Skip to main content

Scratch that!

I attended a lunch & learn session today on Scratch.  I am definitely going to need to play around with it some more before I'm really comfortable with it, but wow, what a tool! You can see my first project below.



Scratch is surprisingly simple to use, once you get going.  My previous coding experience has all been text-based:  HTML, Fortran (can you say, "do loop"?) and Basic.  Yup, I'm that old. In Scratch, each command has a block, and you string them together in stacks, just like Lego.

My ultimate goal with this is how I can use it with students.  Lots of ideas for math, and even grade 9 and 10 science... but I'm teaching grade 12 IB biology right now.  Hoping for an inspiration on what they can do with it, and whether it's better to wait until September when they're not so focussed on the May exam session.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Challenges 2018

A few years ago, I started a reading challenge with the intent of reading more. That year my goal was to read 26 books (and the challenge was " 26 Books with Bringing up Burns "). 26 books seemed reasonable, and I hadn't really been keeping track of what or how many books I read in a year, so a book every two weeks seemed do-able.  This year, so far, I'm at 99 books (and as I should finish the one I'm planning to use to complete the second reading challenge... I'll be in triple digits by the time we ring in 2019.) For my fourth year of participation, #26BOOKSwithBringingUpBurns... I read a book that: is self-published: The Dealmaker by G.S. Marriott has food or drink on the cover: Killer Cupcakes by Leighann Dobbs is translated from its original language: The 100-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson is your friend's favourite book: White Oleander by Janet Fitch has pink on the cover: City of the Lost

Planning ahead and Prezi

I discovered Prezi about six years ago at a PD-instead-of-a-staff meeting session. One of my colleagues shared resources to use with PowerPoint, and another introduced us to Prezi. I'd never seen it - I don't do a lot of in-class presentations (by students) so it was a cool new tool for me at the time when it didn't give me vertigo. I still use it sometimes... I have Prezis that I like (and some that I don't) . I prefer Prezi for teaching single topic or concept - anything that would take multiple days in class, I veer towards Google Slides more often than not. Here's one I use for introducing IB diploma programme courses to our grade 10 students: There are a lot more built-in templates than there were when I first used it, and I recently received an email from the developers with a "school planning calendar for 2017". It looked good for highlighting key dates in a month, so I thought I'd give it a try.  The only thing is... everything we do

Has it been 10 days yet?

Yup.  I just counted from my first post, and it was on January 16, making today day 10. I missed a couple of days - both times I had begun writing, but didn't finish or didn't publish the draft - but I also double posted a couple of times, to try and catch up. Still, this is post number 8, on day 10. Not bad for a rookie, right? We started exams today, and since my first class doesn't write until Friday, I'm trying to be productive and mark their major lab reports before I have to start marking their exam papers.  It's going slowly... #BellLetsTalk day is in full swing, making my phone buzz and my computer bong with alerts as people tweet and re-tweet. Yes, I am easily distracted when faced with a task I don't always enjoy.  I also wrote a reference letter for a former student who is applying to the SickKids Summer Research Program , and its deadline is before my mark-entry deadline, so I justified writing it before grading papers, too. Just imagine if