Category Archives: Computers

First Week!

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Because we started on Tuesday, today (the fifth day of school) was the end of the first week for Specials. I’ve seen every kid in the school once. Or pretty much all of them – a kid was added today, I heard. The last number I saw was 523 students at Carmel Elementary, but that was several days ago and anything can happen!

That’s somewhere around 523 login cards that I made for the kids. In the past, the teachers kindly made the cards, but this year I volunteered to make them. One less thing for teachers to worry about, and because I made them all without using a drop of imagination, they are amazingly, boringly, consistent, which I like in a login card. I did use the bigger size of index cards for the kindergartners, because they’re the ones who will use the cards the longest, and they’re easier to grab out of the drawer that way.

I even made them for the fifth grade, because I’m starting a typing thing tomorrow. The teachers and I want the kids to have typing practice – typing’s no longer taught in school, and those of us who had typing class (or keyboarding), back in the day, are a little concerned. It’s possible that as a society we’re placing a little too much stock in the fact that the kids like to play on computers so much, and we trust that they have greater skills than they do. I’ve had fourth graders ask me how to move the cursor from one line to the next, in Word. (Answer: Hit the return button. Response: Ohhhh!) So my thinking is that we’ll start with one of the typing programs that we link to on our fourth-grade weblinks page, have the kids do a typing test and write down their numbers on their login card (see, it all makes sense now!), and then have 5 minutes of practice.

Last week every day went at the speed of light, but today things were a little slower. I breathed a couple of times, took a couple sips of my water. . . . NWEA testing is going on, so I’ve been kicked out of my computer lab for the two- week duration. I’m in the temporary computer lab – an unused classroom in which the efficient and effective Ms. Barney has set up laptops for me. We ran into a couple of issues – one keyboard wouldn’t type the letter A, one wouldn’t type 0 (the zero). Why? Who knows. Wouldn’t have been an issue since we weren’t really typing much today, but you can’t log in when your name has an A in it, or your password a 0…. Plus, not a sadist, to make kids take typing tests with non-functioning A and 0 keys!

Today a first grader asked me if we were going to play Pokemon. “Umm, no,” I said. “WHY would we play Pokemon?”

“Because I want to!” he said, looking at me with his big disingenuous eyes.

Umm, no. Lots of other fun stuff though I PROMISE.

Best. Job. Ever. But I am so so tired.

Days One and Two

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Fourth day of waking up at 4:30. I decided to just wake up, and do something – maybe tonight I’ll be so exhausted I’ll sleep through the night. Must be nerves, but so far the week is going well!

Because I’m a Specials teacher, I have five first days. I see everyone in the school for fifty minutes a week, class after class after class. I’ll be done on Monday with my Five First Days, and then I’ll see the second wave.

It’s odd doing the First Day stuff for those reasons – I do it over and over again until by Monday I won’t remember whether I’ve told them already about the Word Wall and the Digital Citizenship posters, or if that was two classes ago. Also, I was here last year in the Computer Lab, and our population is pretty stable, so most of these kids know me in this role.

I struggled with how to do the First Day stuff because of that. There seems little point to doing an introduction of myself and who I am, since they mostly know me. I worry about becoming stale, since I’m certainly becoming repetitive.

In addition to doing Five First Days, I’m also doing basically the same lesson across the grade levels – at least for grades 2-5. I’m doing a portion of the same lesson for the 1st graders. The kindergarteners are getting mouse practice, in preparation for NWEA testing, which starts this coming Monday.

The lesson outline is:

A. Greetings & who I am (A couple of classes I’ve forgotten to say, “I’m Mrs. Finney,” but luckily usually a kid says my name during the class. I do feel afterwards like, really? I forgot to SAY MY NAME? How basic is that???)

B. Expectations – I’m doing this as a question and answer session this year, in which I say, “You guys are 3rd graders (or 4th graders, or whatever), so I bet you know the expectations teachers have in class. What’s one expectation you think I have?”

C. Tools – I brought some tools from home, and I say, “When I think about a computer, I think about this,” and I pull a mallet or a level out of a canvas bag. It just occurs to me, I should bring in one of Dan’s toolboxes and pull tools out of that! Shoot! Why didn’t that occur to me before? Anyway, I pull out five tools and the kids name them, and then I prompt them to figure out why I think of these tools when I think of a computer and sometimes they come up with creative ideas, and then someone gets to “Because the computer is a tool.” I talk about yes, can do a lot, but beware of misusing, just like misusing a mallet, etc.

D. What we’re doing this year – computer hardware, computer jobs, digital citizenship stuff, coding.

E. Eye tour of the room – I have an “I Am a Leader” wall, with the leadership posters on it; I have R2D2, C3PO, and BB8 defining banks of computers; I have the Word Wall (which I actually put words on yesterday!) and some Star Wars digital citizenship posters that I downloaded – I think I talked about those before on the blog. I talk a little bit about all of those things.

F. Everyone goes to their computer. I’ve usually put out the login cards – finished making those yesterday! Hallelujah! – in alphabetical order. They log in. People have difficulty, and I run around and help them out.

G. We talk about icons (one of the Word Wall words), and productivity apps (another Word Wall word) and browsers (ditto, Word Wall). We open Firefox. It goes first to the Carmel Clay schools website, so I challenge them to find how to get to Carmel Elementary. This is something they remember from last year, usually. I have a kid go up to my desk to make my computer do it – my screen is projected on a big screen so they can see it. We find teacher websites – we’re moving to Canvas, so not everyone has a website right now. We find their grade level websites. We click the x in the corner to shut Firefox.

H. I say, “One of the things I like best about computers is that there are usually lots of ways to do something. Here’s another way to get to Firefox.” So we open the Websites folder, which I think I opened once last year and didn’t even know existed until halfway through the year. Theirs looks different than mine does, because theirs opens as a List view, and mine has icons (and I get to say the word again!) (and point to the Word Wall!), so I show them how to change the way it looks. There are extra large icons as choice, so that’s pretty popular, and hilarity ensues when someone picks that. Then we click on Mel the Tiger, and he opens up Firefox WITH THE CARMEL ELEMENTARY HOMEPAGE, which feels like a small victory, frankly. And then I give them free time.

So here’s one of my favorite moments: A kid in one of the classes said to me, “Mrs. Finney, you could click on Mel and drag him down to the bottom bar on your screen and then he’d be there all the time,” and I said, “WOW, that did not even occur to me, great job!” WAY TO GO! I love that, when the kids figure out something that I didn’t know – one, because I’m learning that way, and two, because how great is that, to figure something out that your teacher didn’t know? Wouldn’t that give you a sense of accomplishment?

I want this to be something we figure out together. I know a bunch of things, but I clearly don’t know everything about computers, and at first that really bothered me, but now I’m thinking, Boy, that’s a strength! It means the students and I have to be in this together. I don’t think I was always able to create that feeling last year, but every once in a while, we learned together. Hoping for that a little more this year. That’s why I have kids go up and show how to do things on my screen, to give them a little bit of empowerment, and to encourage a sense that they know how to do things on computers, that we’re teaching and learning together.

Because really, what I’m teaching them how to use now may not be there in five years. The important skill is how to figure out stuff, and not to be afraid. I have to be really supportive of mistakes – “Wow, that’s an interesting screen you’ve gotten to!” – and really encouraging for them to try different buttons and see what happens.

Today: Third First Day. Hope it goes well! And I haven’t shot myself in the foot by getting up at 4:30!

At least there’s chocolate at school. That should get me through the afternoon.

Google Educator, Level 1… It’s True!

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So this happened…

GCE_Badges_01-2

One of my goals this summer was to get this certification. I’m not sure how I first heard of it – maybe from Kate Masterson, who’s one of the big deal tech people for our school district. She’s done Level 1, Level 2, AND the Trainer’s certification, but that is beyond my scope right now. I’m happy to have Level 1.

It’s a useful process – going through the study modules for it is a handy introduction to Google’s products that are aimed at educators. The test costs $10 to take, and they give you three hours – I used every minute of those three hours, and finished the test with, I kid you not, seven seconds to spare. But I did finish!

Feels like an accomplishment! I hope it will help me this coming year, when teachers ask questions about things. I have to say, the functionality of Google’s productivity apps is very, very cool. I’m not sure how many of them I can work in this year. I’d love to do some Google Classrooms but will have to check with the teachers to see what they think. We need to use less paper in our school, so there might be additional interest in Google docs.

We went to the pool to celebrate, and now going out to do some Pokemon Go. I feel like I should get a “geek” tattoo or something…

Digital Citizenship Book Club

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Digital Citizenship

In my quest to learn all there is to know about education (ha!), I’ve joined a bookclub run by the Indiana Department of Education. We’re reading this book, Digital Citizenship, which is terrific so far.

The link is here:

eLearning Book Club

It just started yesterday, so I’m pretty sure you can still join. You can earn up to 14 PGPs, which doesn’t really affect me yet, because I’m not a Real Teacher, but which is interesting for the future, and might be interesting to someone reading this!

Susan Bearden lays out a definition of digital citizenship and the categories within it: Internet Safety, Privacy and Security, Relationships and Communication (she’s including cyberbullying within that), Digital Footprints and Reputation, Self-Image and Identity, Information Literacy, and Creative Credit and Copyright.

Full disclosure: I’ve only read the first chapter so far, because I’m trying to follow the bookclub “rules” and do a chapter at a time. But so far she’s written a very coherent and (it seems to me) thorough summary of this topic. I’m excited to read the rest of the book, and figure out how to incorporate these ideas in my teaching, both in the computer lab and later on, in a classroom.

I think the book would be interesting for parents to read as well. It’s part of a series called the Corwin Connected Educators Series, but this particular topic is of high interest to a lot of parents, who are struggling to deal with tools and abilities that we did not have to deal with when we were young. It’s like all of our kids got this superpower in their cribs. We got it too, but we’re older and had a structure with which to deal with it. The difference between a Superbaby and an adult getting superpowers is control and understanding.

That being said, it’s true that a lot of us need the benefits of a thoughtful approach in dealing with this brave new world. Bearden (so far! will update as I go along!) has thought through the rules of life in this Internet world, and is laying out the issues for us.

I bought the book on amazon.com. It’s $10, although there are used copies available for slightly less. The kindle version is $9.50 but I thought it would be useful to have this available to loan out.

If you’d rather avoid the bookclub, I would still recommend this book. I’ll update as I go along throughout the club!

 

Geeking Out

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Ok, so I went to the best. workshop. today.

It’s a code.org workshop given by Michele Roberts, taught at IUPUI for FREE. Seriously. And there was swag – a cool bag and a water bottle and a clipboard and a notebook. But that wasn’t even the best part.

The best part was, this was exactly the information I need – her mission, if I may hazard a guess, is to prepare teachers to teach computer science to elementary and middle schoolers. We have new computer science standards in Indiana, and schools may be scrambling a little bit to figure out how to cover those. I’m hustling a little bit, because I want to both support the teachers with what they need and also to teach computer science in the lab this year, and school starts in 2 1/2 weeks.

She gave a couple of reasons to teach computer science. I’m paraphrasing her, but as Willie Sutton said, when asked why he robbed banks, It’s where the money is – an enormous number of projected jobs in the future are computer science jobs.  Also, our kids are going to be making policies and laws and SENSE of what the computer hath wrought. Privacy issues, data issues, all kinds of things need to be understood and digested so people can vote intelligently and make and interpret laws intelligently.

In addition – and this is according to me, not Michele – in my district, the computer lab is a Special class, along with music, library, gym, and art. So here’s what’s great about that: Specials classes often reach kids who are not reached otherwise. We talk often about how kids are different for us – some kids are outstanding in PE, love it, never have any disciplinary problems – and other teachers are tearing out their hair when that kid comes through the door. Some kids come to school for art, or for music. That’s how we reach them, that’s how they learn best, that’s what they love. Computer science can be the same way. I saw kids who knew how to do stuff on the computer that no one else in my class knew – I didn’t know how to do it – but they did and what a boost for them, when I deferred to their greater knowledge.

Computers allow kids to explore and ask questions and go deeper into whatever they’re interested in, and do so many of the things we want education to do now. It’s an amazing opportunity to encourage kids to be proactive in ways that we have a hard time figuring out how to do elsewhere, whether they’re programming or doing Google searches or creating a spreadsheet .

I figure there are roughly 39 weeks in the school year, and even though I miss the Monday kids every three day weekend (five times in all, not that I’m counting), and the Friday kids four times during the year, I will have every kid in the school roughly 24-29 hours during the year. I need to make that as productive and useful a time as possible.

My Information Science buddies may appreciate this: she was discussing parameters, and gave as the example the code Rectangle (5,10). Now you can change those numbers all day long, she said, and you’re changing the parameters. I said, Do you mean Rectangle (x,y)? Wouldn’t that mean you could change those parameters more easily? She faced the class. Class, she said, Elizabeth’s skin has been drained of all color, and if we turned off the lights in here she would glow. She is GEEKING OUT.

I am so. proud!

I highly recommend taking this workshop. Today’s was part 1, and tomorrow I’m taking part 2. Here’s the link to find a local workshop, no matter where you are:

Code.org local workshops