The Computer School
Tracy at The Computer School made the segue into teaching later in life, after working as a computer programmer for a number of years. As a teacher she is a FabLab Fellow with Stanford’s Transformative Learning Lab. She has a passion for computing and its integration into teaching and learning. She has a very dynamic classroom and at lunchtime runs makerspace sessions with an open-door policy.
We were able to join Tracy for two classes, a free session and half of her lunch time makerspace session. As with any standard non-elective class there always students who aren’t super keen or interested in the activity. On the whole though, I found that the majority of the class was engaged in the activity and working proactively on the task.
Aside from students who had finished the work and had moved on to something different, all classes we saw were working with the coding environment StarLogo Nova. They were creating adaptive behavior change models. The students had one of two options, to model predator and prey or an epidemic. They had to create a model and plot the results on the line graph. It was amazing to see such fantastic work from the students working with a high level concept.
Students who weren’t working on the modeling project were working on other activities. One of whom was working on programming a wearable device. A small jacket for a toy giraffe had an arduino lilypad, speaker and button sewn on. When the button was pressed the lilypad was programmed to play old macdonalds farm. A pair of students who arrived during lunch for the makerspace session were using a makey makey to program an interactive book. You were able to touch the relevant page to trigger a short video on the computer to play the page that you had touched. All pretty awesome concepts!
Tracy tries to avoid the standard ‘front loading’ teacher model of providing all the information and then allowing the students to do some work. She prefers to introduce a concept and let them tinker, filling in or assisting with knowledge gaps as required in order to solve the problem.
The real focus in the classroom is to use the computer to assist in solving a problem. The problem needs to be defined, planning needs to be done to determine an approach to solving the problem, all before touching the computer to start solving the problem.
Despite having very limited resources, not much administrator support and a subject that is not core, Tracy does a fantastic job of getting students engaged in the class, learning real world skills and developing fantastic solutions. Her passion and enthusiasm are inspiring!
Lunch with Dan Ingvarson
We had a lunch meeting with an Australian by the name of Dan Ingvarson. Dan works more with the student data and management systems. He is working on a product that will connect to a schools existing Active Directory for logging on, providing a single sign-on service that will also allow 3rd party applications to connect to the student accounts but only allow those applications access to the data that they require in order to operate. This would help teachers some more freedom to decide what tools they want to use and just be able to use them.
In a noisy restaurant it was a little challenging to hear all the conversation, but this was the gist of the discussion.
Please Note, I may have made errors in my summary, as I wasn’t able to hear it clearly.
Promethean Interactive Whiteboard workshop at the Childrens Workshop School
After lunch we visited the Children’s Workshop School to sit in on a professional learning session to demonstrate the basic function of a Promethean Interactive Whiteboard. While the PL session wasn’t overly informative, as most of us are already able to use a Promethean board. The discussion we were able to engage in with teachers after the session was really good.
I haven’t mentioned it previously, but all discussions with teachers has come back to questions about common core standards and standardized testing. Every teacher we spoke with has found that the use of standardized testing as a measure of success is having a negative impact on teachers and students.
Curriculum ends up being delivered around the core standards and what will be on the test. This takes away the freedom and time to explore concepts deeply. It increases the stress on the student and parents because the score affects what schools they can apply for and get into, affecting their entire future. It affects the teachers because the overall result is a reflection on them, it can affect school funding, teacher employment and even the existence of a school. The Government can shut down a ‘failing school’ based on results.
Also interestingly, The Computer School and Children’s Workshop School are both examples of limited physical school resources. They both operate in a building together with one or two other schools. One school might have two floors of the building and another school another two floors. I find this quite a bizarre concept. I think they are doing a brilliant job of making it work, but I do find the situation a little worrying.
Dinner with Tracy, Dan and Karen
For dinner we met up with Tracy from the Computer School, a current leader in Design Thinking, Don and a teacher with a focus on technology integration, Karen.
We had some great discussions about design thinking, the process of designing a product and taking it through to production; the pros and cons of the maker movement; the difference between coding and programming; and similar topics. It was great to chat and share ideas in an informal setting and to form networks. They had great suggestions for things that were worth investigating and put us in contact with other relevant professionals in the STEM/Makerspace/Design Thinking areas.
By the end of the day I was more than overloaded with people and with information. It was a very informative day and one that I think my brain will be slowly processing over the days and weeks to come.
CatComputerTeacher 