Week Eight Reflection

For this week’s class, we discussed technology in the classroom and coding for kids.

We began by talking about ways in which we have seen various forms of technology integrated into the classrooms we have been visiting on Wednesday’s. A few people mentioned their teachers have been using resources such as FreshGrade, ChromeBooks or that X-ray T-shirt thing (Something like this). It was interesting to hear about all the ways that teachers are using technology in the classroom, however I haven’t had much witness to this. My mentor teacher has used an overhead projector for an art lesson and a math lesson, as well as showing the class some pictures from her phone. But other than that, I have not seen much other technology being used in the class. I talked to her about what technology she does use, and she told me that they do have a few times a week where the students use ChromeBooks, but I just haven’t been in the class when they do. She also mentioned she uses FreshGrade for parent communication, but she doesn’t really like it, and prefers the standard report card over the online grading aspect.

Next, we went out in to breakout groups, and participated in a mini-research session on different resources for coding for kids. This was sort of like what we did with the EdCamp session, where we did our own learning and research about a topic. In my group, we were researching “Hour of Code”, which was a great website. It had a bunch of links to different games and activities that students are able to practice their coding skills. For example, the activity we tried was “Dance Party 2019”, where there is a little dancing figure, and you can go in to the code and choose the song, the dance moves, and the character who is dancing by using simplified coding. Here is the link.

We played around a bit, changing up the moves, and making the character an alien, and switching up the song. This particular activity we thought was good, because not only does it incorporate coding, it also touches on other subjects like PE (dancing along) and music (singing along). It was pretty entertaining, not gonna lie! It was also really cool that on each activity on the Hour of Code website, there was a whole lesson plan design for teachers to use when introducing the activity. Although, each activity/tutorial is an hour long, so it can be a bit time consuming, especially if you don’t have enough time allotted for the activity.

Overall, this class was pretty fun. We had a few good laughs in my breakout group while trying to make the alien dance. I think that coding for kids can be really fun, and we have a great list of various coding websites that we can use as future educators.