Like many teachers, I found The Hour of Code, sponsored by Code.org to be truly inspirational, I was already doing programming with most of my k-5 students, but it was stand alone, programming for the sake of programming. (Which IS worth it's own time, seriously. ) But I am always looking for those opprotunities to create another way to master a skill or demonsrate understanding.
This past week in #PATUE we were chatting about how tech can impact scope and sequence, which is a tricky topic. You will hear my voice as loud as any in the outcry against tech for the tech of tech (programming is different, it is a skill), or allowing tech choices to dictate instructional choices. But at the same time I believe as new tools become available to me as a teacher it is my job to use those tools to the best of my ability to meet the needs of all of my students. My end goal is all students learning as much as possible in a way where they experience empowerment and ownership of their knowledge. This means that I am always making choices about how to structure a lesson to meet the needs of all of my students.
Differentiation is an expectation at my school. We suport this expectation by enrolling teachers in differentiation trainings and in house support for the learning services team. While designing tech lessons I strive to model tech-based differentiation, often in the form of a video or screencast tutorial to support students who need the instructions repeated. It is too easy to ignore the other 1/2 of the spectrum. Differentiation needs to always reach in 2 directions, scaffolding to support those students that need it while clearing obstacles on the path ahead.
When I started working with Hopscotch I was using it with my 4th and 5th grade students, and they enjoyed the interface, but had already worked with scratch. Their reaction was a little like "What else you got?" My Hopscotch world changed radically when I caught Wes Fryer's session on Classroom 2.0. I loved hearing his learn-as-you-go approach to some pretty impressive tools, Minecraft, and Hopscotch. At the end of the webinair he shared his Hopscotch book with the audience. Wes had some great lessons and helped me find some of the great features of the program. I felt a bit silly when I realized there was a library of Hopscotch programs that I could access to see some great models. This really opened the possibilites for the app in my imagination.
Here is where the tech impacted the curriculum. In second grade the students learn about shapes, solids, and polygons, but they don't study angle measure. Students learn to use protractors in 3rd grade and I assume that is when they start drawing geometric models. I ran the idea of using Hopscotch to draw polygons by the 2nd grade teachers. I described how we would give the students the needed angle measures, after we talked about the number of degrees in a circle. The teachers were on board.
Each class figured it out by the second try. The discussion was a really great think-aloud session. After we completed the octogon, I left the code displayed and the teachers paired the students up on an iPad. I let them work on the floor so they could be close to the board. I asked the students to recreate the ocogon, and only a couple used the "set rotation to" command instead of the rotate command. Once they all successfully drew the ocotogon (about 4 minutes), I listed the # of sides and the angle measure in a chart on the white board, and showed the students where to plug in the values to create the other polygons.We opened class by talking about shapes and setting up the code on Hopscotch to draw a square (the students were "in the puddle" on the floor in front of the projection board. I was using my ipad projected via Apple TV using a NONHD projector. I could read Wes's book, but the students could not when I projected it, so I created his models in Hopscotch, easy fix). When we got to the turn, we talked about what "Rotate" means and what degreees were. I found myself standing at the clock before love and tracing the position as we crowdsourced how many degrees in one circle. This did not take long at all. The teachers were surprised by what the kids knew, I was grateful :). Once we had the degree defined we found that bear needed to turn 90, and 4 times made a square. Then we cut the angle measure in half and tried to figure out how many times we would need to repeat to close the polygon.
Some students created stars, suns, giant triangles, a series of overlapping hexagon. I even have unverified reports of a cube! This lesson was about 50 minutes and the initial discussion was about 10 minutes and we engaged as much of the vocabulry as possible. The guided practice of drawing the polygons was about 25 minutes. This left a good span of time for students to go beyond the lesson.
Pairing the 2nd graders 2:1 in this lesson was great. They needed some reminders to share and take turns, but there were no breakdowns. As students worked there was some foot traffic between pairs as they asked each other questions and shared their discoveries. Once one group found the Text as sprite feature the idea spread quickly.
