MIT Media Lab's Creation, Scratch, makes Coding easily teachable |
Many in the edtech world are very familiar with Hour of Code, the teaching movement to get kids learning computer science at an early age, and the numerous coding sites with which students can learn the language of computers, video games, graphic design and the web; however I have labored to find a perfect teaching tool for my special education students that are working at 6 different ability levels and on the same note, a site that is perfect for elementary school. Many teachers have their favorites, however, for elementary and basic programming/coding mine is Scratch and I will illuminate for you the various reasons why.
If you have read through any other parts of my site, you will know that my class has a college focus on MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) due to the high focus on technology in my classroom and I was introduced to the astounding projects (check out inFORM for a geek 'wow' moment!) coming out of the MIT Media Lab through the wonders of Google+. I found the diversity of projects to be amazing and inspiring, especially the story of Kelvin Doe from Sierra Leone. After some exploring I happened upon Scratch and it opened up a new creative world.
The lightning bolt scar exploded... because I was shown the time sucking path to sites-not-yet-explored-about-coding (sorry for the Harry Potter humor there folks... I am a nerd).
I started exploring coding through a other sites , code.org madewithcode.com. My twitter PLN was full of insight into Hour of Code and I realized that computer and web languages are languages that students must know in all careers in the future to be ahead of the curve. I found that in all of my exploring of this interest area, much like all of my exploring of all the millions of endless resources online for teachers, I had stumbled upon something important for students.
I took it upon myself to start integrating Codeacademy into my daily teaching, simply out of the desire to help them in the design of their websites, but found that the JavaScript language in its sentence form was a little too difficult for all but one of my students. So I decided to introduce them to Scratch, which is a visual representation of the sentences for JavaScript and other coding languages. My students logged in and loved the ease of Scratch. It runs seamlessly on their Chromebooks and it has the best tutorial system I have been able to run into as of yet. Other companies such as Codemonkey, Lightbot, and Codespark (all three of which have signed on a rep as guest speaker in my coding elective) have joined the visual coding/Hour of Code revolution for schools and now teachers have no excuses not to teach coding as a regular function of the curricular day (teachers have plenty of time to add it on... right?).
Okay, maybe not yet with the adoption of (or possible un-adoption? anti-adoption? of) common core, but it will be a necessity soon once teachers realize their students are speaking a different language and they want to learn it.
All of this exploration and class use has lead me to the ScratchEd community (run through Harvard [those ivy league schools share everything]) where I was lucky enough to happen upon a set of lesson plans, several units long, for teaching Scratch to any ability or grade level as well as a printable student workbook for which I am using to create my elective with 40 general education students (all of my students picked other electives because they have had it with all of the technology I expose them to everyday:( ). My elective adventure is so much fun and I am going to transition it into a more advanced app development elective using MIT's Appinventor.
So many fun times are ahead and I can't wait to share.
Please click the links in this post if you are a teacher and explore these amazing sites!!
PS: Check out my Edweb.net CE certificate to teach coding and my Hour of Code certificate below.
If you have read through any other parts of my site, you will know that my class has a college focus on MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) due to the high focus on technology in my classroom and I was introduced to the astounding projects (check out inFORM for a geek 'wow' moment!) coming out of the MIT Media Lab through the wonders of Google+. I found the diversity of projects to be amazing and inspiring, especially the story of Kelvin Doe from Sierra Leone. After some exploring I happened upon Scratch and it opened up a new creative world.
The lightning bolt scar exploded... because I was shown the time sucking path to sites-not-yet-explored-about-coding (sorry for the Harry Potter humor there folks... I am a nerd).
I started exploring coding through a other sites , code.org madewithcode.com. My twitter PLN was full of insight into Hour of Code and I realized that computer and web languages are languages that students must know in all careers in the future to be ahead of the curve. I found that in all of my exploring of this interest area, much like all of my exploring of all the millions of endless resources online for teachers, I had stumbled upon something important for students.
I took it upon myself to start integrating Codeacademy into my daily teaching, simply out of the desire to help them in the design of their websites, but found that the JavaScript language in its sentence form was a little too difficult for all but one of my students. So I decided to introduce them to Scratch, which is a visual representation of the sentences for JavaScript and other coding languages. My students logged in and loved the ease of Scratch. It runs seamlessly on their Chromebooks and it has the best tutorial system I have been able to run into as of yet. Other companies such as Codemonkey, Lightbot, and Codespark (all three of which have signed on a rep as guest speaker in my coding elective) have joined the visual coding/Hour of Code revolution for schools and now teachers have no excuses not to teach coding as a regular function of the curricular day (teachers have plenty of time to add it on... right?).
Okay, maybe not yet with the adoption of (or possible un-adoption? anti-adoption? of) common core, but it will be a necessity soon once teachers realize their students are speaking a different language and they want to learn it.
All of this exploration and class use has lead me to the ScratchEd community (run through Harvard [those ivy league schools share everything]) where I was lucky enough to happen upon a set of lesson plans, several units long, for teaching Scratch to any ability or grade level as well as a printable student workbook for which I am using to create my elective with 40 general education students (all of my students picked other electives because they have had it with all of the technology I expose them to everyday:( ). My elective adventure is so much fun and I am going to transition it into a more advanced app development elective using MIT's Appinventor.
So many fun times are ahead and I can't wait to share.
Please click the links in this post if you are a teacher and explore these amazing sites!!
PS: Check out my Edweb.net CE certificate to teach coding and my Hour of Code certificate below.