Skip to main content

On second thought...

People don't truly understand the power of peer review.  That feedback of a peer who is a friend, colleague or just educator who shares a similar mindset, can be priceless.  I am working on finding a new approach to get more coding into my schools and help my teachers to better understand why the skills that students gain from these activities can be so beneficial.  Originally, I was going to go in and do all the heavy lifting... teach all the kids in 3rd grade.  Be "the girl".  Then I took advantage of an opportunity to share my plan with a fellow educator, Dr. Lisa Turner.  She listened to my pitch of what my plan was with lots of positive reinforcement and then helped me to see the light.  I can reach more people and make a bigger impact if I am not "the girl".  I don't have to be their for every step for the magic to happen.  If I empower the teachers to take an active role as well, they too can experience the same joy and satisfaction of seeing an engaged group of students begging for more and what the next step is and giddy to show you what they did and what they want to do next. Dreaming of what else it could do.   #teacherbuyin 
This has made a significant shift in the direction I was going with my initial plan.  We also discussed how I could incorporate Blended Learning and model it for teachers in my first or second lessons to help teachers see its benefits.  The content would be coding and computational thinking. To learn more about blended learning check out Caitlyn Tucker and her work on Blended Learning.
Now my plan incorporates a blend of various instructional strategies (direct, indirect, experimental instruction, formative and summative assessment) as well as various classroom configurations (small and whole group with plugged and unplugged activities).
I will be helping to guide teachers along the process of this unit so they will have an active part with components of my unit blended in as cross curricular activities in writing and math.  This is all in an effort to help with teacher buy-in and identification of the importance of computational thinking to be help round out a students digital/life skills.  I am really looking forward to getting this started... is it August yet?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ISTE Standards Review

I had the privilege of hearing from Eric Sheninger today in my district.  I was invited to attend with our district's leadership team.  What a great experience to hear him in person sharing with OUR staff about OUR students and OUR needs.  As he shared about professional development or even better, professional learning, I am trying to figure out my role as I sat amongst a room of district administrators from the building and central office levels.  I turned to the ISTE Standards for Coaches and ISTE Standards for Teachers .  When I compared the two and found that I did not necessarily agree with their direction.  I found that both the Coach and Administrator Standards share most of their involvement specific to the area of Visionary Leadership and Digital Age Learning specific to modeling and facilitating Digital Citizenship.  To my disappointment, the standards have the majority of the professional development falling on the coach's role but not th...
Post a Comment
Read more

My next big venture...

So I have been recently charged with developing a new integration plan to infuse more technology into my classes. I am a technology integration coach full-time so I am always promoting technology integration but I do not have my own classes. I will need to get creative with the challenge I was presented. A main focus by choice and promoted by my administration is the push for computer programming or as we like to call it for short… “Coding”. To learn a little more about Coding check out this short video to help you better understand computer programming and where it is used in our everyday life.                                             I find the elementary to be much more receptive to newer concepts as a whole so I think I would like to work with 3rd graders to introduce or expand on their exposure and understanding of computer programming. I also know that I will have ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Short-term and Long-term Goals in Education

After stumbling across some articles on short-term and long-term goals in education. Taking into consideration what short really goes into creating a short term goal keeping in mind that short term means there is not much investment early on.  Often people compare this to a quick buck.   Ari Wallach mentions in his TED talk, 3 Ways To Plan for the (Very) Long Term , that many times we use a sandbag strategy where we prepare for problems over and over again like putting up sandbags for a storm but this is a temporary fix.  This can be exhausting.  Consider that long-term fix. Long-term fixes are a process and need to be revisited often.  One of the Ways Ari Wallach approaches long-term goals that really resonated with me and I felt fit our current educational situation was that in which he called the Transgenerational Approach .  This would equate to not just looking from your birth to your death or the time in which you could "run the play" but more acr...
Post a Comment
Read more