Showing posts with label hour of code. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hour of code. Show all posts

Thursday, February 25, 2016

It's Time for an Educational Jailbreak

Coding, Maker Space, Video, Photography, Graphic Design, Sound Engineering, and countless other great educational innovations have suffered far too long in the educational prisons of the world. It is time we break them out and truly integrate them into the core curriculum.

Coding is math. Video editing is story telling. Making is practical application of all kinds of "core" skills. They have to move though beyond being viewed as clubs, fun Friday activities, or just stuff hippies do to avoid integrating fully into society.

The education establishment has this terrible tendency to bottle up and lock away approaches to teaching and learning that don't look like something it experienced in the classroom twenty years ago or worse isn't obviously a part of subject areas measured by state assessments.

My former district took away specials like gym and art and made them test prep time. Recess was all but eliminated for more reading instruction. So much for educating the whole child.

This has to stop.

We can lament this all we want and nothing will change or we can begin to focus on the pedagogy and develop sound ways that coding builds success in the algebra classroom and that iMovie Book Trailers build excitement for reading and a demonstration of literacy. That is how we break down the prison walls that are keeping great innovation on the fringes of education and not at its core.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Hour of Code: Learn Code With Star Wars and BB-8



The Hour of Code project has teamed up with Star Wars and it could not be any more awesome.

In lesson 1 learn to use blocks of code to program BB-8's movement and then dabble in some java script. Give it a shot and begin to build your own galaxy with code.