mypaperlessclassroom

Design Thinking with Puppets

MyPaperlessClassroom has moved into the Teachercast.net media family.  All the new posts are http://ift.tt/1H2kESy.   The posts on this blog will be migrated over, leaving a jump link.  My apologies for links broken in the move. the new RSS is http://ift.tt/1H2kESC. Thanks for reading!

ACSD provided a copy of The Tech Savvy Administrator for review.  The whole series can be found here

Don Wettrick’s Pure Genius (Dave Burgess Consulting 2014) is a great balance of inspiration and best practices for supporting a community of innovation at your school.Wettrick’s honest evaluation of his own learning models the process honestly, and makes this work accessible even for teachers who have not yet begun to dream about a choice based learning environment.

If you want to know what my number one ed tech wish is, close your eyes and listen to second grade learning, and then tell me how to support video creation in that room. If my former supervisors are reading this they are laughing.  I LOVE noise in the classroom.  I believe it is generated by the friction of learning, like heat from a light.  But even loving the noise, I am challenged when I want them all to make a video.  They ask if they can go some where quiet, but there simply are not enough quiet spaces. I first tried to solve this problem with REALLY CHEAP ear buds.  Seriously I think we paid 3 dollars per pair.  The mics were ok, but my first grade kids cannot use earbuds, their ears are too small and the ear buds fell out. At CUE I got a chance to talk with ThinkWrite, and I like the quality of the headphones. This week I had a chance to test them against no mic and the inline earbuds mic.  Check out the 40 second video below and judge for yourself. I think we will be ordering a "cart set" of the ThinkWrite headphones, while they don't cut the background noise, they do amplify the foreground much more than the other set ups. ThinkWrite did provide the sample headphone for this review

Want to get a full on chat room going?  Use Today's Meet to make sure you can control the content and the archive of the chat.

Checking in with my second grade team, I discovered they are on the cusp of 3 long experiments about stages of life.  They will be growing beans, hatching chicks, and watching caterpillars become butterflies. In class, they record daily observations in a science notebook writing a description as well as sketching what they see. In tech class we got started with Paper and Skitch.  The kids were creating detailed and annotated digital sketch in under 30 minutes. To prep for this I loaded Paper on the ipads, and gave thanks that all the drawing tools are free now, and made sure Skitch was also in place.

There is something beautiful that happens when great apps are no longer locked into one platform.  I am super excited that all my android wielding friends will now get to use Scratch Jr with their students. Why is Scratch JR awesome? This brings the power of content supporting programming to grades K and 1.  The camera import function means you can transform seat work style worksheets into interactive programming lessons.  Once you get your students creating presentations, dialogues, and skits in Scratch JR, you will be amazed at the power of programming as a formative assessment tool. Still not convinced?  Check out these videos about Scratch JR and lesson ideas.  If you have been lamenting your device and feeling left out of the most exciting thing to hit coding for the pre-reading crowd, get off your apps and install this amazing tool!

Checkout their Indiegogo campaign and be the first to get your hands on the wood-trimmed robot!

Tickle brings the power of block-based programming to the world of connected toys and this is great news for teachers.  As a K-5 programming teacher, I want my students to study programming in a variety of contexts and Tickle puts programming in the middle of my classroom, flying through the air, rolling on the floor, even controlling the lights in the room. Tickle is a powerful programming studio that lets students control robots using a visual language that is familiar to them.  Resembling Scratch, Hopscotch, and Blockly, Tickle is a quick start app for my students.     I really enjoy seeing students develop a greater understanding of programming and the world around us as they experiment with robots, discover variables, or learn about the "magical" use of broadcast to launch a quad copter. Tickle is brand new on the app store, so please give them some love, write a review, and connect with the Tickle team on social media.  Tweets by @tickleapp!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");

I am excited to be presenting at the annual CUE conference in Palm Springs.  I have a pretty full speaking schedule, with 4 great group presentations.  If you are at the conference, join the conversation about creativity, learn how making puppets changes lessons, or just stop by to get some hands-on time with robots. Whether you are looking to add new tools to your tool kit, or a sure fire way to avoid Burnout and boredom find time to talk with us, we will get you making more than a difference.

Wokka, my dear friend from the Edupuppets was hard at work this week while I worked on my rank in Star Wars Commander.  He wants everybody to dream big for Digital Learning Day!  Get off you Apps and do something spectacular!

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This post is in support of a workshop I am presenting at the Head Royce School in Oakland as part of the NAIS Regional Conference.  If you are joining me of this conference, please take a minute to complete the form below.  You will find the slides from today embedded below the form.   Loading...

I am so excited to be presenting at SVCUE this weekend.  We are talking about progressive pedagogy and programming.  We are also playing with Robots. Why progressive? We are cutting with both edges of that one.  We will talk about building skills year over year with spiraling skill based lessons.  We will also be talking about how coding as a mode of expression can empower students to become creators, not just consumers of digital texts.

Here is a sample 

This is a challenge we are working on in fourth grade. The gold rush was an exciting and dangerous time.  Fortunes as well as lives were made and lost. Your challenge is to design a simple 2-3 screen game that captures the drama of the real history of the gold rush. You will be programming in Scratch and you will share your final game in our class studio. The game should be some sort of a historical simulation.  Let's consider a game that was first produced in 1974.  (The was the year Sam was born).  Spend a LITTLE time and play the game below.  While you play I want you to think about what the game is asking you to do and how it is teaching you things about the Oregon Trail. You can create or design backgrounds or characters in other programs if needs be.  Be mindful of the time you have and make it a priority to finish a playable game. If you think you could successfully remix another Scratch game, you may.