Seesaw: Pinning A Weekly Schedule To The Top Of The Journal Feed In Seesaw

Have your students and families struggled to find your weekly schedule of activities, websites, and video conferences in Seesaw because they have to keep scrolling through the journal feed to find it as more and more posts and activities fill up the journal feed as the week goes on?

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Seesaw's new "Pin To Top" feature makes it easy to pin a post with a weekly schedule to the top of the journal feed making it super easy for students and families to find the schedule whenever they need instead of having to scroll up and down the journal feed looking for it when it was posted earlier in the week. 

International STEAM Summit - Get Started With Code Wherever You Are

 

Are you an elementary teacher in a hybrid or distance learning situation and looking for ways to include coding and computer science lessons and experiences for your students?

I hope you are able to join me to learn more about the Apple Everyone Can Code: Get Started with Code 1 and 2 Teacher Guides and how you can use them with your students in-person or in a hybrid or distance learning situation by watching the recording of my session from the International STEAM Summit.

Everyone Can Code and Develop In Swift Curriculum

Apple has free teacher and student guides available in the Apple Book Store in the Books app on the iPad or Mac computer. The curriculum guides include ways to introduce coding concepts and key vocabulary, activities to help students better understand the concepts by through everyday activities, practice with block-based apps at the elementary level, and reflection activities that allow for using other apps to create multimedia responses that demonstrate student learning.

Coding Concepts In The Get Started With Code Guides

Unplugged Activities

The Get Started With Code guides contain unplugged activities that get students off their devices and up and moving to introduce coding concepts through familiar games and activities to help students understand and remember the concepts.

Block-Based Coding Apps

Block-based coding apps allow students to learn about coding concepts and practice them in apps without needing to know any coding languages. Students can simply drag and drop the code blocks to create a program.

Tynker

CodeSpark Academy

Daisy the Dinosaur

Lightbot Hour

Kodable

Scratch Jr.

Scratch

Hopscotch

Robots With Block-Based Apps

Dash - Blockly app       

Sphero Mini - Sphero EDU app

Blue-Bot - BlueBot app

 

Resources:

Apple K-12 Education Teaching Code - Curriculum and resources for teaching code.

Apple Teacher Learning Center - Learn about iPads, apps, Mac computers, applications, and integration ideas. Get started earning your Apple Teacher badges.

Google Jamboard - Collaborative online whiteboard. Saves in your Google Drive account.

Google Meet - Video conference application.

Keynote - Apple presentation app for iPads and Apple computers. Awesome for creating presentations, drawing, animation, video, and layout and design.

Padlet - Online collaborative bulletin board application for sharing resources.

PowerSchool Schoology - Learning Management System for hosting courses and groups making it easy for students to find, access, and share materials and learning.

Seesaw - Content Management System for sharing digital messages with families and students and collecting their work from them.

Using Google Calendar Appointment Slots To Schedule School Conference Meetings

 Are you looking for options for holding virtual school conferences at your school this fall due to distance learning and dreading the process of writing multiple emails back and forth or making several phone calls to work out the conference date and time with each family?

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The Google Calendar Appointment Slots feature can allow parents to book a conference meeting time that works for their schedule without needing several phone calls or emails back and forth to work out the details. A Google Meet is also automatically added to each meeting, which can really speed up the process when holding virtual conference meetings.

International STEAM Summit - 10 Steps To Hosting A Virtual Coding Camp Focused On App Design and Prototyping

 

Are you interested in learning more about how to host an in-person or virtual summer camp or after school club for students to get them excited about coding and computer science? You can host a club or camp focused on app design and app prototyping in 10 easy steps.

App prototyping is the process of creating a working model of an app. Before spending a lot of time writing the code for an app, you can create a prototype to help you map out the interactivity and features of the app. Essentially creating models of each screen, the features of the app, and demonstrating what happens when you push a button. Does the app go to the camera app, a photo gallery, a data entry tool, or back to the home screen?

I hope you are able to join me to learn more about hosting a virtual summer coding camp focused on app design and app prototyping as a way to get students excited to learn more about computer science, coding, and app development by watching the recording of my session from the International STEAM Summit.

Marketing:

Creating a flyer to get information about the camp out to students, staff, and families is a very important step in the process so that everyone knows about the opportunity. Fortunately there are lots of great tools, apps, and applications that you can use to create your flyer.

I used Keynote and shapes from the built-in shapes library to create the flyer shown below.

Layout and Graphic Design:

Keynote

PowerPoint

Google Slides

Canva

App Ideas:

Where to start? We had students brainstorm ideas of apps that they thought could help solve problems or challenges in their communities or could help to promote opportunities or resources that  people might not know about.

We used the Google Jamboard app. Padlet would be another great resource for this task too. Both of these apps allow students to add sticky notes to a board to share ideas with others. By using a collaborative community board, students who were still struggling to come up with ideas were able to take inspiration from the ideas shared by others.

Learning About App Design:

Apple has an awesome App Design Journal that is a Keynote file that guides students through the four stages of the app design process: brainstorm, plan, prototype, and evaluate. The journal is loaded with helpful information and spaces for students to sketch, write, and record their thoughts as they move through the process.

Creating An App Prototype:

 

Building Interest - Creating A Good Pitch Statement:

 

Celebrating Student Success:

 

Keep The Interest Going:

 

Resources:

Apple K-12 Education Teaching Code - Curriculum and resources for teaching code.

Apple Teacher Learning Center - Learn about iPads, apps, Mac computers, applications, and integration ideas. Get started earning your Apple Teacher badges.

App Design Journal - Keynote file students can use to guide them through the app design and app prototyping process.

App Showcase Guide - Tips, suggestions, and steps to hosting an app development or app prototyping showcase.

Google Meet - Video conference application.

Google Jamboard - Internet-based collaborative whiteboard. Great for collaborative brainstorming. Saves in your Google account.

Keynote - Apple presentation app for iPads and Apple computers. Awesome for creating presentations, drawing, animation, video, and layout and design.

PowerSchool Schoology - Learning Management System for hosting courses and groups making it easy for students to find, access, and share materials and learning.