ED 629 Blog Collaboration

How to Spark Student Interest Through Coding Teachers can use coding in a regular classroom setting? This can’t be possible, because teachers have their own set of standards that have to abide by. Although this may be true, Common Core doesn’t specify curriculum. It requires students to have knowledge of and skills they’ll need to succeed (Brookhouser & Megnin, 2016). From my readings, there are many different ways to engage students in many different content areas and grade levels. The first grade levels I'd like to discuss is K-5. In the article “Use Coding to Engage Students in Reading and Writing Lessons”, Randles (2017) list 5 reasons coding Engages K-5 students. Listed below I have embedded the articles 5 reasons, along with ideas that I think are engaging. Making student thinking visible- Students that are young tend to need help following directions. Coding introduces step by step thinking. Scratch is a platform that I would suggest for this ...

Social media in the classroom has become a hot topic within the last decade. Teens and young adults everywhere are using social media platforms. According to Anderson and Jiang “YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular online platforms among teens. Fully 95% of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online 'almost constantly' ”(Anderson & Jiang, 3018). Since social media is so popular with tweens, teens, and young adults, why not use it as a resource for education?   Research shows that effective communication between the student and the learner helps learning in the classroom (Faizi, Afia & Chiheb, 2013). Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter can serve as backchannels for communication among students and between teachers and students within or between classes. I am considering starting a classroom Snapchat, that I can engage students away from the classroom. I plan on posting problems of the day on the classroom story for students to v...

Enhancing Learning through Educational Videos I can remember my second year of teaching, I had a student who rarely understood the standards in class. Finally, we came up with the idea to give her supplementary videos to watch at home. She came back the next day completely enthused that she was starting to understand concepts! A recent study done by Mckinny, Dyke and Lumber found that the students using video podcasts performed significantly better than the students in the regular physical classroom (Hsing and Cigas, 2013). I found this information to be extremely helpful, especially knowing that the data was coming from a math classroom. Hsing and Cigas also gave qualitative feedback from actual students in the study. Here are some of the samples the journal notes (Hsing and Cigas, 2013, p. 6):  • “I went from not getting it at all to saying ‘oh, that's easy’ after the first video. It's so much easier to comprehend when you do it step by step lik...