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My travel is over for a couple of weeks. Well, about three weeks. Then I will be headed out to Seattle for the US Finals of the Imagine Cup. Look for news of the public’s chance to vote for their favorites later this week. We, the US, have some great looking teams this year and I am hopeful they will do well in the world wide part of the competition. And now some links.

Looks for some fun and educational contest sort of thing? Don’t miss a fun new software competition for younger students – Microsoft’s Kodu Cup

Kathleen Weaver has a nice post on One Note use  Planning and Presenting (Both for Teachers and Students) on her blog. She explains some of the ways she uses Microsoft OneNote

The March Tech Student of the Month is Kenneth Harding   from Ohio State University. He is one of those people whose parent started them coding and who have never stopped learning and growing. Take a look at all he has been up to.

Go behind the scenes at Xbox with this talk with Larry Hyrb better known as @Majornelson

Charlie Kindel from the Windows Phone team has a great Behind the Code interview. This is an interesting series of interviews with technical people at Microsoft who discuss their careers, the industry and their latest projects.

My good friend Doug Peterson and I made a list of 300 educators on Twitter. If you are looking for educators to follow this is a nice place to start.

Sam Stokes posted about how to use – XNA and Bing Map Geocoding

Lyn Langit has been busy with resources for Small Basic lately. Last week she posted about some videos she has created at  Teaching Kids Programming–Video Training for Teachers

College Students Aim to Build a Better Way to Manage Courses – What I love about this story is that students didn’t complain but rather said “we can do better: and then set out to prove it. This article highlights some resources available to software startups and so if you know a budding small business person point them this way.

Cool! Windows Phone 7 app for NYC subways A must have for NYC subway riders. This is another story of a students seeing a need and developing software to solve the problem. I am thinking I may want to buy this app before my next visit to New York.

Take a look at this video by Dan Kasun talking about making government information more valuable. Moving more government information to the cloud where more people can get at it in more ways is a great step towards making government more effective and responsive.

lastly for this week, take a look at this Webcast Series for K-12 educators and teacher recognition program from Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program.

Thanks to Chicago Mag writer Whet Moser for helping me finally understand why I should care about the whole school lunch debate, which as a “serious” education blogger I’ve generally thought of as silly yuppie parent/ public health stuff (ie, not my business).  Still, school lunch is something of a big story because not only is CPS weaning itself off its infamous daily offering of cheese nachos (remember from last year?) but also experiencing a new mandatory school breakfast program that teachers hate but kids apparently need.  Still, I’m not interested until Moser connects lunch food to something bigger:  ”We demand accountability, as we should, but demonstrating accountability calls for data, which calls for standardization, which calls for structure across schools, districts, and even states…That can make it hard to run a “small, nimble operation,” whether it’s a school or a school cafeteria.

I don’t think truly bad teachers are the biggest problem of all the many issues out there, but they’re a pretty obvious place to start.  Is it really so hard to spur teachers to do better or weed them out, or is it actually much easier to do than it might otherwise appear?  Please be specific.

Now the real work begins.