Arts Education

I had a great experience this week with  FreeConferenceCall . I had assembled a committee of people from all over Ohio and we needed to meet to finalize a recommendation. Rather than try to get to one location, we used  FreeConferenceCall  to meet digitally. It was so easy. I downloaded the desktop app and clicked the video button to begin the meeting. I could invite people by email or share a link. As people joined the meeting, they showed up on the right of the screen. If they used a webcam, we could all see up to five video feeds. If they called in, they had a white placeholder screen with their name or phone number. I had considered a couple of other similar services, but what swayed me toward this one was that many people could participate at once. I only needed space for 12 participants (2 more than Google Hangouts allows), but  FreeConferenceCall l allows for 1000 participants! That was just one of many things I liked. Here are some of the others: When someone...

Dalton created a chicken nugget game controller. Kids bitsboxing during Genius Hour. In my last post I mentioned the inclusion of a Genius Hour into coding camp. The addition of an extra day this year created some found time in our camp structure. With a plethora of new coding apps and tools coming out all the time, we decided to allow for free exploration of a variety of these tools at the end of camp each day. Our daily routine at coding camp includes completed the unplugged and computer-based activities provided by code.org . We also schedule time to work with ozobots. When we finished those projects, we set up centers around our room where students could choose coding activities to further explore. Our coding centers included: Robot Turtles (a coding board game) Osmo Coding app Osmo Coding Jam app Code.org Artist and Play Labs Scratch Ozobots Bitsbox LightUp Tesla app Makey Makey As high school teachers managing upper elementary students, we really weren't sure what to expe...

Last week I co-hosted our second annual Coding Camp for students entering fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. This year our camp expanded from four half days to five, so with that change came some new activities. One of them was the addition of Genius Hour (more on that in a subsequent post) where we encouraged campers to explore an application of coding that interested them. One of the more popular selections was the new Osmo Coding Jam . Osmo is an attachment for your iPad that allows a child to play with Osmo toys in front of the iPad and interact with the Osmo apps on the iPad. There are nine different apps, with more on the way, that target everything from language arts to math to art. Read more of my thoughts on Osmo here . In a post a year ago, I highlighted Osmo's Coding app . This spring Osmo released Coding Jam, an app that creates music by arranging coding blocks. I tested out the app before camp. Though the app is very intuitive, users begin with a tutorial mode that ask...