Empowering learners & Student agency a big focus today. How can we provide the tools, experiences and opportunities for our students.
Computational thinking
A very cool example of incorporating a local context into something that many kids are already so into. Fortnite in a Maori context - imagine! What would be the most valuable weapon? How would you fly in to an area? What would the different areas be called?
Some great resources to explore for use in the classroom. Some super frustrating and it will be interesting to see if the kids experience the same frustrations or whether it's just us oldies. Some great resource links...https://code.org/
http://lightbot.com/flash.html
http://games.thinkingmyself.com/
Unplugged Coding
Language level appropriate for differing abilities was definitely something to consider, especially making sure that we were not using 'codes' that they would not have had exposure to or understanding of yet; for example coordinates or angles.
Clarity of coding to avoid any 'bugs'.
Loved the money grid - students could have the goal of achieving as much money in least amount of moves, or a certain amount, or give a certain amount of lines of code to gain the most amount - or avoid 'losing any money' by avoiding landing on them.
Chromebook Apps
Because I only have access to chromebooks with my kids I have been really interested in exploring applications that will work with chromebooks.
https://www.autodraw.com/ for drawing own backgrounds on chromebooks
Clap motion
Stop Motion Animator
How could you use computational thinking to allow your students to explore digital storytelling? The stop motion sites above will be great. Scratch is another great programme available to turbo charge the learn, create and share process... and I am sure the kids will much quicker at it than I was! Here's my little example.
Everything we touched on today helped to provide us with more useable tools to empower our students. Yes there are many barriers that our students face on a daily basis but we can do our best to minimise these or provide awesome opportunities for our students to experience success regardless of the negative impacts they are enduring.
It is becoming increasingly obvious how much support is available in the form of tutorials and online video to make me realise that I don't have to be the expert and can use these as resources with my students as there are so many things they will pick up and run with a lot more quickly than me.
I am interested in using Scratch, ClapMotion combined with green screen or by using photos with the background removed using https://www.remove.bg/.
The Google exam next week has played on my mind a lot and I know I have not managed enough revising to keep me up to the play, however I decided it was still worth giving a go and I'm not going to beat myself about it. Even if I don't get through it next week I will still be keen to resit at a later date. There has been so much amazing stuff to take on over the DF1 time but it's the learning that I have applied immediately that I remember and the rest is all a bit hazy in the background.
Hi Dominique
ReplyDeleteGood on you for stepping up to the Google Exam. I think the word exam puts the shivers down everyone. Your use of the G Suite apps on a daily basis will really help you, you might just want to spend time revising on some of those multi-choice.
There are a lot of apps out there to make teaching code especially easy. Check out code.org it's got a teacher dashboard where you can have your classroom set up and a whole variety of differentiated learning activities that the kids just love.