Scratch Blocks brings together two different programming “grammars” that we have designed over the past decade. The standard Scratch grammar uses blocks that snap together vertically, much like LEGO bricks. For our ScratchJr software, intended for younger children, we developed blocks that are labelled with icons rather than words, and snap together horizontally rather than…
Top three for the week Google Spaces is a new way to collaborate and share resources An interesting take on small group collaboration The Beginner’s Guide to Design Thinking in the Classroom – A.J. JULIANI Getting started with design thinking in the classroom Create a slideshow of your Google Photos with Youtube Create slideshows in…
Google released its Gboard keyboard a week or so ago, and I’ve been testing it out. Previously, I used the default keyboard the most, followed up by the Swiftkey keyboard, but both now take a backseat to Gboard. Any keyboard I use has to have excellent text prediction. I usually type without looking at the…
Adobe Spark brings easy-animation apps to the web Now the company is bringing all three of those apps under a new name, and also introducing a web version of the software. The new Adobe Spark suite includes Adobe Spark Video (formerly Slate), Adobe Spark Page (formerly Slate), and Adobe Spark Post (which was just Post…
Google announced at its I/O 2016 Developer Conference that Chromebooks will soon be able to run Android apps, opening up a library of 1.5 million apps for use on the Google Chromebooks. The implications are pretty big for education, and it’s happening this year. The numbers Chromebooks now make up over half of the devices…
I’m the music teacher at our school. I’m also the resident Nerd Supreme, whose recent rabbit hole has been physical computing: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, sensors, boxes of electronics, and soldering. Meet Alex. He’s a second grader at my school who was born without eyes. Oh, and he’s autistic. He’s funny and smart and he loves…
In a new white paper out last week, “A blueprint for breakthroughs,” Michael Horn and I argue that simply asking what works stops short of the real question at the heart of a truly personalized system: what works, for which students, in what circumstances? Without this level of specificity and understanding of contextual factors, we’ll be…
Google’s developer conference is going on this week, so that means a lot of announcements out of Google. Yesterday Google showed off Allo and Duo, an instant messaging and video chat app. Both apps require the use of your cell phone number for identification, so they will not be of much use when working with…
But giving my students choice and allowing them to being curious learners was hard work. In fact, sometimes I was still really ineffective at guiding the learning that was taking place in my classroom. I tried many different project-based learning frameworks, embraced the inquiry cycle, and tweaked my own idea of how to structure this…
This book reaffirms what I have speculated for a while; the majority of schools and districts gauge the effectiveness of professional development with nothing more than teacher surveys. As Guskey informs the reader, “Sadly, the bulk of professional development today is evaluated only at Level 1 [participant reaction], if at all. Of the rest, the…