It's The Last Week Before Winter Break...

Let The Coding Begin! OHE Students Collaborate & Code During Hour of Code Week!

Schools all over America are participating in Hour of Code this week including Oak Hills Elementary!


One cool by-product of sharing your teaching experiences on a blog is you can look back at what you have done in past years! I first wrote about Hour of Code in December of 2013 in a blog post entitled "Hour of Code" Week - December 9-15, which as luck would have it, was the very first year of Hour of Code. Without realizing it, my students and I were at the ground level of this popular coding movement. The Code.org mission then and now is to involve more students in computer science. They have certainly made great strides toward their original goal. These are the stats from their website.

For Lakeville Schools, this is the first year with our newly adopted Coding Learning Progression for our elementary schools. Even though most of our elementary schools were already participating in coding activities, this new progression serves as a guiding document for insuring that it is done with more intention and fidelity. Once Hour of Code week is over, which I am spearheading in our classrooms, our students will be participating in 8 more lessons with their STEM teachers to make sure they continue to gain knowledge, skill and confidence in their own ability to code.  

At Oak Hills, our students had a blast with their initial Hour of Code activity, to code their teacher! Yep, they coded their teacher with a set of blockly code instructions, and all of our teachers (pictured below are Mrs. Bakke and Mr. Hemann) were great sports about it! Their classes had a blast trying to code their teacher's movements. Almost all of the classes had bugs in their code that had to be worked out. This collaborative coding effort was great for getting students to think about how precise their language had to be to get their teacher to do what they wanted.  I created blockly magnets for the students to get the hang of it and to scaffold their learning when they begin blockly coding on their devices. 

Next, I introduced Blue-Bots to our students.  Blue-Bots are a fun tool for teaching students programming logic. Blue-Bots are great because they can be manually programmed on the buttons on their back, or they can be connected via bluetooth and programmed via device app.  

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For our second Hour of Code activity, students used the manual programming option for pair programming, followed by coding collaborative groups to make their Blue-Bots line dance.  OH WHAT FUN! Our students loved the freedom to figure it out. Without realizing it they were collaborating to debug their code continually. Teachers seemed thrilled with the soft and hard skills our students learned and practiced during this hour, and  I was delighted with the results of our OHE Hour of Code for 2018!  

Integrating Benchmark Universe eBooks & Digital Tools Into Literacy Stations...

This year, we began our school year with a new literacy curriculum adoption, Benchmark Literacy. I should mention from the outset of this blog post that I have been teaching for 30 years, the first 10 years as a 4th grade teacher and the last 20 as a media specialist and now Digital Learning Specialists. Many reading trends and curriculum adoptions have come and gone over that time. Each one has been challenging for our teachers in the beginning. This bumpy beginning doesn't really reflect poorly on the curriculum, but is more about how hard it is to get up and running on all the new literacy pieces, jargon, processes, classroom management and expectations.  Benchmark seems to be an excellent choice for our district, but our teachers are feeling the stress of a big learning curve. (If you haven't lately, give a classroom teacher a big pat on the back for their endurance and grit!)

With our new adoption came a digital component called Benchmark Universe. With Benchmark Universe, students can take unit assessments, read eBooks and the teacher can use digital posters for whole group and guided reading group instruction. Great! Now the challenge for our teachers is learning the digital tools and how best to use them. They are trying to wrap their heads around this new curriculum, while also meeting the expectation that student guided reading groups should all do meaningful independent "station" work as the teacher meets with one group at a time, ideally three groups a day. (Kinda like Daily 5)

While the teacher is meeting with each group, the other groups can read and do followup work using their group's assigned digital eBook.  That's where I come in! I have been to a few of Benchmark's "train the trainer" sessions and quickly tried to learn how to use these digital tools in Benchmark Universe. Now, we are working hard to teach our teachers how to set up groups, assign assessments and eBook assignments to each student group.

Although I have been helping our teachers with the Benchmark assessments and ePosters, I am especially focused on helping them set up student groups in Benchmark's Manage Students tool.

and Assigning eBook Assignments from the Library window. 

I am meeting with teachers for about 15 minutes to teach them how to set up their groups and create their first assignments. I'm happy to say that this goes quite quickly. So far our teachers have been relieved to find that this won't be too time consuming as part of their ongoing preparation work.

Once these steps are done, I have been volunteering to meet with each group within a class, during guided reading station time, to show students how to independently accomplish the assignment that they have been given. This week I got my first try at meeting with the groups in Mr. Hemann's 4th Grade Classroom.  It was very successful and Mr. Hemann and I learned a great deal (from our mistakes :) from our first try. Students learned how to open an assignment,  refer back to the previous tab if they needed to reread the instructions, "turn in" their work to Mr. Hemann, write on the Close Reading side panel, write on a post-it notes, highlight, zoom in, and circle.

So what important lessons did Mr. Hemann and I learn?

1. Assignment instructions should be stated as simply as possible so students can be independent, depending on the literacy goal. It might even be a good idea to number steps. 

2. Students need to notice that the assignment question is located on the previous tab in case they need to reference it.

3.  Teachers should know that only written notes from an student edited eBooks (on the close reading panel or post-it notes) can be easily accessed & summarized from their teacher assignment tools. Otherwise teachers will need to open each student book to see the highlight and pencil tool results. I'm not certain that this is reasonable for our teachers unless they plan to meet and look at it together with students in guided reading group.

4. Quickly adding a student to an existing assignment can be tricky! Mr. Hemann and I wiped out the work of a group when we added another group, inadvertently deleting the already assigned group. Proceed with caution and add students to an existing assignment one at a time from the whole class list. 

As we begin a new week, I am just realizing that I need to spend some time exploring the student view from an iPad. Our K-2 students use iPads, not Chromebooks, which means most of the Benchmark Universe digital tools will probably work a little differently with a touch screen.  So much to learn in a short time frame, but I am throughly enjoying this challenge. I do think our students will be enriched by our efforts.