Why Schools Don’t Educate
June 17, 2008 – 7:56 am1990 New York City Teacher of the Year acceptance speech by John Taylor Gatto.
Alice - Teaching Kids to Program in a 3D Environment
June 15, 2008 – 9:59 amAnother tool like Scratch, this one from Carnegie Mellon.
“Why Johnny Can’t Code”
June 15, 2008 – 9:51 am“BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched — but today there’s no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.”
Via Salon: “Why Johnny Can’t Code”
Educational Software Top Four
May 18, 2008 – 2:42 pmI really wanted this to be a top five, but I didn’t have another one that I felt like belonged with this group. All of these are completely free. Let me know in the comments what other resources deserve to be in this list.
#4 Phun
Phun is a work in progress, but has more than enough to keep you busy for hours. I quickly moved from just playing with simple actions and parts, learning what everything did, to recreating some of the machines shown in the video. Most were pretty easy. A little mastery, and I was on my way to imagining and building my own ideas.
#3 Tux Paint
Tux Paint is Paint for kids. Yeah…kids. Very SMART Board friendly.
#2 Scratch
Scratch is probably the most sophisticated of the bunch. Like Phun, it’s more a set of tools than a predefined objective. I actually once had second graders creating their own simple programs with Scratch and a little hand-holding. The kids that took best to this app were soon asking for help with creating their own ideas. The drag and drop interface is especially friendly to SMART Boards. Hands down, it’s the best introduction to programming I’ve seen for young students.
#1 Poisson Rouge
Poisson Rouge is free-form exploration at its best. If you’re familiar with constructionism and don’t know about this site, prepare to be giddy. It’s updated periodically, and you won’t find much in the way of instruction anywhere. There are hundreds of games focusing on color, sound, and action, and kids taught me some of the best features. I encouraged communication in my classroom, and I saw this site facilitate the best in that when students would share their discoveries. One student discovered red and white make pink. Students crowded around his screen to bear witness, then returned to their own stations to make sure it worked for them, too. The next boy discovered orange. That’s when it hit them–the discoveries weren’t pink and orange themselves, but that discoveries were possible at all. The gold rush was on, and the combinations were played out pretty quickly, but the students took this little secret of discovery on to the rest of the site with a lot of enthusiasm. Poisson Rouge deserves a post all its own, and it’ll get it soon enough.
Hello Y’all
May 13, 2008 – 8:01 amThis first post is just cranking the engine–I haven’t started driving yet. I have a domain and a host, and I’m currently using a Wordpress theme because building a site isn’t the goal. The content is the goal. In the spirit of tasks versus tools (a hopefully upcoming article), I’m focusing on the task. If I put too much of my attention on the tool (this site), it’d be forever before I started working on the actual point of it all, the articles.
Cheers.