5 ways to engage students in real coding this summer (hint: it’s not by playing Minecraft)

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A coding expert shares how to get students truly invested in computer science that goes beyond drag and drop

Teaching students how to code software is one of the most valuable skills you can give them, and will virtually guarantee them employment once they’re in the workforce. According to the US Department of Labor, the median pay for a software developer in 2015 was $100,690, and the growth in available positions is expected to be 17 percent during the period 2014-2024 (more than twice the average growth rate across all occupations).

Many schools are offering coding courses over the summer. I’ve spent the last two years building a platform that makes learning to code software as easy as playing a game so I’ve learned a thing or two about how to engage students in coding. Here’s some advice for choosing the right learning platform for your community:

Make sure it’s age-appropriate and will engage children and teens.

Many of these courses were designed for adults, and even if a child is off-the-charts intelligent, he/she might be bored if the course is all coding and no fun. Courses for kids should incorporate some element of gamification to keep them engaged. Look for courses that were designed specifically for children and teens.

Students should be writing actual code, not just dragging and dropping.

Programs like Scratch are a good method for very young children (K-2), but within a few hours becomes boring for older children, who won’t learn very much. To keep kids engaged, they need to start writing real code very quickly.

Get them started on a ‘beginner’ programming language.

Javascript and Python are two great beginner languages. Java and Swift are much more complex and may intimidate a beginner, ruining the experience for them

Don’t get stuck in the Minecraft trap.

Many people think playing Minecraft helps children learn to code. It doesn’t. It’s engaging, and it teaches children binary logic, but they aren’t learning to code. Don’t get tricked into letting children or teens play Minecraft all day and think they are learning programming.

Make sure there is some collaboration involved.

Single-player is fun for a child for a while, but they quickly want to show off what they’ve done, and that’s easier with multi-player coding – especially when the course involves gamification.

There are also some good options for children who may not be ready for a course yet, but who want to do some light learning as a first step. Check out board games such as Robot Turtles, and programmable robot building kits (such as Dash & Dot or a Sphero), which are great activities to work into a summer camp program. But teachers shouldn’t just hand their students a game and step back — these activities are more valuable when teachers and students do them together.

This advice and these tools can easily be carried back into the classroom in September. Happy summer, and happy coding!

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5 ways to gamify writing in the classroom

Believe it or not, writing is a natural fit for gamification techniques

You’ve surely noticed how your class gets engaged as soon as you introduce a game into the teaching process. The students get competitive, but that’s a healthy competition you want to nurture.

Have you ever thought about teaching writing through games? It’s a great strategy that helps students overcome the lack of motivation they have regarding writing assignments. Robert Monroe, a writer for EduGeeksClub and a father of a 10-year-old, explains how he made writing attractive for his son: “I realized he was bored whenever he had to write something for school. I know how fun writing can be, so I found a way to turn it into a game. I set up a private online diary and gave him brief prompts every day. He received points for each ‘level’ he passed and a prize for every big achievement. I noticed great improvements in his grammar and style in a really short period of time.”

Needless to say, you’ll need an effective strategy that will help you introduce writing games in the classroom. Read on; we have the tips you need.

Understand the problem

Before you can make your students like writing, you need to understand why they don’t. One of the biggest problems with the assignments is the fact that they are boring. Plus, teachers tend to make them more challenging than necessary, so the students lose motivation even before they start working on them.

The entire process of research, outlining, writing, and editing takes a lot of commitment. When you turn it into a game, you need to make it less challenging and more flexible. For example, you can create teams and allow your students to work together on the research stage for a day. Then, they can all focus on storytelling according to the principles you provide, and you can publish all stories on a blog.

Give them a competitive edge to motivate them to achieve better results, and try to create some graphics to accompany each story. That will be

 your reward for them.

Set precise goals

Every game needs a goal. If, for example, the point of the game is to write a story, you need to make it very specific. You may ask your students to show how the main character overcomes a personal flaw, such as shyness or laziness.

Once you set the main goal, break it up in stages. You know that each game has levels, don’t you? For example, the team can write a paragraph to pass the first level. Each member should contribute with their own sentence for the paragraph, and the content has to be coherent. Once they pass level one, they can continue to a higher level, and you ask them to add another element to the story (such as a new character or a challenge).

Set some rules

A game has to be founded on rules; otherwise it would quickly get out of hand. Just as you have a grading system for their papers, you should have a point system for the games. If, for example, you create blogging quests, your students should know exactly how many points they need to get onto the next level, and how they can earn those points.

You can start with a maximum of 30 points and reduce 2 points for every mistake in grammar and spelling, and 5 points for each mistake in logic. Make these guidelines clear before the games begin.

Games come with immediate results

You know how students have to wait for days before they get a grade on their papers? That’s a stress they would all want to avoid. Games give immediate feedback, so they keep the enthusiasm levels high. Draw a chart on the whiteboard, so everyone can understand the point system.

When your students realize that they can do something right now to beat the other team, they will get more engaged to achieve better results

Rely on the right tools

Technology can make the gamification of the writing process much easier. There are different tools you can use, so don’t stop exploring what the Internet has to offer. You can start with these tools:

• Rezzly – it enables you to design fun quests, which your students can access through their smartphones or tablets.
• ClassBadges – a tool that helps you develop a reward system in the form of badges.
• Edublogs – a safe blogging environment that you can use for publishing the challenges and results.

Educative games are a great addition to the teaching process because they make the classroom more dynamic while enabling the students to develop new skills. Even the most complex skills can be practiced through gamification. You can develop different games that will make writing attractive for you students, so don’t waste time and start experimenting. Your students will love the new approach.

10 apps that block mobile distractions

1. ClearLock for Android : a productivity app which allows users to block all distracting apps on their device in order to concentrate and focus on what matters to increase productivity. Users select which apps they wish to block, for how long and that’s it. [Price: Free]

2. Cold Turkey for OS for Android: users give a list of the most tempting websites they access and Cold Turkey will block access to them all for the time period specified. Whatever browser users are using, the results are the same – enter one of the forbidden URLs before the time is up and you’ll be told that the site is unavailable. [Price: Free]

3. Focus Lock for Android and Flipd for Apple: Focus Lock promises to help users stop being slaves to their phone by blocking notifications for 25 minutes from whichever apps most distract them, followed by a five-minute unlocked window. Flipd has more customizable settings and is a similar app [Price: Both free]

4. Isolator for OS X: can completely hide other windows, blur everything behind your active window, and do a variety of other things depending on your settings, such as hiding the dock when you want to concentrate. [Price: Free]

5. (OFFTIME) for Apple and for Android: lets you monitor your smartphone usage in real time and take dedicated timeouts from the digital. The app’s analytics aims to make it easy to identify habits and take action to change them. (OFFTIME) has three components that support digital balance and digital detox: 1) tracking and comparing device usage; 2) setting personal device usage goals and accessing tips & articles; and 3) pursuing alone or inviting others to OFFTIMEs (on iOS the flight/mute mode). The app lets the user understand his/her digital habits through graphs and visualizations of his/her smartphone usage, clustered by daily, weekly, monthly and total usage reports. Using “locations” the user can find his/her usage hotspots. With the badge icon the user can see his/her daily unlocks or collect time offs. [Price: $2.99; Free for new users]

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6. Power Focus for Apple: This is a countdown timer that aims to help users work in manageable chunks of time to beat procrastination and addiction to distraction apps. Features include customization of work session timer length, customization of regular & long break length, the ability to view daily & all-time completed work session stats, and interactive notifications (Continue, Pause, or Stop current timer). Users can use the intervals to get tasks done and give themselves a break in between tasks. [Price: Free]

7. RescueTime for Mac, PC, Linux and Chrome and Android: This app gives users a readout at the end of the day (and year if you opt for the $6 a month Pro version) of their web activities. The Android version provides automatic time tracking of mobile apps, reports voice call time, knows where web site time is spent, sets user-selected alerts and goals to manage digital life, flags milestones and highlight achievements, provides historical productivity reports to see progress, and has privacy options to choose what the user cares about. The app aims to help individuals and teams propagate good processes and eliminate bad habits. [Price: Free]

8. StayFocusd for Chrome: This extension works in the reverse manner to Zero Willpower or Anti-Social. Rather than setting a period of time for which users can’t use the Internet, it allows them to set a period of time to indulge in time-wasting sites. Only want to give 60 minutes a day for Twitter, vanity Googling, and updating the Netflix queue? This is the app. [Price: Free]

9. WriteRoom for Mac: a full screen writing environment meant to give users time to write without typical software distractions. Unlike the cluttered word processors users are used to, WriteRoom lets them focus on writing by the fast handling of large documents; live word count, reading time, and more; shift line up, down, left, and right commands; selection of word, sentence, and paragraph commands; by automatically logging writing sessions to a spreadsheet, etc. [Price: $6.99]

10. Zero Willpower and Anti-Social for Apple: Zero Willpower is a simple native blocker for the web browser on iOS 9and lets the user block his/her own access to distracting websites of his/her choice. By default these are: 9gag.com, Facebook.com, Instagram.com, Reddit.com, Twitter.com, twitch.tv, vk.com, YouTube.com. Anti-Social is an app which blocks social media content from websites which includes widgets and popups to provides a clutter-free, fast browsing experience. The app works with Safari and blocks social widgets, with the added benefit of substantially decreasing web page loading time. Users can banish social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ from transmitting data about them after they leave those sites, even if the pages they visit has a social plugin. [Price: Both are $.99]

5 ways technology can be useful for autistic learners

A tech researcher shares pros and cons for using devices with autistic learners — and draws from her own experience

During the last few years, touch screen devices like the iPad have been a boon to special education. Apps such as Proloquo2Go can aid children with speech difficulties while a myriad of interactive games and activities engage and educate students with autism spectrum disorders, perhaps because theybreak learning down into small, digestible chunks.

There are plenty that would disagree with that assessment, however. As technology researcher Alexandra Samuel recently noted in the WSJ, some researchers contend that autistic children are “particularly prone to videogame addiction.” Others think that the structure inherent in gaming can reinforce the rigidity of autistic-type brains.

For Samuel, who is the parent of an Autistic ten-year-old, technology has been both useful and harmful in her own experience, and she refrains from drawing any stark conclusions. According to Samuel:

[T]here is no simple answer to the question of whether technology helps or harms autistic children, any more than there is an easy answer to whether technology is good or bad for society as a whole. To make technology a constructive influence, we need to get past talking about “screen time” as if it were a single thing, and start looking at the impact that specific kinds of screen time have on specific people and behaviors.

In particular, she has used technology in five different ways:

As downtime, to avoid sensory overload; as targeted therapy to teach mindful techniques and emotional intelligence; to help monitor behavior (although the particular apps she tried ultimately proved too engaging for her son); to promote special interests, such as coding; and for online socializing, given that it may be easier for autistic children to communicate and learn about social interaction in a controlled (online) environment.

All of the approaches, Samuel notes, require adults, such as parents and educators, to keep a close eye on their kids, not only to help manage behavior but also to help tease out hidden interests and to learn more about what draws them in.

Further reading:

Personal Technology and the Autistic Child: What One Family Has Learned

Experts pick the 21 best apps for autism

Kids and Teens with Autism Vulnerable to Video Game Addiction

CPD paradox

Taken from https://thecpdparadox.wordpress.com/about-the-cpd-paradox/

What is ‘The CPD Paradox’?

One thing that all schools have in common is some sort of ‘Continual Professional Development’, or CPD.  Over the country, hundreds of thousands of collective hours and an equal amount of money is spent on the task of improving teaching.  But is all this training working as well as it should be?

I don’t think so.  And I think that this is as a result of the CPD paradox:

The paradox (part 1)

The CPD paradox has two distinct strands, both of which contribute to the dilemma.  The first relates to the aim of Professional Development programmes.  It helps to try and be as clear as possible about what exactly this aim is:  to turn teachers into effective and skilled practitioners as quickly as possible so that students in their classes get best teaching they can, leading to the best exam results and the best student outcomes.  It is an aim that both teachers and schools are committed to; if the aim is achieved, everyone benefits.  Given that both teachers and schools have numerous reasons to be committed to the efficacy of their CPD sessions, it would seem that in-school teacher training would, on the whole, be a resounding success.

But despite this, despite the time and energy that is spent by teachers and schools on training, it is often clear that very little, if anything, from school CPD sessions actually turns up in anyone’s day to day teaching practice.  Why is this?

1) Teacher exhaustion

Teachers have stressful day-to-day jobs that can leave them feeling mentally exhausted and with little room for personal development. They can be left after a day spent taking part in literally hundreds of emotionally driven interactions with other humans feeling drained, a feeling that is not conducive to effective learning in after school teacher training sessions. Any CPD programme that wants to be really effective needs to take this into account in its design.

2) Workload

Even if teachers come to CPD sessions feeling engaged and ready to learn, there is another challenge.  As soon as the session is finished they have to get on with the myriad tasks that are part of the job.  This could be marking books or exam scripts, planning lessons or any other of a huge variety of jobs.  By the time the teacher finally gets to the end of this mountain of work they go home, only to arrive back at work the following day to face a similar situation.  They simply do not have the space to reflect on their learning and put this in practice.  CPD sessions need to be designed to mitigate this issue if they are to be successful.

3) The Poorly Planned Session

Often, CPD sessions are planned and lead in school by middle or senior leaders with thousands of other things to do that come under the category of ‘more urgent’.  As a result, CPD sessions can often feel poorly planned and with not enough opportunity for active learning rather than passive listening.  This is further compounded by the above issues: if a tired and overworked teacher is forced to sit through a badly designed session when they could be working through their mountain of work, they can be left feeling completely turned-off from the very idea of CPD.

The paradox (part 2)

Of course, none of this would matter if teachers didn’t really need CPD to get better. If we could all engage effectively in our own private development, directing our own improvement and working to make changes to our teaching practice then the CPD paradox would cease to exist.

Unfortunately,  in-school training is a vital component in teacher development for reasons already discussed.  Due to the mentally and physically demanding nature of the job, to the demands on the time of the average teacher, we just do not, on the whole, have the mental space required for really effective personal development.  To wade through all the different teaching books, blogs and academic papers, building ourselves a private programme of study and then working reflectively and relentlessly through it is just not something that teachers have the time to do.  I’m not saying that this never happens; clearly there are people who have the self-discipline to work in this way but for the vast majority of us, myself included, we need someone to provide us with the impetus and direction to get better quickly.

To summarise, the CPD paradox takes on a viciously circular form .  School CPD is not effective because teacher exhaustion and workload means that the material covered does not ‘stick’, and is not actively embedded in practice.  Yet these are the very reasons for why an effective training programme is important: it provides teachers with the direction, materials and support to make changes to that they would not otherwise have the time to make on their own.

Principles for a programme that avoids the CPD Paradox

Thankfully, however, I think that with a couple of fairly simple tweaks, these issues can be avoided.

•Participant led  – I think that CPD sessions should be, as much as possible, driven by the participants themselves.  This helps to avoid the issue of poorly planned sessions from busy senior leaders and puts the onus on the teachers themselves to deliver sessions that are effective for them, and designed to address the issues that they are interested in.

•Accountability for change   – Because teachers have so little space for personal projects and reflection, CPD programmes need to be designed to ensure that they are forced to make changes to their practice.  This need not be draconian but can simply be some measures such as peer-to-peer observation that ensure that participants in sessions are reminded to actually try out what they learn.  Equally, devoting part of the planned session time to practicing skills then and there means that participants are held accountable for moving on.

•In-built uptake time – To avoid the ill-effects of teacher exhaustion and workload, sessions need to be designed so that teachers get an opportunity to put learning into place within the session itself.  This can be through practicing skills in groups, or having some time to plan a lesson in the session, thus maximising the chances that things learnt in the abstract in a training session actually find their way into our daily practice as teachers.

What is the point of this website?

I am an English Teacher and Professional Mentor at a large academy school in London.  For the last two years, my job within the school has been to plan and lead the CPD of all new staff, NQTs and untrained teachers.  After completing the Teach First training programme and being a participant in quite literally hundreds of CPD sessions myself, as well as working as a full time teacher while attempting to improve my own practice, I hope that I designed my own training programme, as well as the individual sessions within it, in such a way that they avoid the most pernicious problems the paradox presents.

I will be posting my CPD programme and sessions on this site in the course of time, and hope that they will be of use to anyone leading their own in-school training programme.