A quick post just to welcome everyone back to school after what I hope was a wonderful, fun-filled, relaxing break from the routine. As promised, I spent a few weeks this summer going to conferences, workshops and an edcamp. In future posts, or perhaps as an afternoon workshop I would love to spend time with those interested talking about Hyperdocs, BreakoutEdu or some of the real hands-on coding for younger students that I learned more about and worked with this summer. HyperdocsI did end up taking the Hyperdocs bootcamp course. The book is worthwhile ( I bought the paperback copy and I can loan it to you), the Facebook group is relatively active, the twitter group is worth following and the website is something I reference pretty continually. The course itself... not so much. I learned a lot from the Google Hangouts, from doing the assignments, but the instructors did not give feedback to the learners. They had reasons for this- that they could not evaluate how we would use these docs in the classroom, etc... but it was kind of like working in void. For those of you who don't know what hyperdocs are.... I wrote about them in the Spring, but essentially they are like the old webquests but on steroids- waay more engaging, more collaborative, more connected, and you can organize your lessons, your units, etc for both yourself and your students. Oh- and one plus for me was in the course of doing one of the assignments I chose to use Plotagon. It was fun to use, is free and is kind of a replacement for xtranormal. Computational Thinking ( coding stuff)I also attended the Scratch conference at MIT as well as a day each of ScratchJr and of Kibo Robotics over at Tufts. One of the themes of the Scratch conference was inclusiveness. When we hear that coding is the new literacy, that all students should learn to code, etc,, regardless of how you feel about those statements- who are we including/excluding? Do girls get to try these activities? How about students of color? How about students with disabilities or students who live in poverty? Some really interesting conversations. I even saw a poster session by a woman who is designing a version of Scratch (which is visual, drag and drop programming ) for the blind! Lots of really smart people, probably the most international conference I ever attend, and they are all thinking about, talking about how to help students and teachers connect computational thinking, creativity, and design in really interesting ways. The 2 days over at Tufts were on computational thinking with real hands on programming. The Kibo robot- thank you Helping Hearts- has a low entry level and a very high ceiling. It is programming a wooden robot, using wooden blocks with bar codes- but includes loops, conditionals, etc. and you can use the stage to make really cool characters. And of course #edcampCTI love going to edcamps. Where else do you get to design and choose your own PD, walk out of a session that isn't meeting your needs and have great conversations with amazing educators? I attended edcampCT over at the Ethel Walker School in August. It is one of my favorite edcamps- beautiful facilities, excellent food, and of course a diverse mix of educators- from preschool and elementary through high school and college- librarians, classroom teachers, administrators... It is just plain fun and I learn a lot. I'm not a real big fan of augmented or virtual reality- so I attended a session on it- just to make myself think differently. I still don't like it personally, but am now convinced that I need to work on learning more about it and seeing if it is a good fit for some teachers/learners. I said this was going to be a quick post- I lied. Google made lots of changes over the summer- some may be useful and I will go over those next time.
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AuthorMaureen Tumenas Archives
June 2021
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