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AIS Integrators Conference 2014 Part 2 Time is slipping away since the AIS conference on September 16. I am trying to work through my notes and resources and post. Unfortunately I have no images for this one sorry. :-( This is the second post on the AIS conference held in September. You can read my first post here . Setting up a media team +Chris Woldhuis (@cwoldhuis) This year was asked to oversee the student council media team we have a digital display. It started off well but has not been embraced the way I would have liked.  I attended Chris' session to see what Northern Beaches Christian School has done with their media team. Chris is passionate about his media and has been making videos since he was a kid. He has found a team of like minded and very knowledgable students to be on his team.  The school has two teams, Media Team (video, photography) Production Team (sound, light and visuals) The media team has set roles for students. Head of video Head

Association for Independent Schools IT Integrators Conference 2014 Two days of connecting and information information about  computational thinking,  makerspaces,  coding,  the Australian Curriculum, and  inquiry learning. Now for the hard part, to take what I have learnt and implement it. For future reference I have decided to summarise my experience of the conference. There were lots of amazing speakers unfortunately I could not attend as many as I would have liked. This is the first part of a series of posts about the conference. The Twitter feed #AISITIC14  an amazing wealth of resources, links, quotes, pics and a small amount of silliness. An AIS conference is not complete without  +Amanda Hogan   ‏ @hogesonline  sketch notes. She has graciously given me permission to use her summaries as a part of my blog. Grok Learning - James Curran  +Grok Learning   @GrokLearning What a great keynote. He spoke on the importance of Computational Thinking in the K-12 classro

Educational value of coding There has been discussion on the value of coding. Does teaching coding to Primary aged students steal valuable teaching time from literacy and maths. What does coding teach? Ultimately reading, writing and spelling skills are among the most important skills students take from education. Communication empowers people to learn and do more with their life. Skills taught in coding Coding teaches Logic - work through an order of steps Perseverance -  must solve the problem Problem solving Reading if following online tutorials Group work Coding can be used to teach Procedure writing Recounts Descriptions Information Reports Expositions Maths - 2 D shapes and angles Some of my most enthusiastic coders are average spellers and readers. One student was receiving ed support and I didn't know. Coding is a motivation to read. I have other students who are poor spellers. When typing code in HTML,  codeacademy ,  pencilcode.net  students learn p

This is the 3rd post in a series on coding with girls. See  Part 1  and  Part 2  if you would like some background. Over the last few weeks I have had consistent numbers with about 15 students showing up each time. I have launched a website for the students so my resources are in the same place and easily accessed. kodeklubbers.weebly.com . I have now added and will continue to build the teaching resources and some information on our makerspace  facilitated by Matt Richards , teaching resources and apps . These are all works in progress so check back regularly for new resources. Observations The main programs the girls like are scratch and kodu . Both visual programming tools. Some of the girls are enjoying working through the learn.code.org tutorials and blockly , both scratch style programs. I had some boys ask to attend the club last week and not wanting to discourage them I allowed them to get a computer and sit in a separate area. It was interesting that 2 girls came