Last night I had an opportunity to present a free, evening webinar for the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s Educational Technology Division, as part of a series they hosted to prepare teachers for Computer Science Education Week. The title of my presentation was, “Developing Computational Thinking with Scratch Coding.” The webinar recording is 1 hour and 11 minutes long, and my presentation slides are also available via Google Slides. All these presentation resources are available on my presentation handouts website using the shortened URL wfryer.me/scratch.
During the webinar, which was hosted on WebEx, I shared several videos. This helpful, 4 minute video tutorial showed me the process and steps of sharing a pre-recorded video successfully during a WebEx webinar, and it seemed to work very well. I was glad to not only watch that video in advance, but also have an opportunity to test my slides and videos in WebEx in advance with SDE staff.
The first video I shared during the webinar was the 2013 Code.org video, “What Most Schools Don’t Teach.” This is one of my favorite videos to show students and parents to encourage an interest in coding. It’s especially notable since it features several famous people including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. This is a video I used to have on the homepage of my STEM curriculum website, and still have on the site’s subpage for the Hour of Code.
The second video I shared was “Rainbow Race Scratch Project by Wyatt,” which is a Scratch project “show and tell” quick edit video from 2013 by a student I co-taught in a 5 day Spring Break Scratch Camp. The “Reflections” page of that Scratch Camp resource wiki has several more compelling student Scratch videos like this one.
I also mentioned (but did not play) this short video clip of Google CEO Sundar Pichai in May 2017 explaining how Google is pivoting from a “mobile first” to an “AI first” approach in all its products and services. I explained this has big implications for all of us and how we need to be introducing the basics of coding / computational thinking to ALL students. I referenced my November 4, 2017 presentation (available as an audio podcast) “Teaching and Learning in an AI First World” from G Camp OKC, if people want to hear more about those ideas.
In addition to watching and listening to the webinar archive, I encourage you to check out the “Scratch Camp” wiki I’ve been building and adding curriculum to since 2012. The May 2017 “Scratch Day” agenda and resource page has good suggested Scratch activities. The March 2013 Spring Break Scratch Camp “videos” page has some more of my all-time favorite coding related motivational clips, including the “Intel Rockstar Video,” “Keep Moving Forward” (from one of my favorite movies, “Meet the Robinsons”) and “Nokia – The Fourth Screen.” I didn’t share these in the webinar, but if you’re introducing students to coding, computer science and STEM/STEAM, they are definitely worth watching and passing along at some point!
If you watch the recorded webinar and find it interesting / useful / worthwhile, please let me know with a comment below or by reaching out on Twitter @wfryer.
Also be sure to check out my wife’s recorded webinar video and Google Slides from her presentation Wednesday night this week in the same series, “Helping Students Learn Coding with Scratch Jr. and PBS Kids Scratch Jr.”
Happy Scratching!
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Source : Developing Computational Thinking with Scratch Coding (webinar video)
