Day Of Code

To quote Cher "After all the stops and starts" in the end my Day of Code event, went better then I had anticipated.  The kids had a blast and learned a lot.  At the end of the day one of my 5th graders said, "This morning I did not like coding at all, now I like it very much!"  The general consensus of the students was the same!

We had no trouble with bandwidth which was my biggest fear, the Internet ran perfectly for all of our web based activities.  I honestly feel the 25 minute mini sessions was a perfect amount of time.  The kids left each activity wanting more and not yet having reached a boredom or frustration level.  At the end of each session students left my activity disappointed that the time was going by so quickly.

The only hiccup if you will was after lunch when one iPad was missing briefly, mostly because the student it belonged to didn't put it where he was instructed to, it was quickly located and tears were dried before most kids even knew what happened.

We used two hashtags for the event, the #hourofcode hashtag from Code.org and our campus hashtag #aisnhabe.  I used these whenever I posted a photo on Twitter during our event.  In between assisting students in learning to create Apps I created Hashtag Crawl where all of our photos with the campus hashtag would be gathered.

Students arriving at the Nha Be Campus and finding their name-tags/schedules for our Day of Code!

Getting inspired to start our Day of Code!

Coding Relay (off line) with Mr. Edwin

Learning to code our own apps with Ms. Sarah (aka me)

Grid Paper Coding (off line activity) with Ms. Hannah

Learning about Careers in Computer Science with Ms. Madeline

Taking a break for lunch!

Time for recess and a heated game of dodge-ball.

We take our dodge-ball very seriously here.

DEAR time.

Puzzle Coding with Ms. Kristi!

Flappy Code with Mr. Blake

Reflecting on our new knowledge and skills at the end of our day.

After reflecting on the success of this event the only thing I would do differently if I ever do this again would be to not have hosted a mini sessions so that I could have floated to better support the other teachers and give them a reprieve when the needed it.I am so thankful to have had such a helpful group of teachers being willing to jump and try something out of their comfort zones to help raise awareness to our students about Computer Science!  Thank you Code.org for leading the charge and sponsoring this awesome event! #hourofcode

Planning for the Hour of Code 2014

When Hannah McMacken first approached me about collaborating to do the hour of code with her 5th grade class I was excited!  The first thing that came to mind was, awesome, let's make it a whole 5th grade thing.  Since I am very lucky to get to work with a 5th grade team this year that are all very comfortable with technology and all seem to jump any chance to integrate it into their classes.

I started by emailing the building principals and the Administrative Team to see what step I needed to take to make this day happen. I gave them a rough plan of my vision for the day and waited for their response.

After a few days one of the principals popped by my lab and chatted with me a bit about my plans for the day.  We talked about Vietnamese teacher coming and doing a session in Vietnamese and giving other specialists the option to reschedule class to a different day or doing a coding activity instead.  He suggest I met with the grade level team when they returned from their week without wall to discuss their thoughts on these things.  He was all in for it and gave the green light.  I emailed the grade level teachers and waited for their response.  Nearly a week later I had heard nothing so I followed up and let them know if I didn't hear back from any of them with a possible time to meet I would assume they were not interested and I would scrap the event.  Needless to say they all replied within about 30 minutes of receiving my email and a planning meeting was set for a few days later.

We met and agreed on a date.  One of the teachers asked about doing out at the new Nha Be Campus.  I was hesitant on this because logistically it was quite complicated.  So we put it out of our heads and began talking about a plan for the day, intro, on and off line activities, etc.

A few days later I was at the Nha Be campus and the teacher and principal there both thought it would be great to host it at their campus.  So I sent an email to the ES campus principal and waited.  Friday of that week after hearing nothing from him I went back to my plan of two separate events one at each campus.  Only to have one of the ES campus Teachers come to me confused as the 5th grade team at the ES  team had told their principal that they loved the idea of going to the Nha Be campus.  So I switched gears yet again and put the wheels in motion.  But my delay were not over with yet.  The ES principal put a full stop to everything later that day and so we all waited.  We waited until Tuesday afternoon of the next week.  Needless to say I was getting very frustrated, so much so that I was very close, hours away in fact, from calling the whole things off.

Here I sit a week later with a schedule created, events/activities selected, groups created, name tags and signage created and sent off to be laminated.  Participation certificates have been sent to all the grade 5 classroom teachers to be printed. Bus are booked and the classroom teachers are collecting permission slips!  Friday is our big day.

My final preparation steps were to collect some media to share with the students at the intro and conclusion of our event on Friday.  I also spent some time helping one of the teachers prep for her small group activity "Careers in Computer Science".  As well as invite the Library and Technology Coordinators to join in the fun!

The names tags shown below were made by editing an item from TeachersPayTeachers.  Each student will receive one in the color of their group, with their schedule for the day, name and class code on them.  Teachers also will receive one in black with their name devices or unplugged icons on them.  The idea is that everyone will wear this during the event.

Signage: schedules and room name/numbers were also created using the same editable iPod purchase from TeachersPayTeachers.

Embracing the In-Santa-ity of the season!

It's the last week before Christmas Break.  The kids are all getting a bit more crazy every day, rather then try and fight their in-Santa-ity this week I've chosen to embrace it!  I am giving them a controlled exploitative free day in ICT class.  I have given my students in grades 1-3 access to Santa related websites.  They are getting to explore the North Pole and more specifically the Elf Club House.  I have also given them a link to make online snow flakes!

Other sites you could use are:

 Decorate Cookies

Primary Games: Hanukkah

Primary Games: Christmas

A Kids's Heart: Christmas Games

Santa's Workshop

Frozen Games

More Frozen Games

Elf on the Shelf Games

What are some of the ways you embrace In-Santa-ity?

Virtual Field Trips

With my First and Second students as part of our Digital Citizenship Unit (from Common Sense Media) we are practicing being safe on the Internet.  One way we've done this is with Virtual Field Trips.

The lesson objective was to...

• discover that the Internet can be used to visit place that are far-away and help us to learn new thing
• explain rules for traveling safely on the Internet.

With the First Graders we took a Virtual Field Trip to the San Diego Zoo.  During this Field Trip each student worked on their own computer but as a group we explored several part of the website, we "stayed together" as we moved from one activity to another.  We enjoyed looking at different animals, watched some videos and about some of the animals, colored pictures of animals and played some animal games.

Grade 1 students color pictures of animals.

Touchscreens made the games more fun!

Grade 1 Students at the Nha Be Campus try out some games.

The Second Grades took a Virtual Field Trip to The MoMA.

Here is a short list of some other places you can take students on Virtual Field Trip to:

The White House

Smithsonian 

Vermont Teddy Bear Factory

Jelly Belly Factory

Mizuno Baseball Glove Factory

Little House on the Prairie

Plimouth Plantation

Yellowstone

Ellis Island

Picassohead

With my Second Graders we've been working on understanding the importance of giving credit to ourselves and others for creative works.  We used the My Creative Works Lesson from Common Sense Media, I adapted part of this to better fit my needs.

Instead of creating a time capsule I created an online gallery of my photos in my 500 account .  I deliberately omitted dates, titles and the author.  I showed the gallery to to the students taking care to hide my name; we talked about each image.  As we viewed each image I asked if they knew who took the photos or when it was taken or what the title of the photo was.  Each time the kids noted they didn't have anyway of knowing.  At the end the kids commented that they really wish they knew who took the photos. I shared that I was the photographer and that it's important to let others know about the works you create.  We talked about why it's important to give credit to the creator.

Next, I introduced the website Picassohead and we talked briefly about who Pablo Picasso was.  Much to my surprise, only one student in one of my three second grade classes had ever heard of Picasso.  I talked a little bit about Picasso's style of artwork and I molded briefly how to use the features of the site.

We then talked about the importance of putting our name, date and a title on all our works.  They saw in the Picassohead Gallery that all works had a date and title, some of the works were by "unknown" artists so this reinforced the importance of putting their names on their works.

With their instructions in mind they headed to their computers and got to work creating Picassoheads. When they finished they saved their work to the Gallery and explored the Gallery, some went back a created a second work of art.

To wrap up I asked them how to give credit to a creative work that they make or find? Without any difficulty they were able to tell me, put the author's name, title of the work and date it was created.

Teaching Technology to Kindergarten

When I first learned that kindergarten was part of my course load this year I cringed with fear.  Kindergarten Teachers are a rear and special bread of teachers.  They're so young and still just learning how to be in school, add to that nearly all of these kids were new or fairly new to the English Language and you might begin to understand my fear.  How was I going to teach them?  Where should I start?  In the end I opted to skip teaching them how to turn on the computers (smart move since a month in we got all new computers that get turned on in a completely different manner).  I decided to start with mouse.  Yes the mouse.  Since we don't have tablets or touch screens it was the most logical place to start.

I found some wonderful websites to help build mousing skills.  I set things ups and was ready to go with my Kinders or so I thought...I got them on the computers and some did a wonderful job and had great fun playing the mousing skill games. Others had no clue how to hold a mouse let alone understand the difference between a left click and a right click. So I went back to the drawing board.   I searched the resources left for me by Jen Simon and stumbled upon a Mouse Handling Activity that she had found on Teachers Pay Teachers.  I printed out the activity part and cut out the mice and glued on tails.  I then went in search of a video or song to help the kids understand how to use a mouse and found the My Computer Mouse Song.

For the next session I went into the Kindergarten classrooms, as my lab was far too small to do anything except be on computers.  I played the song a few times for the kids then they went to their tables and we did the Mouse Handling Activity.  With the help of the classroom teachers we got most of the kids understanding how to hold the mouse and what a right click was.

Armed with their new mousing skill we met in the lab the following session and tried our mousing skill website with far greater success.  Now, don't get the wrong idea I still have kids who don't know left from right or even how to properly hold the mouse, but for several of the kids the offline activity helped them gain some valuable vocabulary and comfort needed to start to be successful on the computers.

Mouse Skill Building Sites

Fun Brain Mouse Games

What is a Mouse Tutorial

Using a Mouse Tutorial

Balloon Popping

Matching

Bees and Honey Games

Tidy the Classroom

We now start every class with a short video

I've found the video helps transition them into being ready to listen

Wordless Books

In early October I was approached by the grade 2 team about collaborating on a wordless book project. Their students were hard at work writing stories to go with the images of wordless books from the school library.  The teachers wanted to find a technological way of sharing these stories with the rest of the students in the school.  I shared a few options with them and we settled on QR Codes.

After completing their writing process (pre-write, write, revise and edit) the students came to the lab to "publish" verbally their stories.  Each child recorded themselves telling their stories, then listened to the playback and decided if they liked what they heard. If they were happy we saved it, if not they were able to a second reading.

Audio Recording

Once all the students had completed "publishing" their stories I stepped in. I took photos of each child holding their book and imported both the photos and audio into MovieMaker and I published these movies. The next step was to upload the movies to YouTube.  Once on YouTube they were marked as unlisted to protect the students' privacy.  I then took the URLs for each video and created a QR code for them using a QR Code Generator.  Next, I modified a bookmark template in MS Publisher to fit my needs.  I imported each student's photo and QR codes and put some basic instructions on the bookmarks.  These were sent to be printed in color and laminated.  Next, I created two small posters.The first poster explained what a QR Code is and where to get one based on platform, the second was other a how to use a QR Code poster.  Finally, the books, poster and bookmarks were used to create a display in the school library.  When students check out one of the wordless books they get to take the bookmark home to hear the stories created by the grade 2 students!

Wordless Book display in the library

Close up of the books with their QR code bookmarks

Jumping in

When Jen Simon told me for probably the millionth time I needed to be blogging about what I was teaching my students, it finally sunk in.  That was about a month ago and here I sit with three blog post partially written and none published.

Today during my taxi ride into school I thought about this blog and made a conscious decision to come in today and get my blog officially up, running and shared with the world. But how? What was the best way to introduce my blog to the world? As I drove past a local public school seeing balloons dotting the courtyard I decided I need a proper launch if you will, I need this post right here. To announce to the world, my school and myself that I was really doing this.

I am currently a K-5 Technology Teacher in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I love what I do and the kids for the most part are like kids anywhere in the world.  They are eager to learn and just a eager to do and share what they are doing with others. They want to do a good job and be complimented for it. They have good days and bad days.  They sometimes listens and follow instructions but often get distracted or simply don't have enough English yet to fully grasp and comprehend what their tasks are.  I model and demonstrate and talk a lot more then I would like during my lessons, but such is the life of a teacher, especially when teaching students whose native language is not their learning language.

At the Elementary Campus where I spend most of my days, I have a small lab with a Promethean Board which, often gets unplugged because of PE classes on the other side of the wall.  I have a printer and 20 student-use computers operating Windows 8. That's it, there's nothing more.  No tablets, no laptops, no bee-bots, nothing.  We do have a fairly well parent-supported BYOD program in grades 4 and 5, but I am not overly involved in that, at this campus.

I also teach part time at the new Nha Be campus, over there I currently teacher grades 1-5. There I have a large computer lab inside the school library.  It has 20 student-use computers, Dell all in ones, complete with touch screens. There is also a projector so I can model for students, but no printer.  Nha Be also does the BYOD in grades 4 and 5.  Grade 5 is in full swing, the grade 4 here is just getting started.  Oddly at this new location some of the parents I am told (by administration) are against the use of technology, that's a whole different set of issues I get to help teachers try to deal with.

As as school we are in the process of acquiring MinecraftEDU for use with grade 3-5 and everyone is all a buzz about that at the moment, but that's for another day.

I love my job, despite not having all the cool tech toys other schools have. I am hopeful to get many of those things in years to come, but for now I work with what we have and make the most of it.