mardi 24 juin 2014

Project presentation slides

Yesterday evening, I gave the final presentation of my project. Here are the slides.

I'd like to thank especially Vera, Sophie, Lauriane, Julien (who did a really nice project about improvisation) and James for attending the presention, for asking relevant questions, and for the advice.

Thank you.

mardi 3 juin 2014

Meet Gymglish, your new personal English teacher!


The problem with learning a new language - according to a lot of people - is that you need to spend a lot of time studying before reaching an acceptable level.

Yet unless you are still at school, it is often difficult to find enough time to study seriously.


Gymglish tries to go beyond this hurdle by offering short 15-minute online English lessons through daily e-mails.

The real advantage of this approach is that you'll no longer have an excuse for loafing around instead of studying you English because each lesson is designed to be very concise, yet exhaustive.

This page explains better than me why Gymglish works.

I subscribed to the 7-day free trial, and I really liked the content of the lessons. Give it a go and tell me about it in the comments section!

jeudi 29 mai 2014

Harness the power of your computer with Codecademy!

 Have you ever been impressed by this geeky friend who can do almost anything with a computer by typing - often blazingly fast - a few lines of code?
Are you tired of struggling with the most advanced functions of your spreadsheet programme to perform simple math?

Then learn to code!

Yet I must confess that learning to program can be a boring and tedious task: you'll often have to naviate through specialized, technical websites, install special software to compile your code... and you'll probably give up writing your first line of code!

These days are over!

Codecademy offers a ready-made, user-friendly programming environment that turns learning code into an unthralling quest! After having subscribed to Codecademy, the first screen you'll get will put you right in the heart of the action!

In the heart of action!



The specificity of Codecademy is indeed that the user must participate actively to unlock new "levels" and is asked therefore to write lines of code at each step

If you do this well you'll get rewards and will be able to share your progress with your friends!
I'm in the process of becoming a Python expert!

Do you know any other website to learn how to code? Do you think the new generation of computer programmers will start on similar websites? Please tell me in the comments section!

dimanche 11 mai 2014

Big Blue Button: an open-source software for class-oriented video-conferencing

Tired of having to wake up every morning, jump out of your bed and breakfast your way to school or university? And arrive just in time to:
  • realize that your teacher forgot to get out of bed this morning, or...
  • attend a 3-hour hypnotising conference where the orator is the only one to speak and barely does anything but read his slides out loud
Within a few years, we might not have to suffer this painful old grind everyday, because school will have moved... right home!

Online massive video-conferencing is a first step towards this direction and will probably gain much popularity in a few years. Personally, the prospects that this technology may offer truly fill me with enthusiasm and excitement!

However the most pessimistic people will tell you that the technology behind this feat isn't mature yet. Here's one little piece of software to show you they are shamefully wrong!

Big Blue Button (developed by Mozilla Foundation, the foundation that develops Mozilla Firefox) might bring a smart solution to this problem by allowing us to do video-conferencing... straight in our web browser.

Check out this (cool) video that shows the software's capabilities, and give me feedback in the comments section!