Session 7: Computational Thinking

Today I was most inspired by Vivian's session. There was a lot of thought provoking discussions on the Ten Break Through Technologies -Bill Gates. It tends to make you question what else will be invented within the next ten years. How will these inventions impact people? will they hinder or will they be a convenience? During the session it was great to be introduced to the Sort Me activity. It was good to use computational thinking in a practical way. There were no devices needed and I could actually see Maths links. I would love to do this sort of task with my class. It would be great to adapt it - around who lives the furthest from school? It was interesting to learn around debugging -the what if's around two people who have the same answers. The resources off the Trail Blazers website would be wonderful to explore and to try out. I tried Scratch-coding website last year, and I enjoyed doing the lessons that were put on there. It will be neat to get the children to create their own mazes. 

During the lunch time it was good to lesson to Makey Makey. I think this would be a fantastic resource to use at school as an introduction to electronics and to coding. I particularly like how with Makey Makey there are multiple learning opportunities with this resource.  There were lots of other takeaways from today's session such as Junior Scratch, Zombie Circuits. 

I could see the circuit idea working for games the students could make. 

  

Session 6: Dealing with Data

Today I learnt about Google Forms. It is amazing the special features Forms have now where you can add sections into divide content. You can also add link your segments together. I can see this working for pick a path reading activities and for explicit statistical investigations. I really liked how you can import sheets into Google Maps. When you create a questionnaire in Forms as part of a getting to know you unit, it would be great to use Google Maps and to get the students to add a photograph of themselves on the country/city they've chosen. I love how these maps can be published onto blogs.

This afternoon we were shown Blog Post Analysis, in which the students could track the number of posts over time (months and years). It was very interesting to look at one of the students blogs whom I use to teach. This afternoon I analysed one of my students blogs over the last two years I taught her. It appears that there has been a bit of a slide with the number of blog posts that she has published this year. There are many variables behind this, however the quality of the posts have not gone down. Good things take time to achieve. I would like to do something similar to this next year. It would be a great opportunity for the students to set goals around the number of blog posts they would like to publish upon their blogs. 

Day 5: Enabling Access Sites

Today was a wonderful day for learning something new. It was great to receive feedback on my class site from colleagues within the group. There was some constructive feedback on the site which in the long term I will implement next year. Today was good to implement some short term goals around ways I could improve it for my learners. It was great to have the time to fine tune aspects of the site. I have now got a home button link for every page created, so the students don't need to click the back arrow on the page. I have also learnt how to fix the my colleague's photo so it isn't so zoomed up and elongated. One thing I will sort out is ensuring the permissions are set for anyone with the link for the Writing and Maori Pages.

Next year, I will try and create buttons that have more of the children's image on. This year the theme is around Super Heroes and so I made it look like a comic. I used the Pop Art theme of the Roy Lichtenstein dots as a background to create the buttons.

This afternoon I learnt about creating buttons. It was good to have a refresher on this and to use the mask tool to create my buttons. To ensure buttons are consistent it is good to know that if I copied and pasted my original button over, then I can just replace the image and change the text each time. Another little gem I have taken away is the importance of shift, when resizing lettering.

I also enjoyed learning about creating headers. These could be used next year for my pages. Another thing I learnt was that it is critical to have less colours on my site and have a white back ground, as it makes the page look much cleaner and professional for the students.

There is so much to takeaway from today's session that I am looking forward to meeting up with George after the Christmas break and plan our site together. It will also be good to get the students to do a screen recording around the navigation of the site.