Educating the Digital Generation

Scratch is one of my all-time teaching tools. It’s a powerful (and free) programming language specifically designed for children. It’s so simple that even children in junior primary school can use it.

This term, my Year Six students have been learning about probability and statistics. We have completed traditional hands-on maths activities involving dice, coins and spinners. However, we have also written short Scratch programs that involve random events. The engagement that the students have shown with the Scratch projects —- not to mention their depth of  understanding —- has been breathtaking.

In a classic example of ‘hiding the vegetables’, my students think that they are being allowed to play and create video games in class. In reality, though, they are learning a mountain of  different mathematical, logical and creative concepts. Here are some examples:

Student-created: Relative frequencies when rolling a die.

Dru created this Scratch app to keep track of how often each number occurred when you roll a six-sided die. He also included some special surprises: When you roll a five, Scratch the Cat changes colour. And when you roll a two, he dances!

Teacher-created: Simulation of two-up coin game.

This is a Scratch program that I wrote to show the most likely outcomes in the Australian coin game called ‘two-up’. Students can view the simulation in their web browser and then download the project and open it in Scratch to see how it worked (the 21st century equivalent of pulling a motor apart).

Student-created: Relative Frequency Bar Chart (or ‘Cat Race’)

Rochelle’s Scratch project consisted of a race between six cats. When the user presses the space bar, a random number is generated and that cat moves. One beautiful touch that she added was a multi-coloured trail behind the cats which magically forms a bar chart of the numbers that have been generated.

Teacher-created: Two-dice simulation

This project builds on Rochelle’s idea of using sprites (moving characters) to build a graph. However, it uses two dice and includes an on-off button to hide the sprites. As students watched this, I could see the lightbulbs turning on: All of a sudden, they could a visual link between probability, geometry, number and statistics.

Want to get started using Scratch?

Download a free copy of Scratch from the MIT lifelong kindergarten site. Then visit the Scratch Support page to watch free video tutorials and download  Scratch cards containing simple worked examples.

One warning: Scratch is addictive! It’s a great example of ‘hard fun’  —- the type of activity that makes learning enjoyable for children and adults alike.

Scratch is available free for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Perhaps I am unusual, but I love waiting rooms. I also enjoy lengthy plane rides and waiting for the bus. Why? Because the crazybusy life of a teacher, the opportunity to sit and read, uninterrupted, is the most precious of luxuries.

So as I contemplated the six hour car journey from Perth to Walpole, I anticipated a similar experience. My wife was happy to drive and I looked forward to a long relaxing day immersed in Walden, Thoreau’s rambling 19th century tale of life in the wilderness.

The car started and, straight away, the radio came on. Unfortunately, this music, which provided a soothing ambience for the driver, proved a distraction for me. The text that I was reading required mental effort and I found myself reading the same passages over and over again, not quite grasping the more subtle points that the author was making.

Then the kids in the car got up to their usual hijinks (playing travel games that seemed to involve punching one another depending on the colours of the passing cars). Our two year old got cranky and ended up watching Dora the Explorer on an iPad, another set of sounds seeping into my subconscious.

Conversations. Beautiful scenery. Changing light. Noise. Distractions. All while trying to maintain sustained mental effort.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. I could focus for short periods of time, but I couldn’t focus for the entire six hour journey.

Six hours. The length of an average school day.

It got me thinking. What must it be like to be a child who has difficulties maintaining their focus? No amount of positive thinking was going to help me focus in that car. No sticker chart, reward or threat would have made a bit of difference.

It’s not that I wasn’t smart enough. I didn’t lack motivation. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I just couldn’t focus in that environment.

So what can teachers do for children who have difficulty focusing? There is, of course, no single solution. Changing the environment, rewards, cognitive strategies and medication all have their place. But I believe our starting point must always be a sense of empathy.

There will never be a shortage of people ready to blame, criticise or label these children. Sure, they make some poor choices but don’t think for a minute that they don’t know this. Being the tenth person today to tell them to try harder won’t help a bit. What they need — what every child needs — is someone who accepts them for who they are and wants to help them grow. Be that person and you can change a child’s life forever.

Behaviour management is a key part of every teachers job. No matter how wonderful a class may be, every teacher needs a bag of tricks to keep their students focused on their learning and keeping to their class agreements.

Class Dojo is an amazing tool for achieving this. It is an online service which allows teachers to track their students’ behaviours — both positive and negative.

Because it is web-based, teachers can enter data using any device that is connected to the web — e.g. a phone, iPad or laptop computer. If they wish, teachers can use a projector to display each student’s score against a customisable monster-style avatar. Sounds can be turned on or off if you wish to publicise (or tactically ignore) student behaviour. My students love checking the scores regularly to see how we are progressing towards our goal of 3000 points (which earns them half an hour of free time).

Class Dojo has several great advantages over traditional behaviour management systems (such as writing names on the board). First, it is an overwhelmingly positive system. As a teacher, you tend to ‘catch kids being good’. Our class is currently running at 97% positive behaviour.

Secondly, behaviour can be tracked over time. While 97% is a great effort, I can’t wait to see that number getting closer and closer to 100% as the year progresses.

Finally, the system brings parents into the process. Using a ‘secret code’, parents can sign up for a weekly email which advises them of their child’s behaviour during the week. These real-time updates can enlist parents’ support to avoid minor issues turning into major ones.

This idea is spreading like wildfire through my school so it is only a matter of time before the team at Class Dojo starts charging for their service.  Class Dojo is currently free and, according to their website, will always remain free for teachers who sign up now. So what are you waiting for?

After a week of randomised seating arrangements (created using the wonderful Triptico app), it was time to assign my Year Six class to their permanent seats.

Based on their experience in the first week, I asked the children to nominate the names of six children that they would like to sit with. This process yielded a great deal of useful data that I used to create a sociogram — a visual representation of the class’s social structure. The sociogram wasn’t shared with the class but allowed me to quickly identify children with high levels of influence in the group as well as students at risk of becoming isolated.

I then created five groups, ensuring that each child had at least one friend in their group. Based upon the sociogram, I ensured that each group had a mixture of leaders, followers and different personality types.

Then came the fun part — letting the children know which group they were in. Using the Harry Potter books as an inspiration, I created a Keynote presentation which simulated the process of kids being assigned to Hogwarts houses by the Sorting Hat. It worked beautifully, with the children being welcomed into their new houses with cheers and thunderous applause.  It was a moment that the students and I will remember for a long time. Every child felt welcome, every child had a friend in their group and I had a seating plan that (hopefully) will allow learning to flourish.

Photo Credit: comiquero via Compfight cc

For most children today, Google seems to be the natural starting point when researching a new topic. The difficulty, of course, is that most content on the web is written for adults. As a result, young children often have difficulty making sense of any information that they do manage to find.

Luckily, Google has a hidden feature which allows students to filter their results by reading level. They simply enter their search term as usual and then click the ‘gears’ button in the top right-hand corner of the results page. This enables them to select from range of ‘advanced search’ settings, including the ability to specify the reading level that they would like returned.

By selecting either a basic, intermediate or advanced reading level, students will be assured of receiving only pages that they can understand. This simple step will save many minutes of ineffective ‘scrollerskating’ and frustrating attempts at reading adult-level texts.

It is also worth exploring Google’s other advanced search options. My particular favourite is the ability to exclude a particular term from your search results (For example, the term ‘Abyssinian’ but not the term ‘cat’, ‘Windows’ but not ‘Microsoft’, ‘Apple’ but not ‘fruit’).

For me, this demonstrates the big shift that is needed in how schools think about research. In less than twenty years, we have moved from a world where ‘knowledge is power’ to a TMI (Too Much Information!) world. These days, the key skill is knowing how to filter the mass of information available to find the one piece of information that meets your specific needs.

Just as children in the past learned the Dewey decimal system to find books in a physical library, learning how to use Google effectively is a vital step in becoming a 21st century researcher.

The days of teachers simply handing out worksheets are over (or, at least they should be!). However, there are now times when teachers will want to distribute digital material to students. Here is a quick and easy way to do it.

Step 1: Sign up for Dropbox

If you haven’t already got a Dropbox account, you need to sign up now! This fantastic free service lets you sync files across all of the computers, phones and digital devices that you own. However, that’s not all it can do!

Step 2: Save the file in your Dropbox public folder

Files that you save in your Dropbox public folder can be accessed by anyone with a web browser. This is the perfect place to save files that you want your students to access (Just don’t save your electronic banking details in here!)

Step 3: Copy the public link for the file that you have saved.

This is a simple matter of either right-clicking (Windows users) or control-clicking (Mac Users) on the file that you have saved and selecting ‘Copy Public Link’.

Step 4: Shorten the Public Link

You could, in theory, stop at Step 3 and give your students a link like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6068864/Quick%20Start%20Guide.pdf

However, this is a bit cumbersome for students to type in. To make things easier, visit a link-shortening service such as tinyurl.com. These services allow you to create a link that is easy for your students to remember and type. Simply paste in the public link that you created in Step 3 and shorten it to something memorable like tinyurl.com/thatseasy.

You are now finished! All your students have to do is open any web browser and type in the short address that you give them. What could be simpler!

Dropbox picture under creative commons licence courtesy of flickr user pvantees.