Coding Stories – Screenless Coding for Div 1

Coding Stories – Screenless Coding for Div 1

by | Feb 22, 2022 | Coding, GSuite

20 No-Prep Coding Lessons that do not involve screens
Theme: Growth Mindset

When we ask children to retell a story, the process is linear. There is a set sequence of events, and deviating from that sequence is incorrect in the retelling process. As is the case with retelling a plot sequence, coding is also a linear process.

To begin to cultivate the concrete-sequential nature of coding, literature is a natural place to start. These coding stories all involve the reading of a children’s book. All of them include a Youtube link to someone (the author or the publishing company whenever possible) to make them a good fit for remote learning as well as in-class learning.

Students listen to the story. They then cut out the “buttons” (arrows that they glue to the paper to retell the story). Starting at the icon containing the triangle (the start button), they glue the arrows to the coding story grid, using the images on the grid to guide the direction the arrows must point in.

The goal is to use as few steps as possible in the retelling. An example is provided based on the story “If you Give a Mouse a Cookie”.  You can see in the image that students could bring the mouse to the cookie using two different paths, both using the same number of arrows (five in total). Either answer would be correct. A path that uses more than five arrows to arrive at the cookie would be, through the lens of coding, incorrect and would need a reduction of steps, as a reduction would be possible.

The booklet of 20 coding stories can be found on our CESD Teacher Share website!

 

Password Protect Google Forms Assessments

Password Protect Google Forms Assessments

by | Jan 20, 2022 | GSuite

If you are giving a Google Forms assessment to multiple classes, security is a consideration. Different teachers approach this security differently, but it is worthwhile noting that Google Forms can be password protected to limit students’ ability to access the form before you want them to have access.

This video is an example of not being able to go through the door when it comes to tech, but rather finding a window by which to accomplish the desired task.  There is no button to toggle to password protect your forms assessments, but if you follow the easy and innovative process shown in the below video, you will have a new level of security to apply to your assessments!!

Let’s Go in Through the Window.

Intro and Outro Videos for Christmas Concerts

Intro and Outro Videos for Christmas Concerts

by | Dec 3, 2021 | GSuite

To try to help your December run a little more smoothly, I have built a selection of video intros and outros that schools can use for their Covid Christmas Concerts and other December activities that need to be pre-recorded in light of the current provincial restrictions. 

To the left are a couple samples, but there are a few more in this Google Drive folder. Most of the intro/outro files have space where you can put your school’s name or logo onto the video using your preferred video editing application.

MBot for the Classroom

MBot for the Classroom

by | Nov 1, 2021 | GSuite

The MBot is an engaging robot that can be used with beginning coders, and expands to be a great resource for more advanced coders as well.

The MBot is more fragile than some of the robots that were designed for younger children, so extra care is needed for these robots.  When programming the MBot, it is best to lay the MBot on its back, or put something under it that takes its tires off the desk; if it drives off a student’s desk, it will break something – likely one of the motors that power the wheels!!

To use MBot with a Chromebook, you will need to install the mLink extension to your profile and your students’ profiles.

Google Classroom Banners for You!

Google Classroom Banners for You!

by | Mar 23, 2021 | GSuite

I am pumped to let you know that I have built an assortment of Google Classroom Banners for you to use to customize your Google Classrooms with some different images than the default images that Google offers.

It is important to understand that when you change the banner in Classroom, it is going to appear a fair bit darker than the way it appears in Google Drive. This is an assistive technology in action, as the darker tone makes classroom much easier to see, read, and engage with for students with vision challenges.  This cannot be changed, and likely (hopefully) is not something Google would entertain changing.

The new banners can be found in the Templates area on our CESD Teacher’s Share site.  There are other useful templates there as well that you may find you have a good use for. So, please, anything you find in that site that catches your attention – feel free to take a copy!! That’s why that site exists!!

Below is a small sampling of the Google Classroom banner resources available to you on our Teachers Share site.

Audio Recording with Mic Note

Audio Recording with Mic Note

by | Mar 19, 2021 | GSuite

I was wrong!

The first time I took a look at Mic Note for recording audio clips to assist our students who struggle with reading or have written language or other disabilities, I thought that it was clunky and awkward.

After much searching for a perceived better option, and coming up blank, I returned to Mic Note, only to realize that I was wholesale wrong about it.  It offers more than just audio recording, which is amazing, but for the purposes we want it for in CESD, it’s brilliant!

Among my first misconceptions was my assertion that it was difficult to record in .mp3 format, and awkward to direct to Google Drive. Wrong.

The key advantages it offers over other audio utilities are important details for educators.

Firstly, it allows for up to four hours of recording time. None of us require that much for school uses, but we definitely need more than 5 or 10 minutes as the outer limit, which is where most other applications cut the recording off.  Some sources for exams take longer than 10 minutes to read aloud.

Secondly, it can be set to store the recordings directly into your Google Drive, making them yours forever. This is another advantage over the “competition”. There are some decent applications out there – Talk & Comment and Vocaroo come to mind right away – but they store your audio on their server and delete it after an amount of time has passed. This means that for all the time it takes to record the audio, a year down the road when you wish to reuse the resource with your students, you no longer have access to your recordings from last year, or even last semester. That’s no good!

Thirdly, Mic Note allows you to edit your audio as you are in the process of recording. So, if you get your tongue in a knot reading aloud, and you need to try again, Mic Note facilitates this easily.

So, I hereby retract my earlier position about Mic Note, and I highly recommend it.

Here’s a video outlining how I recorded an English 30 exam for students requiring the accommodation, and the templates for the two exam booklets can be copied to your Google Drive through the templates section of the CESD Teachers Share Website.