ISTELive 22 - Join Me To Hear About Our Student Genius Squad Tech Teams

Join me at the ISTELive 22 Conference for my session on Level Up Technology Skills With Student Tech Leaders to learn more about how to empower students to teach others new technology skills!

Need to teach your students technology skills for in-person classroom, distance, hybrid, or online learning? Let them teach each other! 

Our student Genius Squad tech teams learned new tech skills, leveled up and earned badges as they moved through synchronous and asynchronous course resources, and put their skills to work through service learning to support their teachers & classmates. Check out the work of our elementary Genius Squads & resources that helped them level up their skills & created an interest in computer science careers. 

Presentation slides, tutorial videos, and iPad challenges will be available on this blog page closer to June 29, so please check back toward the end of the month.

Do you have some great tutorials or iPad challenges to share? Please add them in the comments.

MNCodes Summit 2022 - The ABCs of a PLC Book Study To Align And Deepen Computer Science Instruction

 Are you interested in learning more about computer science instruction in K-12 classrooms and how unplugged lessons can deepen students' understanding of abstract terms and concepts?

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Learn more about how to build teacher knowledge about computer science concepts and align instruction across multiple elementary schools with varying specialist rotation configurations in this poster session of the MNCodes Summit 2022.

Saint Paul Schools elementary technology teachers have been deepening their own computer science knowledge and sharing concrete unplugged lessons and activities to take back to their classes through a monthly virtual PLC book study this school year. 

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Find out what book they are reading together, which topics they prioritized to read about first, and top unplugged activities that they are using with their students to build computer science and computational thinking skills.

Presentation Slides

Click here for the presentation slides

District-wide Elementary Technology Teacher PLC

Since there is usually only one technology teacher in an elementary school in my district, they can choose to participate in an optional district-wide PLC that meets after school for two hours every month with other technology teachers rather than being in a PLC at their school with homeroom teachers or other specialists.  Being in the district-wide PLC allows for lesson sharing, anecdotal lesson data comparison, and exploration of new ideas and resources.

We decided to continue meeting virtually this school year to eliminate travel time and rush for those teaching at late-ending schools. Each school's principal and leadership team decides which grade levels technology teachers will teach and how long each rotation with a grade level will last before switching to another specialist.

Book Study

This year we were able to do a book study as part of our PLC. We decided to read the book Computer Science in K-12: An A to Z Handbook on Teaching Programming by Shuchi Grover to deepen our  computer science knowledge and align instruction across schools. The book provides a nice balance of research and practical classroom suggestions.

Chapter Topics

The chapters in Computer Science in K-12: An A-Z Handbook on Teaching Programming are organized alphabetically by computer science topics. The chapter topics range from algorithms to integrating programming in other subjects to JavaScript to variables and much more.

Chapter Types/Categories

The chapter types or categories fall into three distinct groups. Computer science concepts or technical terms, practices or strategies that students might use, and pedagogy or how to teach computer science.

Book Study Reading Overview

Since the chapters are organized by alphabetical topics, they do not need to be read in sequence, which allows for them to be re-organized and read in any order. Although initially we started reading the book chapters in sequential order, we soon prioritized some of the chapters to ensure that we were able to re-read them before the end of this school year.

Focus Chapters Related To District Work

Some of the chapters were also closely aligned with other work that we're doing in my district. The "Integrating Programming in School Subjects" chapter connects with work that we are doing to integrate computer science in the elementary homeroom classes to reinforce content learning and in other subject classes in middle school and high school. The "Learner-Centered and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy" chapter also focused on similar information to the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zarreta Hammond, which all teachers in our district read this year through book studies at each school.

Unplugged Lesson Resources

The "Guided Exploration Through Unplugged Activities" chapter of the book suggested using unplugged lessons that can be done to introduce abstract computer science topics through practical, concrete activities in the form of familiar games or common everyday activities. After completing the activity, it is important to link the unplugged activity back to the abstract concept or technical term to ensure student understanding of the concept.

Some great resources for finding free unplugged lesson activities include Code.org, CS Unplugged, Barefoot Computing, and the popular Which One Doesn't Belong website wodb.ca which includes thought-provoking puzzles that help to develop computational thinking skills.

MNCodes Summit Session Challenge

If you would like to participate in a fun, mini challenge for the summit, use your favorite app on your computer, phone, or mobile device to create a graphic calling out a letter of the alphabet and the corresponding computer science term or concept. Include the letter of the alphabet, the computer science term, and a related image or definition of the concept. Then post your image on Twitter with the hashtags #MNCodes,  #A2ZK12CS, and @TurnbullChris.

Resources

Barefoot Computing

Code.org

Computer Science in K-12: An A to Z Handbook on Teaching Programming by Shuchi Grover 

CS Unplugged

Which One Doesn't Belong - wodb.ca

MNCodes Summit 2022 - Get Started With Code Wherever You Are

 If you are interested in K-5 coding curriculum that can be used in-person in the classroom or for virtual or hybrid learning,  join me for the Get Started With Code Wherever You Are poster session of the MNCodes Summit.

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Learn more about how Apple's Everyone Can Code curriculum helps young coders in K-5 get started with programming and develop coding skills through the fun and interactive iPad, unplugged activities to introduce coding concepts, and block-based coding apps like CodeSpark academy and Tynker.

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.

Learn More About The Everyone Can Code and Develop In Swift Curriculum

Get Started With Code 1 and 2 Teacher Guides

Coding Concepts In The Get Started With Code Guides

Lesson Structure Overview:

Lesson Overview And Key Vocabulary

Lesson Introduction And Kinesthetic Activities

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.

Lesson Activity

Lesson Practice With Block-Based Coding Apps

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

Lesson Reflection And Optional App Design Activity

Lesson Resources

Robots And Physical Computing

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.

I'm Presenting At The Northeast Mississippi Community College Mobile Learning Conference 2022

   I am excited to share that I will be presenting at NEMCC Mobile Learning Conference on June 13, 2022!

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I will be presenting a session on a great topic for anyone in a in-person, distance learning or virtual learning, or online school situation who wants to build students' technology skills.

I am looking forward to sharing some great resources for teachers and students and a model of how to make technology leadership experiences available to students even during distance learning and online school situations.

I hope that you are able to join me for my session on Leveling Up With Student Tech Leaders.