The last weeks of August were filled with opening meetings and back to school goodness. I think next year, I may NOT have a meeting on those crazy days of opening faculty meetings and back-to-school nights, and mornings as some schools chose to add this year. Even though those days are designated for professional learning it's not that easy. It's an algorithm that needs to be revised. I have added it to my "to champion" list.
But back to the meeting. In keeping with tradition, I had my Secondary Collaborative explore various tools that I embedded into our meeting. Today, the big ones were YoTeachapp, a back channel of sorts that can be used by teachers to collect questions and responses from students, and the Google Docs Add-on, Story Speaker. If you've read my previous posts on computational thinking, you'll know that I was/am a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure stories. Story Speaker, designed for use with Google Home, provides templates for creating original stories like this. What makes this cool for educational settings is that you don't need Google Home or Google Assistant, which is disabled by default in GAFE domains. You can play the text version (like the old TI-99 game, Adventure mentioned here) or use your microphone and speakers and interact with the story you create through Google Voice. Many possibilities! So, I took them through getting started and then let them explore in teams. Writing their own stories and sharing them with their peers as they were ready. I threw out the term "debug" when I asked them to test and revise their stories. I started to see lighbulbs over their heads. Then I heard the buzz of "it's like a program" ..... ...and I heard someone connect it to computational thinking, which was perfect! The next slide (my meeting pacing guide) outlined the connection between computational thinking and Story Speaker. More importantly, this reinforced that computational thinking CAN be integrated into language arts! As I read the meeting evaluations, this particular tool that was shared had the most positive feedback. I imagine that some of our middle schoolers will be crafting their own stories with Story Speaker this school year. I can't wait to read them!
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AuthorJeannie Timken Archives
March 2023
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