New Learning - DFI Session 8

The focus of today's session was computational thinking.   It was great to have the opportunity to explore coding and I am really looking forward to exploring this further with my learners and learning alongside them.  This is something that I have not really had any experience with in the past, though I know that some of my students have and are quite keen on it.  I also have a number of students for whom coding will be a new experience so it will be useful to have several "experts" in the class for them to call upon for additional support (for me too!).

I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore "Scratch" in our breakout groups and to have the facilitator to call upon for support.  I had a lot of fun creating this "Ballerina" animation using "Scratch".




I have added a page called "Digital Technology"  to my class site and have added a link to studio.code.org for the students to explore the Minecraft coding, which is something that I think they will really enjoy.

I am planning for us to also do a session on "Scratch" to give the students an opportunity to explore this and to gain more confidence with coding.  These will be added to the students blogs.  On Friday mornings we meet with our Junior buddy class so early next term I will organise for them to use what they have learned through exploring "Scratch" to introduce to their Junior buddies.  We have done this with other digital technologies and I have found it to be very beneficial for the students to use the skills they have learned to teach others in order to consolidate their learning (a good way of using the learn/create/share model also).