the value is HOW is the language constructed or built. What are the conventions
and how do I educate myself if I am interested in pursuing. What comes out of
this time is kids who say either “I never want to do that” or “this is really
cool, I love coding.”

They are doing very simplistic work (although the
LSL object languages were pretty advanced) but since we don’t have a full course
nor time in our curriculum, I do see this as an essential part of what I
teach.

I’m not teaching it for the language sake but for the sake of
understanding the whole body of how languages work – we talk about the different
languages and what they are used for as part of Intro to Computer science and
have an immersive experience.

To me, this is somewhat a comprimise
between leaving it out entirely or forcing everyone to take 12 weeks of it. I
just don’t know where 12 weeks would go in the curriculum.

Lawsuits? What lawsuits?”

think earth day is a special day, because more people try to make the world a
better place. I like earth day because if they're celebrating it most people
will stop doing bad stuff that causes the earth to be in trouble, and you’re
thanking the earth almost everything like h2o. It means so much to me. I hope
every body celebrates earth day. I also hope the earth gets healthier every
single millisecond. I think other people that don’t know what earth day is
should start celebrating. Do good stuff during earth day. Every earth day I will
spread to everybody in the world and explain to people what is earth day. I will
also make the world a better place. It means so much to me. I think instead of
earth day it should be a holiday; I think it should be a holiyear instead.
People started celebrating earth day in 1970. We’ve been celebrating earth day
for about 39 years.

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