Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson

OneNote Videos on TeacherTube

Mike Tholfsen, the OneNote Ninja, found some time to record and upload a bunch of videos about OneNote to Teacher Tube. The video he did on the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers is included in the collection. Mike is promising a bunch more that are specifically targeted at education users including teachers and students.

New Web Design Curriculum Released

Are you looking for ways to engage your students in 21^st century learning? Would you like to generate enthusiasm and excitement about using technology in your classroom on a daily basis? Are your students interested in developing skills they can employ immediately for fun and for profit? Would you like to provide your students with opportunities to work on complex projects in teams? After teaching computer science for more than twenty years, I am pleased to be a guest writer on Alfred Thompson’s blog. He is a knowledgeable, dedicated and insightful colleague. My goal for this blog today is to inform you about new teaching and learning materials that are now available (in beta form) at no charge.

I am excited to announce the creation of Introduction to Web Design Using Microsoft Expression, a one semester curriculum unit, released just in time for the start of the new school year. The curriculum, written by a team of eight outstanding classroom teachers from across the country, provides an extensive collection of unique teaching materials that thoroughly span Web Design knowledge and skills and promote meaningful, real-world learning experiences. Students will engage in authentic learning experiences and design modern Web sites with the same tools that professional Web designers currently use. I can guarantee that this curriculum is unique because it represents the best thinking of a team of talented educators – all of whom have taught multiple subjects for many years. We have synthesized the creativity of web design, computer science, media arts, math, fine arts, science, business education and home economics teachers.

By providing students with opportunities to be creators, rather than only consumers, of technology, Microsoft aims to motivate the next generation to explore and develop their talents. Many students who would be intimidated by a programming class enter the technology pipeline via web design, gaming or robotics. The content in this web design curriculum is appropriate for secondary students and non-technical community college and university students. In order to make your life as a busy educator a little easier, we have based the detailed lesson plans, tutorials, presentations, student projects, and assessment rubrics upon the ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) and 21st Century Skills.

The first 4 of the 8 learning modules are available for you to download right now at Microsoft’s Pre-Collegiate Faculty Connection. The remaining 4 modules will be available September 15.

• Module 1: HTML Basics 2 weeks

Module 1 introduces basic HTML tags and cascading style sheets (CSS) through projects designed to experiment with page design and introduces the concepts of Web standards and accessibility.

• Module 2: The History and the Future of the Web 1 week

Module 2 explores the past and future of Web technologies and the structure of the Web. The rights and responsibilities surrounding intellectual property rights in an electronic world are emphasized.

• Module 3: Designing for Communication 2 weeks

Module 3 explores human communication and the unique challenges that electronic modes of communication present for effective transmission of ideas.

• Module 4: Working with Images 3 weeks

Module 4 uses Microsoft Expression Design to create images. Image concepts related to scanning, digital photography, and image manipulation techniques are included.

• Module 5: Beyond the Basics with Expression Web 2 weeks

Module 5 introduces the Expression Web environment and provides tutorials to guide them in creating a Web site.

• Module 6: The Design Process 3 weeks

Module 6 explores Web technology careers and simulates the design planning process of Web design professionals. Team collaboration and customer interactions are emphasized.

• Module 7 The Production Process 3 weeks

Module 7 guides students in the production of the Web site that was planned and designed in Module 6.

• Module 8 Web Publishing and Maintenance 2 weeks

Module 8 establishes processes and techniques for selecting hosting services, evaluating the effectiveness and usability of Web sites, and providing maintenance over time.

This curriculum project represents an expansion of a short Expression Web curriculum unit and tutorial that we developed for United States high schools in the fall of 2007. The need for additional and more extensive web design teaching/learning materials was identified by feedback we received from teachers who participated in our 2 pilot projects in the fall of 2007 and spring of 2008. The following information may be of interest to you and your students:

• 75% of for United States high schools offer a Web Design/Development class (2007)
• 71% of the educators involved in the Expression Web tutorial pilot reported that it was a valuable teaching tool and they would use it again. The remaining 29% strongly agreed with that statement, yielding a full 100% accord amongst pilot educators that the Expression Web tutorial was a valuable and useful teaching resource.
• 64% of students reported that, after participating in the Expression Web tutorial, they would like to build another Web site.
• 57% of US teens report that they create content for the Internet

The curriculum is currently in beta version and is being taught by educators in the US and several countries through a pilot program. Schools participating in the pilot program receive a free subscription to MSDN AA for High School that provides the Expression software needed to teach the curriculum.

Expression Web is Microsoft’s most recent Web design and development software. It replaces FrontPage and gives your students the tools they need to create high quality, standards-based web sites that meet today’s standards with sophisticated CSS-based layout and formatting. There are many additional resources for learning Expression Web and Design. Learn Microsoft Expression offers training for both Expression Web and Expression Design with tutorials, videos and quick start guides. These are great for teacher preparations as well as valuable tools for teaching in the classroom.

We hope you and your students will enjoy this new set of teaching and learning materials! The 30 high school girls that participated in Microsoft’s “Digigirlz” technology camp last week at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington were able to learn how to use the software and build simple web sites in less than four hours. The girls voted to have a web site design competition and created some truly amazing sites. Students who have a “service learning” or “community service” requirement at their high school have reported that they completed this assignment by building a web site for a local non-profit organization in their community. We trust this curriculum will help you provide students with useful opportunities to engage in creating in and out of classroom experiences that you want.

We would love to hear from you! If you are interested in learning more about joining our team of teachers who are piloting the curriculum or want to let us know about interesting projects your students are working on, please contact me.

Pat Phillips, Director
Web Design Pilot Programs

v-paphil@microsoft.com

Challenge and Success – Behind the Code with Rebecca Norlander

The latest “Behind the Code” interview at Channel 9 is with Rebecca Norlander who is an executive with Microsoft. She started as a software developer and moved up and up in the company into a very senior role. So if you are looking for another example of the field not being all male this is it.

In the often male-dominated world of computers, Rebecca Norlander has made a name for herself by taking on big challenges and proving that she has what it takes to deliver results. Learn how Rebecca got her start at Microsoft, advancing through roles where she had tremendous impact on Excel, Internet Explorer, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Vista Security, and now as technical strategist to Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

Rebecca shares her insights around the obstacles she has overcome, the lessons she has learned, and how she became a strong advocate for customers while working on a variety of high-profile projects.

Behind the Code with Rebecca Norlander is available on Channel 9.

Also take a look at the Women in Microsoft series at Channel 9 for more interesting women who are making a difference. One interesting interview is titled Jillian Venters - A Goth inside the Deathstar OH yes, Goths at Microsoft - who knew?

Typing Tutor Online

Thanks to a post by Christopher Dawson I found this typing tutor program for younger children at the BBC web site. It looks like something students would have some fun with. Few schools seem to teach touch typing anymore. When I was a student it was mostly a high school course but my Dad sent my brother and I to secretarial school while we were still in middle school. Dad thought that typing was an essential skill for students and while he was (and is) a pretty quick hunt and peck typeset he wanted us to have an advantage in speed and accuracy. So for a month we two little middle school boys were in a class with a bunch of “older women” who were probably no more than 19-20 but were intimidating to us. :-) But I have to say that time paid off in spades for both of us. We’ve used that skill though school up through the graduate level and in work far more than we ever anticipated back in the late 1960s.

Clearly typing is an important skill in today’s world. It’s important in work and important in school. Since we expect students to use computers more and more at younger and younger ages it makes sense for them to learn to touch type early. I’ve read several articles that say that third grade is about the youngest for touch typing though. Before that hands are just too small and bad habits will be learned to adapt for that. But I have seen third and fourth graders (and up) really have a good time learning to touch type in the right environments. Making it a game and using cute, colorful characters as this tutorial does seems like the way to go. There is no reason in the world that learning shouldn’t also be fun.

BTW the BBC site also has some worksheets and the like that can be printed out and used offline.

[Edit: Late breaking news. Hilary has an example of a Popfly typing game called Type Type Revolution on her blog. ]

Fall Is Education’s Spring

I have a guest post up at the CSTA blog today. The CSTA blog is running a series of posts about people’s first day of school. That means different things to different people and I give my take at it there. I see fall as a sort of spring for education. Fall is when the work starts and seeds are planted. All during the year (or semester) teachers work hard to cultivate their students – to help them grow in knowledge and wisdom. In the spring (end of the school year) we see what has grown up. The first day of school is the key preparation day.

One of the things I mention in that post is that I really want to visit more classrooms this year. I want to see what teachers are doing, learn what students are motivated by and when ever possible help to support the work that teachers are doing in their own schools.

One of the things I have learned over the years is that people with industry jobs can provide some very real support for teachers by what a salesman I worked with many years ago called a “swears by it.” Students listen to teachers but are often skeptical that what they are learning is really valid or relevant to industry or even to further academic endeavors. When someone from industry comes into a classroom and reinforces what the classroom teacher is teaching (or swears by it :-) ) the students tend to believe it more. The industry person validates what is going on in class. It’s a shame that it takes this and in some societies, where teachers are properly valued, its not necessary but for now all to often this is a surprisingly valuable assist. Plus for me it is a real treat to talk to students so I see this as win-win-win.

If you are a teacher within driving distance (say two hours or so) from Southern New Hampshire and would like a guest speaker let me know (AlfredTh (at) Microsoft.com) and maybe we can work something out.

Yes, I’d like to visit schools outside the area and when travel permits I will. But believe it or not I have a limited budget for travel. In some cases I may be able to arrange for other people in the education team to make some visits. Most of them are better looking than I am and (don’t tell them I said this) smarter than I am as well.

Tutorial: 2D Game Development in Silverlight

Now this looks interesting – a tutorial to create a game using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. The article describes how to implement a game loop, render images and shapes, the handling of keyboard events, and how to do some simple collision detection. I really like the ML diagrams that show the classes, they properties and methods.

Joe Stagner has a set of links on his blog to 44 different videos on parts of Silverlight BTW. So if you are looking to learn this hot net technology there are resources.

Note that Silverlight is also the technology behind the video experience at nbcOlympics.com that I’ve been using to watch a lot of the events that don’t normally make it to TV. It's also an important part of Popfly.

Also on a related (to Silverlight) note is this interesting interview with Miguel de Icaza of Mono fame who talks about the why of an open source version of Silverlight for LINUX.

Teaching the Computer Science Teacher

Garth left a comment on an earlier post of mine that I really think deserves more visibility and discussion. I’ve copied it below (and added some paragraphing):

This thread brings up a whole new topic; teacher training.  I have a fairly broad based university in my town, the University of Montana.  It prides itself on its Dept of Education.  It is possible to get a Doctorate in Ed Tech from UofM.  After having looked at the curriculum and talked to the guy in charge of the program (he is an old friend) the program is for business teachers and teachers that have an unlimited budget to buy all the cool technology toys (he is into iPods, blogs and webpages). 

The curriculum for Ed Tech has no programming, no computer hardware/how to fix the @#$% things (one of my main jobs as a school IT guy), and no networking.  The Computer Science dept at UofM has awarded two Computers in Education minors.  Another teacher and I wrote our own curriculum and did all the course work independently. 

Certified teachers qualified to teach high school programming, basic networking, trouble shooting of hardware, computer purchasing and the other basic skills that a high school CS teacher should be able to present to a class of HS students do not appear to coming out of my local University.  Is this the same nation wide? 

During the school year I have a monthly meeting (BS session) with most of the local techs from the other local schools (5 to 10 people), they all learned their skills on-the-job.  The programming teachers I know have taken one or two college level programming courses then had to write their own curriculum for their kids. 

The way programming is taught at the University has nothing to do with the way it is taught at the high school.  University education departments (at least UofM) do not seem to be looking at what is being taught in the high schools and junior highs today.  Is this typical for state Universities?  I would like to improve my ability to teach programming and the other basic HS CS curriculum elements but without traveling around the nation it does not seem possible.

There are degrees in teaching math, in teaching reading, in teaching all sorts of things but I don’t hear much about a degree in teaching computer science. Like Garth most of the Ed Tech programs I have found are about everything but computer science. I’ve actually seen search engine traffic to this blog from the search string “how to teach computer science in high school” so I know there are people looking to learn.

I’ve done some workshops at Southern New Hampshire University to participants in their teacher training program so I know they are interested and at least including some courses in the right direction. Kennesaw State University is, I believe, developing a CS teacher education program to align with a proposed certification program in Georgia. Certification is of course a whole other problem.

I think that a big part of the problem is that there isn’t enough solid research on what it takes to teach computer science at the high school (and lower) level. Of sure a lot of people are doing interesting things (Alice, Scratch, TeachScheme, and on and on) but there hasn’t been enough research to know what works best. [Yes there has been some research with Alice especially Storytelling Alice and also some on Scheme but I maintain that there hasn’t been enough and there hasn’t been enough to compare it to other innovative programs.

And then it comes back to the lack of reasonable high school computer science teaching certifications at the state level. CSTA is working on this and if you are a high school computer science teacher you really should join CSTA. But we have a ways to go.

[EDIT} Interesting reading on the shortage of computer science teachers. There are some quotes by Chris Stephenson the Executive Director of the CSTA there.

Microsoft Visual Studio Tips Book Helps Hurricane Katrina Survivors Rebuild Lives

The incomparable Sara Ford is coming out with a book collecting the best 251 tips of the day for Visual Studio. Sara’s tips of the day blog posts have taught me quite a bit. So I’m pleased to see that they are coming together in a book form – yes I’m an old-fashioned paper book sort of guy. The fact that Sara’s royalties are going into a scholarship fund make it even more rewarding for me to promote. Visit her blog to find out how Sara is working to support her home town which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

And if you use Visual Studio 2008 for work, for fun, or as an IDE in a classroom situation you may want to pick up a copy of this book as a reference. Help yourself and others at the same time.

GridWorld RolePlay Online

If you are an AP CS teacher one of the things that is an important part of your curriculum is the GridWorld case study. The case study is one of the key pieces of the APCS exam and understanding how it works and being able to use and modify it is very important for student success. For a number of years now running through the case study and its classes and interactions using a role play has been a helpful and useful process. I’ve been through the current role play at some workshops and it can also be fun. The value of getting students up and moving around is also useful I think.

Ben Chun has now put the script and process of the GridWorld role play into an online HTML format. he is not completely finished and is looking for feedback. You can find a temporary link to the role play here but I recommend visiting Ben’s blog for current news and to leave comments. Eventually Ben plans to package this up in a zip file for local use. I encourage teachers who are more familiar with the case study than I am (I don’t teach the case study) to help fine tune Ben’s version.

This is of course yet an other example of the way teachers can support each other using blogs and other web tools. I appreciate teachers like Ben making their resources available to others.

Friday Misc Links – August 8 2008

Found a few good nuggets to share with people.

Robots If you are in to robots or know someone who is I saw this announcement from the Microsoft Robotics team blog.

The RoboChamps Amazed Challenge is over and the winners have been announced. However, the Challenge continues with the Amazing Second Chance Challenge that closes on the 11th August 2008. Download the revised Amazed Challenge from the Downloads page now.

The second challenge in the series, the Sumo Challenge, is now open and the environment can also be downloaded from the Downloads page.

This competition is all online and free using free software. Perhaps something to get your FIRST Robotics software team in gear during the fall?

Professional Development From CSTA Board Member Brian Scarbeau I found this link to presentations from the 2008 CS & IT Symposium. (My trip report from that event is here BTW.)  Besides Brian’s talk on DotNetNuke you’ll find presentations on gender issues in CS, the AP CS Gridworld case study, information on how Google search works and Maria Klawe’s talk on Getting Future Leaders to Learn Computer Science and many more.

OneNote Teacher Tools Mike Tholfsen talks about sections 3 and 4 of the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers. This toolkit comes from the new OneNote site for educators.

Games The Popfly Team introduced a bunch of Olympics theme games by the amazing Adam Nathan. Thanks to Paolo Barone who organized this list I swiped from his blog. Paolo is part of the UK academic team and is a great guy whose blog I try not to miss.

• Torch Lighting
• Soccer or Football as those outside the US call it :-)
• Track and Field
• Archery
• Long Jump
• Weightlifting
• Boxing
• Gymnastics
• Diving
• Synchronized Swimming

Don’t forget that you can see, learn from and modify the games on Popfly. Here is one to start with.

The Language is NOT the Important Thing

Invariably when anyone posts about “the right” programming language to use in a first course a lot of discussion ensues. People are notoriously opinionated about this topic. I am not exempt from this and I admit that I have fallen into this trap in the past. But as I talk to people, read peoples thoughts in blogs and papers, and think more seriously about the first computer science or programming course the more I am coming to the conclusion that the programming language is not the biggest factor in success. Not in success in that first course and definitely not success in a career (academic or commercial) in computer science, Information Technology or just plain programming.

I’m starting to conclude that the real important things are the instructor and the curriculum – especially the contexts that are used to introduce the concepts. Let’s start with the instructor.

Teachers are always an easy target but most of the time they are unfairly criticized and I don’t mean to beat up on people. There are a lot of really amazing teachers out there and I’ve been privileged to meet and work with a good number of them. I do think though that there are a number of things that get in the way of great teaching in computer science. And there are a number of things that I think are required to teach computer science well. Most of these things are probably in teaching any subject though.

1. Enthusiasm – Students learn (by example) the enthusiasm for the subject from their teacher. A teacher who would really rather be teaching Calc BC but who feels stuck teaching introduction to programming is going to turn students right off. You cannot easily hide that sort of thing. Likewise if you really hate COBOL you are going to transmit that dislike to students. I had a wonderful talented teacher who didn’t like COBOL. I learned but not as much as I did in other courses the same teacher taught. Had he not been such a superior teacher I might not have learned at all. It takes a lot to overcome a lack of enthusiasm.
2. Knowledge – Somehow I don’t think it is possible to teach more then a fraction of what we know. If a teacher knows twice what they need to teach they are probably golden. But staying a chapter ahead of the students is not going to be good for either the students or the teacher. I’ve been there and it was tough. In the case I did it only the language was new to me so I like to think the students got some good out of it but it would have been much better if I’d been more expert in the language. We’ve got a lot of high school computer science teachers who have only a shallow knowledge of the subject. They took a programming course 15 years ago in FORTRAN and now they are trying to teach Java. It’s just painful for everyone involved.
3. Openness – By this I mean a couple of things. They need to be open to trying new things. They need to be open to saying to their students “ok we are going beyond what I know so we’re going to learn together.” They need to be open to seeing students as partners in learning. Now some of you are going to say “wait! weren’t you just talking about needing knowledge?” Yes, but no one can know everything. Plus in computer science things are constantly changing. We expect teachers to know where to go for answers, to know how to learn and to have a background that enables them to know what questions to ask and to recognize the right answer when it bites them.  If a teacher has proved to a student that they have a great base of knowledge they will continue to respect a teacher who is willing to admit they don’t know everything. Not only that but a teacher who encourages students to go beyond the course syllabus and even what the teacher knows teaches a student to be fearless in learning. To me that is a powerful lesson.

Now to talk about context a little. Converted math teachers love to teach the math side of programming. Not every student is a fan of math though. OH sure a serious computer science student needs math but why turn students off in the beginning by hiding the other contexts where computer science is used? I’ve become a big fan of the way they are doing things at Georgia Tech. I’ve heard Mark Guzdial talk about their program a number of times now (Visit this blog post of his to find a link to the slides he used at the recent Microsoft Research faculty Summit) and I must say that the results they are getting are impressive. In short they have several different first programming/computer science courses. It’s different for CS majors, non-majors and engineering majors.

Now not every school can have several different first level courses. There is no way that will work in the average high school for example. But I do think there are lessons there that high school computer science teachers can use. I think that finding a context that works for students, one that they can get as excited about as the teacher can, will work great things for many schools. Maybe it is robotics or media manipulation (which Georgia Tech is having great results with) or genetics (which is working at a couple of colleges including Wheaton College in MA), or even game development which is working at high schools and universities around the world. Or maybe something else. In some cases it may be possible to mix contexts, especially in full year courses, to allow students to find the context that is meaningful and motivating for them. that one will probably take a big dose of openness and fearlessness. :-)

Does the language have a lot to do with which context on chooses? Probably not that much. There isn’t much one can do in one language that one can’t do in many others – at least not in a first course. You want an IDE that students can use. You want a language that allows one to teach/learn the concepts of a first course. But really a first course is not about preparing a student for a career. A language that might get them a job at one company might be useless at another. Quality of instructor and contexts that inspire, interest and motivate students are going to have a lot more value in the long run than what language is used.

Let’s also not confuse the first course with a whole curriculum or as the be all and end all of a computer science education. Just because a first course uses one language and one context doesn’t mean that’s all one needs or uses. Along those lines, Mark A. Graybill has a great post on the value of Learn[ing] Another Language that I highly recommend. I really believe that people really need to learn more than one programming language and that ideally they should learn them early in their education. I just discovered Mark’s blog (An Infinite Number of Cats on Keyboards) and there are a lot of interesting posts there.

Top Conversations and Links for July 2008

July was interesting. If you missed it (all you lucky teachers who got to actually relax and disconnect in July) here are some of the highlights according to comments, reads, and links followed.

Tops would have to be the Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy 1.0 with a lot of comments and a lot of people following the link to the download page. Related to that was two posts I made about some of the pieces  the Visual Programming Flow Chart and the Visual Declarative Designer. I’ll have more posts on other features as soon as I catch up from all my recent travel.

The other big draw in terms of reads and people following the link was my post about trueSpace7.6 the FREE Fully-featured 3D Authoring Package. A lot of people see the possibilities with that tool!

The tops for conversation was The Four Digit Problem post with several people contributing code snippets or discussing the ones that others had entered. Next to that was my post called Recursion See Recursion Again which was about recursion if you hadn’t guessed. :-)

I was really surprised by the traffic to my NECC 2008 Trip Report as well. I was recently at Microsoft Research’s faculty summit and need to post a trip report on that one as well. I got to see and try the new spherical Microsoft Surface there. Very cool.

Over all it was a good month with some interesting topics. Now that we’re in August I know that a lot of people are ramping up to get back to school. Some teachers, especially in the south, are back organizing their classrooms this week. My wife and son have meetings this week and next with official contracted days starting soon. It is time to start thinking about the new school year for just about all teachers. Student, I suspect, want to wait a while to think about it. :-)

Teaching Casting

I love a good analogy. Actually I even like so-so analogies. But this one about casting variables from Rob Miles is a particularly good one I think. I can see saying “and now playing the role of an integer is 3.14159” What was that you are asking? Well those of you who haven’t read Rob’s post are asking anyway. So here is the deal.

In programming sometimes we need to cast a variable of one type into the role of acting like a variable of another type. For example we want a pair of integers to act like real numbers so that we can get an answer with a fractional part. Sometimes it is hard for students to get the picture of what is happening though. So I like Rob’s analogy of “You can think of casting as making a movie. You take an actor (Christian Bale) and cast him as a character (Batman). For the duration of the film the character will behave in terms of the role they have been cast into.”

I think the original meaning relates to foundry work though. Melting something and pouring into a mold. But on the other hand casting in the role sense makes it easier to see casting the same variable multiple ways for multiple uses. Besides even the high school I attended doesn’t teach casting in metal anymore – though foundry was a required class when I was a student. Students do understand casting for roles in plays, movies and TV shows though.

Math In Office

OK here is another link for you math teachers out there. Murray Sargent has a blog called Math in Office that as you might expect focuses on mathematics related features and tools with Microsoft Office.

Sample interesting looking posts include:

• Hidden Math Features in Word 2007
• Math Context Menus
• Improved MathML support in Word 2007

It’s not a high volume blog but I suspect you’ll find things there that you may not easily find anywhere else.

Workin' It at Microsoft's Videos

I ran into a number of interesting videos about people working at Microsoft over on Facebook of all places. The best part about them is not so much that these people are at Microsoft but that they show the wide diversity of people and jobs in the computer industry. An Olympic swimmer for example. Or someone trained in media (TV and movies) who works the make technology approachable and interesting for others. And more. The are 15 different videos there as I post this and more are expected. BTW don’t miss the one with Jacqueline Russell, a Lead Project Manager for Non-Professional Developers at Microsoft. You’ll want to find out what that whole “Non-Professional Developers” thing is about and hear her explain the motivation behind tools like Popfly and sites like the Beginner Developer Learning Center.

I found links there to a bunch of other interesting sites with videos and information about careers in technology (with an emphasis on Microsoft as an example) there.

•  http://ViewMyWorld.com - Get a peek into what it's like to work at Microsoft.
•  http://Hey-Genius.com - College students, unleash your inner genius.
•  http://Microspotting.com - Like the paparazzi, but for geeks! Join Ariel as she creeps around campus finding people who are passionate about what they do.
•  http://JobsBlog.com - Get the inside scoop on Microsoft’s recruiting process straight from recruiters.
•  http://Microsoft.com/Careers - Join us (if you haven't already!) :)