Create Staff Meeting Workshop

I ran a workshop at the August 2020 Create Staff Meeting Workshop on using Pencil Code for art and maths. The Create Workshop ran for Manaiakalani staff is a cluster wide staff meeting where teachers hold workshops to pass on skills for teaching children. The focus of the skills is on the 'create' part of Learn Create, Share, which involves children creating digital learning objects (DLOs) as learning tasks. 

My Pencil Code workshop took people through some challenges to learn the basics of coding. The first challenge for example, had people drawing a straight line, then expanding on that skill to create a house.

After creating the house, people could continue with the basic shapes challenge to create a smiling sun, or move on to the Coding Angles challenge.

The Coding Angles challenge tasks people with coding the turtle to travel between locations by measuring the angle and estimating distance between locations. This task involved the use of both digital and physical resources through using a protractor.

The afternoon was a good introduction for everyone into Pencil Code and how it can be used in the classroom for maths and art with these challenges. Pencil Code is more versatile and I would like to try coding simple quizzes or pick a path stories with children.

Reading PD with Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey

Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey held a PD session on balanced reading programmes. The balance being talked about was between modelled reading, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading. One of my key takeaways from this PD was to use template follow-up tasks rather than specifically created tasks. I tend towards the latter, which is in Sheena and Louise's words, unsustainable.