By watching the above video you can see that Anna only finishes half of the snowflake. Why is that you ask? That is because at that point I was frustrated with how long it took me to do step 6. Coding is an amazing thing, and I do wish that I had the patience for it!

Reflecting on link to practice

In the fall I was observing at Journey Middle School in Sooke, in a grade 6 classroom. The teacher I was observing was great at using all possible tools available for them. One particular day students were using laptops to create a google slides presentation with classmates. I went over to check on a student, right away I could tell that she wasn’t working on the assigned task, I knew that she knew that but oh did she play me. I asked her to click on her assignment so that we could get started and out of nowhere a cartoon character with a sword comes running across the screen and chops up her entire assignment! And then it starts fighting with someone, running all across the screen having a sword fight. Then everything disappears! She had somehow coded her mouse to become this character, chop up her assignment, and then have a sword fight. I could not hide how impressed I was, which was her goal. She knew that someone was going to come over and ask her to get started on her assignment and then she would be able to show off her coding. This made me think about how we could allow her to use her skills while still completing the assigned task.

I have not come to a conclusion on that yet, but I do know it is important to find a way. The world around us is becoming more technology-driven by the day. However, as a millennial, I do not know as much about technology/coding as I probably should. Final story prior to chatting about computation. In the observation, class talked about previously the teacher had used coding to make her life much easier. This teacher was HUGE on student self-reflections, so at the end of the unit, she would send all the students google forms where they filled out questions on how they felt they did in the unit, their favorite part, and how they could improve. She had then made a code/ran a program, that would pull their answers and put them into a google doc. She would look over these google docs and then send them directly to the parents for the student’s point of progress! On the front end it was quite time-consuming to set up, but once the code was written it saved her tons of time!

I may have lied..Thinking about my observation classroom again the teacher was also very open about allowing students to use calculators. I found this very interesting, this was very helpful for all students. I found it interesting as some students did not attempt the operations in their heads prior to using the calculator. That is probably a discussion for another post though!