Deb Boisvert's List: explore

• Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

• Ideas for proactively planning for a school crisis with message mapping
• amount of time which is the benchmark of communication for the community: within 32 minutes
• - best if that is your superintendent
   - ask your superintendent if they would like to be “that person”
• I AM THINKING THIS CONVERSATION BUILDS A GOOD CASE FOR STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND OTHERS TO USE A COMMON TWITTER HASHTAG. THERE IS NO DOUBT WHEN KIDS AND ADULTS ARE IN LOCKDOWN IN A SITUATION TODAY, THEY ARE GOING TO BE ON THEIR CELL PHONES, TEXTING, ETC. IF YOU HAVE SCHOOL CONSTITUENTS ALREADY TWITTERING USING A COMMON HASHTAG, THEN THE SCHOOL COULD MONITOR THOSE TEXT MESSAGES AND ACTUALLY GET INFO “OUT” OF THE SCHOOL FROM THOSE ON THE SCENE. OF COURSE THE MEDIA AND OTHERS CAN AND LIKELY WOULD BE DOING THIS AS WELL.
• MY THOUGHT: YOU HAVE DO PUT MESSAGES ON YOUR SIGN OUTSIDE WITH THE IDEA THAT IT WILL BE PHOTOGRAPHED AND PRESERVED. IT WOULD BE BEST TO HAVE A PRE-SETUP MESSAGE FOR YOUR SIGN THAT ASKS PEOPLE TO REFERENCE YOUR ALERT MESSAGING SYSTEM (WHETHER THAT IS JUST YOUR WEBSITE, TWITTER, A COMMERCIAL SMS PLATFORM, ETC.)

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• On April 11th Google launched a new daily puzzle to help teachers and
  students learn how to search more effectively.  AGoogleADay.com presents an
  ever-changing search challenge that exercises your internet search skills,
  and if you get stumped, there's a solution path just one click away to show
  you how to solve the problem.  In the first two weeks, AGoogleADay.com has
  had more than 300K visitors, all coming to learn what's possible on Google,
  challenge their Google-Fu, and learn a bit more about what can be done to
  improve your search skills.  As the Official Google blog
  post<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/trivia-game-where-using-google...>points
  out, it's the first game where using Google isn't prohibited, but
  required! Try it out at: http://www.AGoogleADay.com
  

  We hope that all this news gives you a little to chew on for a while; it's
  certainly keeping us busy. We hope you're enjoying the school years (and
  what is nearing the end of the school year for those in the Northern
  Hemisphere) and we look forward to being in touch soon!