Tech Tip Tuesday

• CodeHS Computer Science PD Announcement
• Scratch!
• Code.org
• Google CS First
• Tech Integration on Purpose and with a Purpose! by Kevin Schamel

NEW: Free Coding Bootcamp for Indiana Teachers

CodeHS is partnering with IDOE to run month-long Java, JavaScript, Python, and Cybersecurity online bootcamps with virtual weekly classes. These bootcamps are designed to help computer science teachers build their programming skills and content knowledge. The bootcamps are free for Indiana public and public charter high school teachers. Teachers who complete the bootcamp will receive the following:

• a $300 stipend,
• professional development certificate of completion for 15 hours, and
• enrollment in one CodeHS online professional development course.
• Register HERE

However this is an opportunity meant for a computer science teacher specifically. Non-content specific teachers could still get students excited about computer science with some of the free activities I post below!

Learn more and sign up here. Contact Jacob Koressel with questions.

With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.

Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.

Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. It is provided free of charge.

Your students can use Scratch to code their own interactive stories, animations, and games. In the process, they learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for everyone in today’s society. Educators are integrating Scratch across many different subject areas and age groups.

The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event or try any of the over 500+ one-hour tutorials, available in over 45 languages.

You can drop a link and your students can jump on an Hour of Code activity - no set up - and just start working, or you can create an account and classes in the program and assign specific activities to students and track their progress.

Code.org also has many professional development opportunities that help prepare you to teach Computer Science at any level! Click here to view those opportunities!

• Elementary Workshops
• Middle/High School Workshops

Google went to the source and worked with teachers to create the CS First program. It will integrate into your Google Classroom and you can assign specific lessons and activities at the touch of a button.

Teachers are the heart of the classroom, and the steadfast advocates for students. They also know what's best for their classroom.

CS First was built by educators who wanted a tool that allowed every teacher to teach computer science, even if they weren't tech experts. So they developed a curriculum that made it easy to teach and integrated into a wide range of classrooms.

CS First

Kevin Schamel, an elearning specialist for the past 7 years, wrote a piece called,

"TECH INTEGRATION ON PURPOSE AND WITH A PURPOSE." Click HERE for the full article or read below to get a better understanding of why we should consider purpose when we are integrating technology into the classroom.

He speaks on the purpose, the "why," for using technology in our classrooms. He goes on to say:

"Thanks to a global pandemic, for many of us the “why” is simple: because our students need to learn in a virtual environment! We need to go deeper though. We need to look at instructional design decisions through this simple, yet powerful lens of “why?” In order to help teachers make more informed and purposeful decisions about what technology-based teaching and learning strategies they can and should use, many have benefitted from the use of a technology integration planning rubric, of which there are a number of iterations readily available."

"One such model is the PIC-RAT matrix, which is built upon the RAT technology framework (Hughes, Thomas, & Scharber, 2006), that not only considers the effect on teaching, but also considers the impact on learning by identifying what students are actually DOING with the technology. Kimmons, Graham, and West designed this matrix in a way that is a bit more actionable as well as shares some parallels with Bloom’s Taxonomy."

This model helps us evaluate how students are using technology. Are they passively using it, "take it or leave it," or are they using the technology to really create something new? It also helps us evaluate ourselves and our practice. Are we just replacing a printed worksheet with a digital one, or are we able to use the technology to transform our lesson into something that couldn't be possible with that printed worksheet?

This image is licensed under a CC BY 3.0 license by Dr. Royce Kimmons.

"In my particular school district, we formed a cadre of teacher-leaders who performed a close examination of available evaluation tools and we decided that Liz Kolb’s Triple E Framework best fit our needs, from both the instructional design perspective as well as for the purpose of evaluation. When comparing it to PIC-RAT, we found it to be a bit easier to identify an instructional strategy in terms of the impact that it was potentially having on the student’s learning experience. Specifically, it allows users to articulate whether or not the activity was designed to engage learners, enhance instruction, and/or extend learning beyond the four walls of the classroom."

This evaluation tool helps us consider whether the learning goals are truly connected to our digital tool or not. If our lessons are falling in that 0-12 range, we really need to think if the digital tool is appropriate in that lesson, or what we can do to really push the lesson outside the box to really engage students with the lesson using technology.