Ms De Jong's Diary of Discovery

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.

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 ...