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Month: May 2014

Summer Reading

nancy 2 Comments

The school year is almost over, and I am planning my summer reading list. I love reading, and I don’t do enough of it during the school year. Here is what I have so far.

  • The rest of Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
  • Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
  • David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper
  • Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by David Kelley and Tom Kelley
  • The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (My daughter told me I had to read this since I love YA stories) and some other “just for fun” books

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Today I Didn’t Teach: Thoughts on Independence

nancy 2 Comments

Today, I didn’t teach anything. I let my students teach themselves, and it was wonderful.

Although the Hour of Code was in December, we didn’t work on it then, because there were many other projects that had to get done. Now that the school year is winding to a close, I thought it would be a nice way for the kids to spend their last visit to the computer lab.

One of the classes that came in was a class of third graders. I played them the 60 second teaser video for the Hour of Code, explained a bit about what coding was, and then introduced the importance of going patiently step by step and iterating your code by showing part of a BrainPop movie, Computer Programming: One Step at a Time. (We had a limited amount of time, so I only showed them the part that covered the basic concepts.) I demonstrated the site we would be using, Tynker.com, and told them that I would not answer questions once they started working. If they ran into trouble, they had to figure it out on their own or ask another student. Read More

my notes from the session

Showing My Work

nancy 2 Comments

Today, I attended the excellent 80s themed HB Tech Fest, put on by the Huntington Beach Union High School District. The keynote by Amy Burvall was thought-provoking; I also attended an excellent session by Moss Pike on design thinking (I thought I knew what it was, but I was wrong; I am definitely going to be learning more about it in the near future) and an equally excellent session on PopcornMaker, where Dan Bennett introduced me to a web web tool that allows the user to annotate videos by adding text, other videos, links, interactive maps and other content. I had never heard of it, but now that I know it exists, I plan to make extensive use of it.

However, the session that made the most immediate impact on me was the one led by David Theriault. All of the morning sessions addressed different chapters of Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon; David’s was on Chapter 3, Share Something Small Every Day. As I read the chapter, I took down some notes. I realized that I have had this blog for over a year, but haven’t really posted as much as I should have. Read More