Learning in Progress

Last year I hosted my first Hour of Code .  It was a rather last minute thing for me to organize because I wasn't sure if I could pull it off and I wasn't sure there would be a lot of interest.  I scheduled our Hour of Code for a Friday afternoon (because who wants to stay after school on a Friday), reserved a lab for 25, sent out an email at lunch to parents with a Google Form signup -giving them a week's notice about the event.  Thinking I wouldn't have a lot of interest because of the late notice and day, I was completely dumbfounded when I checked the registration form an hour and half later and discovered I had 51 kids signed up!  I only had 25 computers reserved!  I scrambled to find some volunteers to help me out and started lining up iPads to borrow from classrooms to supplement.  The kids LOVED it, the volunteers loved it, and I had parents requesting more coding events.  The energy surrounding the Hour of Code was incredible, and while...

For years I've been hearing about librarians who have a self-checkout station for their students to use, and while I always thought that sounded like a good idea, I never really could get it together enough to set one up.  When I thought about it, it just didn't seem like something that would work in my space.  We only have five student workstations, and I couldn't justify commandeering one of those for checkout only. I use the computer at the circulation desk for both checkout and for my own teacher workstation, so having students check out on a computer where my work email may be up or where something I might be working on might be open, just sounded like too much of a hassle to manage.  After having an after school coffee meet up with one of my local school library pals, and hearing that she used a self checkout system on her teacher machine that worked, I realized that I was being silly about the whole thing and just making excuses so that I didn't have to give up...

I'll be giving a GET (Guidance, Education and Technology) talk at my school about different aspects of technology.  I've compiled some research and resources to share with parents.  There is no way I can adequately cover these topics in a 30 minute session, but hopefully it will start some conversations that we can continue. H over over the Thinglink image below to check out some of the resources I've put together - or see it [ here ]