Mr. Higgins’ Blog

Sorry for the absence over the last couple weeks…I have been really busy with school stuff. When people ask me how things are going so far, I respond usually by saying that they are going great overall and that I continue to show up everyday. Of course they know i’m kidding, but those who have been teaching understand what I mean. There are people that get chased out just by the thought of teaching everyday and dealing with the student; however, I am not one of them. Here are some observations I have made thus far in my technology classes…

Web Development Thoughts

In my Web Development classes, we are doing basic HTML code at this point. We are up to tags such as font, ol, ul, and table among other tags. The pace of the class is the only trouble I am having so far. I have students that hunt and peck on the keyboard and can’t even copy down the text in an example in the book. On the other hand, I have students that take 3 minutes to type in an entire page of HTML and the code is perfect. I decided that for the first month I would keep the group together even if that means some are slightly bored for a while. After that month or so, I can let those that are ahead accelerate through some of the longer HTML code. My goal in the class is for everyone to understand HTML code to the extent that they can easily edit the title, text, colors, format, etc… Once we move on to FrontPage, many of those that are not natural coders can see everything visually once again, which I understand is a lot easier and more enjoyable.

Happy thoughts from AP Computer

I forgot how much fun AP Computer and coding in the Java language can be for both student and teacher. The subtlety in this class is that the computer in the end is the bad guy. LOL The students know that I do not know everything and that there are many many many different classes that create different objects and use different code, but they do not hold it against anyone. They are there to learn the code and have fun creating simple to complex programs that do various tasks. I only have 5 students in this class after starting with 10 students. I didn’t know I was that scary! I had a breakthrough moment the other day when we started a program that takes a phone number XXX-XXX-XXXX and randomizes the entire phone number using some specific limits and criteria for the different digits. I immediately get a question from nearly every kid about basic problem solving issues that those reading this blog have seen in programming. They were quesitons about design and problems that may occur. The students were looking ahead and “seeing the solution.” The first day of class I told each of them that they will understand what I mean by “seeing the solution” someday. Little did I know that it would happen during the 3rd week of school they would have a lightbulb moment.

Issues in Visual Basic

My Visual Basic class is a mix of 9-12 graders with all different skillsets in both computing and mathematics. Using a program like Visual Basic 2005 Express does decrease the problems for the students as far as manipulating objects on the form, but when it comes to the code behind those buttons, labels, textboxes, etc, many start to have some trouble. I explained it by saying that we could make a form that looks like Microsoft Word or another application, but few people on the earth could make it as powerful as the actual application. Our responsibility in class is to learn some basic code dealing with the manipulation of different data types through different input/output controls. The students really seem to enjoy this class when there are errors! Not to annoy me, but they get to see what they did wrong instead of following along in the book or listening to me talk about a certain aspect of Visual Basic.One huge hurtle in this class involved what many of you have already dealt with at your school. For about three days in class, while contacting computer administrators, we could not really run or create any type of program because VB will only allow you to compute while acting as a local user. So the policy had to be changed so the students could act as local users and now we can actually program with only a couple hurtles at this point. Unfortunately, computer policy issues are really no ones fault, because many times they are not apparent until you have dozens of students doing the same thing and they all get the same errors.This was just a little bit of my own venting and thoughts about how things are going so far. Those teachers out there reading this understand that this is not negativity, it is just concern for students and hopes for a great year and career.