On of the best ways to reflect on your learning is to share it with others. For the past year, I have been working on integrating coding into our school board. I started with the older students mostly teaching them with Scratch and the Hour of Code tutorials. This week, I held a workshop for teachers from kindergarten to grade 3 on coding with the iPad. After a discussion on how activities like these can be tied to the development of Core Competencies, we moved on to the iPads. As most teachers are most afraid of not having the knowledge to teach coding, we used the Hour of Code to show them that there are tools that are available that require little teacher support. If you haven’t had a chance to explore these resources, I suggest you take a look at them. They are leveled tutorials, ready to use for all age levels. Students can advance at their own rhythm with minimal intervention from the teacher. There are also paper activities that accompany some of the activities in you don’t have iPads or computers available. We had our iPad IT technician add an icon onto the iPads that brings you directly to the tutorial page so that our students didn’t have to type in a URL. This makes it much easier for our kindergarten students to access the tutorials. With limited budgets in our schools, we have put together two kits including 8 mats and 3 BeeBot robots that will circulate in the schools. Teachers can sign up for a 5 week block and have the kits sent to their school. Needless to say, we had to draw names so many teachers wanted to test these out with their students this year!
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AuthorCarrie Antoniazzi is a teacher, facilitator, and lifelong learner. She is the co-founder of EdCampBCCC, a National Geographic certified educator, a 2023 Grosvenor Teacher Fellow and a Teacher Leader with Let’s Talk Science. Carrie also gives workshops across Canada sharing her passion for assessment, creativity, design thinking, technology and minority language education. Archives
May 2023
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