PCS Tuesday Tech Talks

Best of all, you will get help and time to practice building a video lesson for your students. In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to create interactive video lessons to engage all learners. Mark your calendar for this opportunity to transform your classroom with help from the folks at Edpuzzle!

NOTE: To make the best use of your time, we encourage you to bring a link to a video you would like to use with your students. That might be a favorite video from YouTube, or one of the 3,924 videos in the Edpuzzle Originals Library, or maybe a video you have made yourself. Any video will work! Put Edpuzzle on your calendar for Thursday, December 7 at 4:30pm.

-November 14, 2023

Hour of Code: December 4-8

Last year we shared a variety of resources for participating in the Hour of Code, but if you don’t teach computer science, you might be wondering how coding is relevant for your students. So this year we thought we would share some of the reasons you and your students might want to dip your toes in the water of coding.

But first: if you are looking for how to teach coding when you have no experience yourself, check out last year’s TechTalk here on the Hour of Code. Of the many resources offered, we especially like Code.org because it includes video tutorials and detailed lesson plans for students of all ages. This year Code.org has added lessons on A.I., including how it works, its ethics and implications. We also love the OctoStudio iPad app for elementary students.

My first experience with coding was with my 8th grade English class. Since computer games are another way of telling a story, I realized that coding a computer game could be a way to reinforce the narrative elements my students had been learning. They created games based on stories they had written, but students could also design games to reflect storylines in a book they have read. I wrote this article about the project and included classroom strategies and handouts. Students in history classes could also design and code games to demonstrate their understanding of stories from history.

Coding projects can offer the best of project-based learning as they teach computer science along with a variety of content area and “real world” work skills. For instance, this article explains how learning to code can build numerous cognitive areas that help students to think and process, such as:

Understanding logic
Applying algorithms
Improved memory skills
Complex problem-solving skills
Staying focused

This article includes examples of student coding projects across a range of academic areas:

5th grade Spanish students who programmed computers to produce bilingual, animated photo albums;
7th grade science students who modified the code behind climate models;
6th grade science students who programmed claymation plate tectonics to recreate the 2011 tsunami in Japan, the rise of the Himalayas, and the 1904 San Francisco earthquake;
6th grade science students across an entire city who learned about food webs in forest ecosystems, and then coded those relationships and animated them with uploaded photos of their own flora and fauna paintings;
Middle school students who used MIT’s App Inventor to create apps “that will help their school community,” such as games, flash cards and translators.

If taking on a lengthy coding project seems too daunting, we encourage you to start with the Hour of Code. It can help you see what resources are available to you and your students, and it might also inspire ideas for extending the hour into a small project.

Check out more coding resources here on the EdTech Resource Hub.

-November 28, 2023

Coding with Ozobots

Watch your students’ eyes light up when they see Ozobots, the smallest (and arguably cutest) programmable robots in the world! We now have a class set of Ozobot robots available for you to check out for your classroom, along with pacing guides and lesson plans. Take a look:

The tiny brain of the Ozobot offers a great tool to teach the basics of programming in a fun and interactive way. Students can start screen-free with Color Codes, paper and markers to learn cause/effect, critical thinking and debugging. They can move to on-screen coding with Blockly, a visual block-based programming language with five skill levels from pre-reader to master coder. And your advanced coders can program Ozobot with Python.

You don’t have to be a computer science teacher to bring Ozobots and programming to your students. Just filter your Ozobot lesson search by grade level and subject area, and you’ll find lessons that incorporate coding into a variety of content areas.

In addition to a host of online resources (including videos, of course), you also have the support of your EdTech TOSA. I am available to meet with you to get you started with Ozobots and to co-teach with you to get your students going with programming Ozobots.

Let us know if you would like to check out our class set of Ozobots and if we can help you and your students get started. And happy Hour of Code Week to all who celebrate!

-December 5, 2023

Choose Your Own Adventure with Edpuzzle

Have you submitted a proposal to your site administrator for the January 8th Choose Your Own Adventure session? Those proposals are due Tuesday, December 19 and could offer time for you to learn more about Edpuzzle and prepare a video to use in class. More than a tool for bringing videos to your students, Edpuzzle provides a variety of ways to increase access and differentiate for your students through Universal Design for Learning.

To help you get started (or move ahead) with Edpuzzle, we have a recording of the December 7th webinar that Edpuzzle hosted for our district. Included in the webinar is information on how to:

Set up an Edpuzzle account and sync it with your Google Classroom;
Create or edit a video lesson: trim, add voiceover, notes, and questions (and use the new audio notes feature);
Access the new Edpuzzle Originals;
Engage students with Edpuzzle’s Live Mode;
Learn about new features and additional resources.

Ring in the New Year with Public Domain Day

While some of us celebrate the launch of a new year, there are others who wait with eager anticipation for Public Domain Day, which also falls on January 1st. That is the day that certain copyrights expire and their works enter into the public domain, free for all to use. While Public Domain Day may not be on your everyday radar, you might have heard some excitement over Disney’s Mickey Mouse entering the public domain this year.

But what exactly does “public domain” mean and how is it relevant to us and our students? Copyright laws and public domain can be complicated and confusing, yet we and our students need at least a basic understanding so we can avoid violating them.

(Copyright in the context of AI is a whole different beast currently being addressed by the U.S. Copyright Office; you can read more about it here.)

First, let’s define some terms:

Copyrights “cover creative works and prevent people from copying and adapting them without permission, with the goal of providing economic incentives to create and distribute cultural material." So our students need to know that no, they may not copy text from a website, paste it into their essay and submit it as their own.

No, they may not copy and use an image without permission from the creator; download music files or software; or record a movie while in a theater.

The public domain “includes not only works over which copyright has expired or never existed, but also uncopyrightable aspects of contemporary works — such as ideas, stock elements, and unoriginal material."

For instance, Disney often dips from the well of public domain: they took inspiration from Charlie Chaplin for Steamboat Willie; from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow

Queen for Frozen; from Shakespeare’s Hamlet for The Lion King; not to mention the many stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm and Victor Hugo that inspired a library of classic Disney movies.

So is Mickey Mouse now available for all of us to use in our work? No, only the original mouse from Steamboat Willie is in the public domain:

This means that Steamboat Willie and its characters can be used by anyone wishing to feature them in original stories or artwork, as long as it is clear that the work does not come from the Disney company. Your students might recognize the term remix, which refers to a piece of media that has been altered from its original by adding, removing or changing pieces of it. We can now legally remix and publish elements from Steamboat Willie. But the colorful, talking Mickey Mouse of today? Hands off - he is still protected by copyright and trademark.

A practical application in the classroom is the use of Google Images, which students often copy and paste into their work. With just three clicks your students can learn to use images legally:

After they have searched for a specific image, they should click on Tools, then on Usage Rights and Creative Commons licenses. Then they are free to use any of the images that show up. Note: if they refine their search and start again, they will need to filter again for Creative Commons images.

-January 9, 2024