Finnegan Pinchuk (1654) Digital Leader Network » Collaborative blogging between schools. The Network of Excellence. September 2012 saw the launch of the Network of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science.
CAS, working in collaboration with the BCS Academy to co-ordinate and provide training opportunities for both existing teachers and those training for the profession. This initiative is supported by The Department For Education, OCR, CPHC, Microsoft and Google. As the government and other industry leaders and educators call for more Computer Science in the school curriculum there is a need to raise the confidence level of existing ICT/Computing teachers to embrace Computer Science, if they are not already doing so.
The DfE have supported the application made by CAS/BCS to continue and expand the Network of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science (NoE). The heart of the programme is to build a high-quality, sustainable CPD infrastructure at low cost. In the first six months of the scheme: During this phase over 700 hours of CPD contact time was delivered by the Master Teachers. Norfolk CAS. Hot Potatoes Home Page. Weebly - Create a free website and a free blog. Mozilla Thimble. ToonDoo - World's fastest way to create cartoons!
World's Best Way to Make & Share Comics. MonkeyJam. Pencil - a traditional 2D animation software. Stykz. JellyCam - Stop Motion. An Introduction (The 2DIY script archive) Kuato Studios. Imagine, program, share. Scratch Lesson 1: Programming an Etch-a-Sketch Game. Scratch Lesson 2: Programming a Car Racing Game. The second Scratch lesson that I like to teach involves programming a car to move around an on-screen race track in response to presses on the arrow keys on the keyboard.
Scratch Lesson 3: Programming a Pong-Style Game. Now that the children are more familiar with the different command blocks available in Scratch, for the third activity I like to teach them how to program a slightly different game - a Pong-style game in which they have to use a paddle/bat to keep a ball bouncing around the screen for as long as possible without touching the floor.
Like last time, I once again began by giving them a quick demonstration of what moving sprites (objects) needed creating and how the background needed designing: After this, I just then let them work independently at copying my sheet of commands which they all managed to do really well. They basically instruct the paddle to move left/right in response to changes in the mouse's X position and the ball to bounce around the screen edges until it touches a line near the bottom. The children seemed to work much more confidently this week programming their games and their ability to combine various command blocks together successfully in Scratch had really improved. GameProgramming. Kodu Mars 4 Age 4+ Creating a Game. AppShed - Build HTML5, iPhone and Android apps online for schools, education and business.
Kidsruby.com. Microsoft Small Basic. MSWLogo, An Educational programming language. Python Programming Guide for Primary Teachers - Northern Grid for Learning. Hackety Hack! A nationwide network of after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11 - Code Club. Coding, Computer Science and iPads – My Current View. Photo Credit: flickingerbrad via Compfight cc I have spoken a lot recently about my frustration with a lack of apps that help teach children to code.
Largely this frustration is centred around the resulting perception of ICT and edtech this limitation gives our schools. If a school invests wholesale in a set of iPads then the ICT curriculum for these children can be based largely around internet research, movie making and a collection of multimedia authoring apps. And though I love my iPads and iPad lessons the aspect of struggle or challenge for children using these devices is not always apparent or indeed talked about. There are exceptions though: Creatorverse, Garage Band, 123D Monsters I am pleased that the proposed new Primary Curriculum has a strong emphasis on computer science, though it could do with being more balanced. Coding. Ok we had a week off due to it being UK Easter Holidays.
Each week my Flipboard app, Twitter responses, my kids, my Kindle Fire and my Google reader deliver a collection of new web tools, apps, books, crazy experiences and must read articles. Here is this weeks Stuff I have seen: Many of us have seen this iPad versus Paper funny on Facebook or Twitter. Ictopus. Secure Social Learning Network for Teachers and Students. Google Apps. TomBarrett'sArchive for googleDocs. Back in October I wrote a proposal for the use of Google Docs (as part of Edu Apps) to deliver online reporting to parents at our school.
The original blog post proved incredibly useful in sparking some debate about the use of such cloud based tools for reporting to parents. It also brought about some challenges and raised questions in the blog comments, again very useful to help me better understand the whole idea. Become a Google Apps Ninja. It looks like word finally broke on Twitter yesterday about a project I’ve been working on for about 5 or 6 weeks at my school.
It started as a “I wonder what would happen if….” project and has turned into a pretty awe inspiring, self-motivated, get-out-of-their-way, dare I say fun project. When I was going through the process of becoming a Google Apps Certified Trainer I was taking the required tests on all the Google Apps. The tests run on Google’s own system and once you press start you have 90 minutes to finish. Google also gives you all the training materials which are public and anyone can learn from.
So I did what any cheating student would do. As I continued taking the tests I kept asking myself “What is Google after here?” It’s about searching and finding information.