On CUE
Educate. Innovate. Explore.
KIDS & CODING
Coding Defined + Resources
Kids Find Value in Obtaining
Programming Skills
Teaching Something
That Actually Matters
Mobile Tools Bring Coding
Opportunities to Learners of all Ages
Tech and Teaching
Spring 2014 | Vol. 36 | No. 1
Bits and Bytes
Vote! CUE Board of Directors Candidates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
CUE SF: Newest CUE Affiliate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Administrator’s Corner: Creativity, Problem Solving, Career-Readiness:
Administrators’ Perspectives Toward Coding In K12 Schools
Jason Borgen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Legislative Advocacy: Local Control and the Future of Educational
Technology in California
John Cradler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
CONTENTS
Editor
Sara Armstrong, PhD
[email protected]
Design
Kesler Communications
keslercommunications.com
Contributing Writers
Barbara Bray, John Cradler,
Robert EM Craven, Tim Landeck,
Melody McGill, David Thornburg
2013-2014
CUE Board of Directors
Robert EM Craven, President
[email protected]
Ray Chavez, Vice President/Treasurer
[email protected]
Lainie Rowell, Secretary
[email protected]
Kyle Brumbaugh, Member at Large
[email protected]
David Malone, Member
[email protected]
Diana Paradise, Member
[email protected]
Suzanne Mitchell, Member at Large
[email protected]
Andrew Schwab, Member
[email protected]
Roger Wagner, Member
[email protected]
CUE promotes and supports the
effective use of technology in the
educational community.
Mike Lawrence,
Executive Director
[email protected]
CUE, 877 Ygnacio Valley Road,
Suite 200, Walnut Creek, CA 94596
Phone 925.478.3460 | Fax
925.934.6799 | [email protected]
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Features
Coding Defined + Resources
Bonnie Bracey Sutton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
Kids Find Value in Obtaining Programming Skills
Shauna Hawes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Teaching Something That Actually Matters
Steven Abell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Mobile Tools Bring Coding Opportunities to Learners of all Ages
Lucie deLaBruere. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Tech and Teaching
LeVar Burton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Departments
Professional Development: Kids, Coding, PD – Oh My!
Barbara Bray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Technology Coordinator: Guide On The Side, or How I Learned
To Stop Worrying And Love Accept Knowing Less Than My Students
Craig Miller. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
The CUE Review: Make the Turtle Do What??!!
And Other Creative Possibilities
Melody McGill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Columns
Upfront: Programming for Success for Our Students—
Today and Tomorrow
Robert EM Craven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
The Bleeding Edge: Computer Programming for Children
David D. Thornburg, PhD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
On IT with CETPA: A Roundtable Discussion About CCSS:
What’s Involved and How Do We Get There? Part I
Lisa Kopochinski. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
CUE Information & Forms:
Infinite Thinking Machine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
California Student Media Festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
CUE Professional Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Innovative Educator Advanced Studies Certificate. . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
CUE West Coast Summit featuring Google for Education . . . . . . 19
CUE Membership Application. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Leadership 3.0 Symposium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Annual CUE Conference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
UpFront Robert EM Craven , CUE Board President
Programming for Success for Our Students
—Today and Tomorrow
From sports stars to music icons, the President of the United States
to billionaires, everyone is pitching our students to learn computer
programming. Clearly, programming and computer science are now
essential for today’s students. Given this new “celebrity” status for
programming, there’s a growing chorus encouraging educators to
begin integrating computer science into our classes. Fortunately, it’s
never been easier.
The explosion in the last few years of hardware and software to feed
children’s curiosity is unbelievable. Raspberry-Pi, Makey-Makey, Lego
Mindstorms, Sphero, and NAO each offer budding programmers easy
hardware opportunities to program and interact with the world. On
the software side, preschoolers laugh while making Daisy the Dinosaur
flip, rotate, and enlarge, while older students are challenged to learn
basic program skills to build routines in Cargo Bot. Meanwhile, Lego
Mindstorms, code.org, codehs, and more allow middle schoolers and
above to begin stretching their programming knowledge.
We all know that today’s generation
of students needs a myriad of skills to
be successful, far beyond reading and
writing; but just as those form the basics
to a quality education, so too should
programming.
Unfortunately, save a nationally promoted week here or random high
school elective there, computer programming is underrepresented in our
schools. Given the low cost hardware and software currently available
on the market, as educators we are afforded a wonderful opportunity to
integrate programming into our courses. During the last few centuries,
reading and writing were essential to a successful life, becoming
cornerstones of school curriculum. We all know that today’s generation
of students needs a myriad of skills to be successful, far beyond reading
and writing; but just as those form the basics to a quality education, so
too should programming. The analytical and mathematical skills, and
understanding of not only how things work and how to control those
items in this increasingly interconnected world, are all essential elements
today’s students can learn through programming. Integrating these
concepts into the modern curriculum is a tremendous but beneficial
challenge for educators.
4 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
My 10-year-old son, Miguel Angel (pictured above), who enjoys
programming, “because it’s like controlling small worlds,” likens the
process of programming to shopping in a mall. “When you step in the
door, it’s your start point, the hallways are the routes or units to get to
the stores, and the stores are filled with information you need. You must
learn to navigate to that information, combine it with other knowledge,
and then get to the final store that is the endpoint.” He and many
students enjoy the “mission” aspect in programming that is “fun, and at
the same time you are thinking, changing things, and learning.”
The wonder in each of these products is multifaceted. Be it using
bananas to control Mario with a Makey-Makey, building a Lego robot
to pick up red balls, or designing a Minecraft world, today’s students,
teachers, and parents are able to insert laughter, joy, and learning into
life. The added bonus is that underneath all the laughter and smiles,
learning is taking root. CUE Robert EM Craven is an educator with a
technology obsession. An educator for over 15 years,
Robert quickly realized the impact technology
made on his teaching and student learning; this
discovery started him on his endless journey into
the integration, development, and practice of
technology and curriculum. Robert is the Director
for Technology and Media Services in the Fullerton School District,
an Apple Distinguished Educator, Google Certified Teacher, and was
recognized as one of the five “Best of ISTE” presenters in 2007, 2009,
and 2010. Robert currently serves as President of the CUE Board of
Directors. [email protected]
The Bleeding Edge David D. Thornburg, PhD
Computer Programming for Children
When personal computers came on the market in the late 1970’s,
they all had one similar characteristic—they entered a marketplace
devoid of applications. Instead, it was thought that users would craft
programs of their own. To facilitate this, the first computers on the
market (Commodore PET, TRS-80 Model 1, and Apple II) came
with a simple programming language, BASIC (Beginners All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code), built in. This language was developed at
Dartmouth to allow non-scientists to easily write their own programs.
A then-small company (Microsoft) took the ideas behind this language
and adapted it to personal computers with the result that dialects of
BASIC were built into the firmware of most personal computers.
When personal computers came into schools, the assumption was that
students would write their own programs. Even after some rudimentary
word processors and graphics programs were created, programming was
still pretty high on the list of things kids would do once they had access
to computers.
Right Idea, Wrong Language
While BASIC was free, it had an inelegance that led to the creation of
programs that were hard to read, and hard to debug. All variables, for
example, were global. This means that if the letter S was set to some
value early on in the program, this value would often be used a few
pages away when the author may have forgotten the value originally set
to the variable (variable names tended to be single letters in those days).
Other confusing aspects of BASIC included the strange use of the equal
sign. For example, the statement,
K=K+2
is an instruction to change the current value of K to the old value plus
two. Algebraically, this is an incorrect use of the equal sign, but there it
was to bring confusion to all! Much more could be said about the early
forms of BASIC, but suffice it to say that, while free, it was not the
optimal programming language for children.
The Rise of Logo
Long before the advent of personal computers, MIT professor Seymour
Papert felt that children could learn amazing things by working with
the correct programming language. So, in collaboration with some
colleagues, the Logo programming language was born in 1967 by
Danny Bobrow, Wally Feurzig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon.
The work was done at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, a major consulting
firm in the Boston area, and the decision was made to create Logo
along similar lines to the professional programming language, LISP.
While much easier to learn than LISP, Logo supported the use of good
programming practices to the point where adept Logo programmers
could easily transition into LISP if they wanted.
Early versions of Logo controlled a floor robot (called a turtle) that
could be used to draw pictures. Papert’s idea was that, by thinking about
what kids would do if they were to trace out a path themselves, they
could write programs to create this shape on the computer.
For example, if you wanted to create a square path for the turtle to
follow, you could write:
repeat 4 [ fd 10 rt 90 ]
Where fd means “forward” and rt means “turn right.” In this example,
10 is the numbers of “steps” the turtle takes, and 90 is the amount the
turtle turns, in degrees. Once computers with graphical display screens
became available, versions of Logo were created that allowed the turtle
to exist virtually on the display screen and draw lines to indicate its
path. While Logo could do far more than draw pictures, most school
applications of Logo focused on the creation of pictures on the screen.
Papert maintained that when the picture didn’t reflect the intention of
the student, powerful learning could take place through the process of
“debugging” the program to make it work properly.
Unlike BASIC, variables in Logo were generally local, meaning they
only had meaning within a procedure. For example, the procedure
shown below draws a five-pointed star on the screen with the side length
of :size. (Note, Logo distinguishes between the name of a variable and
its value, thus avoiding confusion.)
to star :size
repeat 5 [ fd :size rt 144 ]
end
To draw a star with a side length of 50, you would then type
star 50
In fact, every procedure in Logo “extends” the language to incorporate
this new command.
Continued on page 26
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
|5
Feature Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Coding Defined + Resources
Coding ˈkōdiNG/ noun
the process of assigning a code to something for the
purposes of classification or identification.
You may know coding as programming. Coding is the act of writing
a program in a programming language. So when people say you will
need to know coding, they are saying you need to know two things.
You need to know the language and you need to know how to use the
language. It is easier to show an example of coding than to explain it
(see code.org/learn).
could also learn a lot by attending a CSTA Conference, which features
workshops, mentors, and classroom applications.
You’ve seen the craze for learning code. But what exactly is coding?
Coding is what makes it possible for us to create computer software,
apps, and websites. Your browser, your OS, the apps on your phone,
Facebook, and the Code website—they’re all made with code.
For example, Code.org offers tutorials. CodeHS (codehs.com) provides
experiences and an online curriculum designed specifically for high
school classrooms.
Here’s a simple example of code, written in the Python programming
language:
print ‘Hello, world!’
Many code tutorials use that command as their very first example,
because it’s one of the simplest examples of code you can have—it
‘prints’ (displays) the text ‘Hello, world!’ on the screen. See a code.org’s
video that explains coding: “What Most Schools Don’t Teach”
(cue.tc/MostSchools).
CS4HS
The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) is a membership
organization that supports and promotes the teaching of computer
science and other computing disciplines (see www.csta.acm.org).
CSTA provides opportunities for K–12 teachers and students to better
understand the computing disciplines and to more successfully prepare
themselves to teach and learn. There is outreach to teachers in this
program for professional development, including promoting CS4HS.
CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) is an initiative sponsored
by Google to promote computer science and computational thinking
in high school and middle school curricula. With a gift from Google’s
Education Group, universities develop two- or three-day workshops
for local high school and middle school computer science teachers.
These workshops incorporate informational talks by industry leaders,
and discussions on new and emerging computer science curricula at
the high school and middle school levels, including coding. On the
CSTA site, you’ll find information on how to apply for a CS4HS grant,
information for workshop attendees and partners, and other helpful
resources. CS4HS funding is currently offered in the US, Canada,
Europe, Middle East, Africa, China, New Zealand, and Australia. You
6 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
Coding for Kids
Many offerings can be found online that promote and teach coding to
students from very young years through high school.
Codeacademy After School (www.codeacademy.com/afterschool)
presents a complete online afterschool program for a coding club.
Tynker (www.tynker.com) offers a programming course for 4th to
8th graders.
Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), produced by the Lifelong Kindergarten
Group at MIT, challenges children and adults access to “learn to code;
code to learn.”
Coding increases creativity and critical thinking as students develop
their ideas and translate them to the screen or tablet. Communication
skills grow as students think through their ideas with their peers and
share their work with the online world. Let’s harness this opportunity
to help students become producers, not just consumers, in our
technological world. CUE Bonnie Bracey Sutton is a teacher agent of change
who has taught in many different types of schools and
who has traveled to many countries in the name of
technology. She worked with President Clinton and
Vice President Gore on the initiation of the use of
the Internet in schools 20 years ago and she is still
trying to help schools broaden engagement for women
and minorities in technology. Her interests are social justice, digital equity,
computational thinking, STEM, and digital citizenship. She currently is
working with Yvonne Andres in a US/Russia Social Expertise Exchange
(SEE) Initiative, and has traveled to Russia to explore and share best
practices. She is a member of the Autodesk Educational Advisory Board and
is the educational director of Wired Safety.Org.
[email protected]
Feature Shauna Hawes
Kids Find Value in Obtaining
Programming Skills
“I need a couple of volunteers.”
These words came from D., a student with autism, whose previous
interactions with other general education students had been filled with
suspicion and accusations. This time, he had created an interactive game
using Scratch. He had labored for days to make his helicopter blades
move, he had beta-tested this with friends, and he had very diligently
worked through every detail that he had hosted in his mind. When the
volunteers came forward, D. patiently taught them the key strokes that
would command their helicopters, and then stepped back and beamed
as they played HIS game, and then as other students asked and begged
to have a turn.
As educators, we have correlated the connection between students
reading well and writing well. Our students have become comfortable
users of technology, and the next step is having the students use
technology to support and even to demonstrate their learning.
In a recent training on math and C++ programming at UC Davis,
Dr. Harry Cheng pointed out that traditional algebra practice presents
problems to be solved and encourages students to find answers.
However, having the students create programs to solve the challenges
allowed them to identify the variables and the steps involved in solving
the problem. This is the goal of Common Core—to have students be
able not only to solve the problem but also to understand the logic and
sequence of the process. As I grew up viewing math as irrelevant to
anything I would ever do, I can sympathize with those students who feel
lost and disconnected from math. However, when designing a program
that made the computer DO the calculations for me in a recent
training, I realized that I would have not even realized how much math
I was doing and I would have loved the challenge of it all.
In a programming environment such as Scratch, students have to follow
the logic and sequence challenges as well. They have to have a sense of
order, but also get to be creative and unique in their own ways. Scratch
has a library full of student samples where students can take ideas and
mix them with their own projects to create unique outcomes.
I surveyed my 7th and 8th graders with these questions: Should we
teach programming in school? Why or why not? Repeatedly, they
referenced potential careers, a topic I have never discussed with them.
My favorite comment came from one of my students who wrote: “I think we should teach programming in school because we might
use it later in life and we [will] have experience. I also think it would
come in handy to have those kind of skills. It kind of came in handy
for me because the other day I was using Scratch at home. My mom
has been trying to teach my little sister to memorize her alphabet and
numbers, so I decided to create something in Scratch that will help her.
I created a skit that she can learn from and she has memorized most of
her alphabets as well as her numbers. I think programming is something
that should be taught because it can be very useful.”
I THINK ...
... that you should
teach programming
in schools. It would
help people do things
on computers like make
games, fix things you think are
wrong, and make websites to get
together more. –Kevin
... that students should learn programming in school
because it’s a whole new way of learning things. People
can use programming for life after school, programming is
also used in lots of careers like Business and Tech. –Olivia
... that we should be taught programs. I think that it will
better our wisdom in technology and give us opportunities
to learn new things. –Lauren
... we should [teach programming] because when you
become a robot maker you could program it and stuff.
Also you could program a medical computer to help
people. –Hien
... we should because it is essential for our jobs in the
future; well, at least the one I want to get –Julian
My middle school technology students have already worked with
Scratch, and will soon begin working in the student-friendly C++
environment designed by Dr. Cheng and his team at Davis. We look
forward to the challenges that programming will bring, and can’t wait to
share our successes. CUE A teacher for over 15 years, Shauna Hawes has
a passion for using technology to support student
achievement. Currently she teaches technology classes
full-time to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders.
In 2007, she was named East Bay CUE Teacher
of the Year, and Teacher of the Year for Alameda
and Contra Costa Counties, plus Mt. Diablo Unified School District’s
Teacher of the Year. Since 2008, she’s worked with the Oracle Education
Foundation to teach teachers about 21st Century Learning, including
project-based learning, in northern and southern California, other states,
and in Romania. She is the lead in her district’s piloting of Google Apps for
Education, and her latest project at Valley View Middle School has been to
implement Mouse Squad—a student tech leadership program.
[email protected]
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
|7
Feature Steven T. Abell
Teaching Something That
Actually Matters
I remember, back in the ‘90s, reading an article in the San Jose
Mercury News about CD-ROMs. In this article, some educators
expressed a need for grant funding to learn how to make these
things, so they could teach their students. One teacher said that if
they didn’t get the funding for this training, their students would
soon be teaching them how to do it.
It is embarrassing to count the kinds of wrong in this, and yet these
people said these things right out in public. I wish this kind of
experience were rare. It is not. I read about such things all the time.
As a software developer who has built several successful development
teams, I just shake my head.
One of the liabilities of the computing business is its eternally high
Gee Whiz quotient. Teachers see the latest expression of Gee Whiz,
think it is significant, and believe they must teach that so their
students will be up to date.
Unless you are determined to waste everyone’s time, that’s not how
it works.
How can you identify something about computing that is worth
teaching? Let me pose an analogy:
Consider the Human Being. Even our best specimens are not very
strong. We cannot fly, or even run very fast. Our sense of smell is
abysmal, and our hearing is not all that great. Our visual acuity is
mediocre. We have no claws or teeth that any other creature needs
to fear, neither do we possess chemical or electrical repellents. We
have no spines or thick skin to protect us, or camouflage to hide
our inadequacies. How do we even manage to stay alive? There are
three reasons.
First, while our vision is unexceptional in terms of pixel density, we
have fairly good depth perception.
Second, while we are not as adept at manipulation as some other
creatures, our hands are at least better than average at this.
Third, and most importantly, we are the creature that mutates in
software. What does that mean? Think about the other animals
that share our planet. Ask yourself how they live, and the answer
appears in two levels: how they use their physical attributes to adopt
a particular mode of living. As we have just discussed, our physical
attributes are unremarkable. But we have the ability to adopt a large
number of widely divergent modes of living. When other creatures’
environmental niches disappear, they usually become extinct, unless
Mr. Darwin manages to find them a way out. When our current
8 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
niche disappears, we learn another one and go on, and often several
times in the same lifetime. We hunt, gather, farm, fish, dig, build, on
and on, nearly ad infinitum. More than any other animal, we can learn
to live in many different ways, in many different environments. As long
as we are free to think, we are the Anything Animal.
Now consider the computer. It does only a dozen or so things, and none
of these things counts for much on its own. Look at it up close, and a
computer is close to useless. The only reason anyone builds computers
is because the nearly useless things computers do can be composed
together in flexible sequences, which the computer can then carry out
so bloody awful fast. Because of this, it replaces any number of specialpurpose devices that are actually more efficient. More than any other
machine, it can learn to live in many different ways, in many different
environments. It is the Anything Machine.
As you think about teaching computing to your students, if you ever
stray very far from this understanding of what a computer is and why
we build them, you are missing the point, and missing it badly.
As a consumer of your wares, I am telling you not to teach any
particular “technology” or application program. I especially do not want
you to teach any particular brand of product. This means you should
not be teaching Word or Excel or PowerPoint, even more especially if
what you are teaching has a year or release number attached to it. If you
do this, you are by definition creating your students as products that
will already be obsolete by the time they hit the market. You must teach
your students what kinds of things these programs do. Help them to
understand why such things are useful, valuable, and important. You
might also help your students learn to read and write manuals, and
how to spot software that is badly designed. If you feel obligated to
teach Word or Excel or PowerPoint, you will be wise to show different
versions, or, better yet, show competing programs by other vendors,
so students can see how the same software ideas can be presented
As you think about teaching computing to your students, if you ever stray very far
from [the] understanding of what a computer is and why we build them, you are
missing the point, and missing it badly.
in different ways, and understand that the latest version might not
necessarily be an improvement.
I would rather see you teach your students how to think, and
incidentally how to think in terms of computing. Here is a list to
start with:
a relationship between sets that are essentially
0 Isomorphism:
the same.
things in the world in terms of numbers, and
1 Modeling
understanding the difference between continuous (analog)
and discrete (digital) models.
structures: arrays, stacks, queues, trees, lattices, linked
2 Data
lists, etc., their time properties and their projection onto
one-dimensional space.
that computers don’t actually do arithmetic.
3 Understand
They do something that is somewhat like arithmetic. You
need to know what they actually do, so you can use it
effectively and safely as arithmetic.
a style of thinking that is sequential, precise,
4 Programming:
and reflective. Or, as computer scientist Adele Goldberg
says, knowing who knows what when.
between different language forms (for example:
5 Translations
prefix, infix, and postfix), and why and when one might
prefer one form over another.
6
Neumann Machine: the dominant conceptual model
7 Von
of computer architecture.
Function, object, and inference: higher-order models of
software thought.
Yes, you can teach these things to children, even young children. Every
person conquers all of these ideas or their close relatives at a very young
age. Then they bury them under layers and layers of subconscious
optimization and shortcuts. Learning software-think is a deliberate act
of lowering one’s consciousness, so these ideas can once again become
visible for what they are. If they all seem to have large or arcane words
attached to them, perhaps it is because, by the time anyone realized
these simple ideas even needed to be thought about, all the simple
words were already taken.
What tools should you use? Aside from a whiteboard, here are some
good choices: Forth, Smalltalk, Lisp, Prolog, APL. Start with Forth,
preferably one of the older implementations where it is easy to crash
the machine. Some people call these dead languages, but they are and
remain the big guns of computing. They are the big guns because
they are so incredibly simple. They offer execution models that are
easy to understand, and environments in which experimentation is
not only possible, but the way things are normally done. And they
do these things in ways that mask the more onerous properties of the
Von Neumann Machine. While most programming languages contain
at least a few regrettable design choices, there is no adequate reason
to use watered-down kiddie languages. Do not teach any but your
engineering-bound students anything like Java or C# or C++, and try
not to do it even then. When the time is right, and if you have done
your job well, they will learn these on their own faster than you can
teach them. Never teach anyone anything called BASIC.
The challenge for educators is to create right-sized projects that require
the use of the fundamental ideas outlined here. Here are some examples
for your students to create:
0Household thermostat
1 Automaton that navigates around obstacles to a goal
2Address book
3Word processor
4Spreadsheet
5Instant messenger
6Evolutionary optimizer
Yes, you read that right. Your elementary students can do these things,
and many more, if only you have adequate respect for their intellect and
the courage to teach them. By the time they get to high school, they will
be teaching you how to do things you never imagined. That’s the way it
should be. CUE Steven T. Abell is a Software Designer in and
around Silicon Valley. Starting with a degree in
mathematics, he has been in the software business for
nearly 35 years, working across a broad spectrum of
programming languages and product types. Steve is
often accused of having the only meaningful software
engineering interview that most people have ever
seen. He designs and implements products from the mundane to the exotic.
He also cleans up other people’s messes, and builds and manages highfunctioning software development teams. Steve doesn’t do websites.
[email protected]
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
|9
Mobile Tools Bring
Coding Opportunities to
Learners of all Ages
When the media puts the spotlight on some very young app
developers like 12-year-old Thomas Suarez and 9-year-old
Alexandra Jordan, it is easy to be impressed but also easy to dismiss
these children as outliers. But, when 50,000,000 students write
500,000,000 lines of code in seven days as part of the Hour of Code
event last November, it is hard to ignore the fact that “Kids can code,”
and they can learn to code at a very young age. Last year, Estonia made headlines as the first country to teach kids
how to code starting at the age of seven. Their goal is not to “start
churning out app developers of the future, but people who have
smarter relationships with technology, computers, and the web.”
Estonia wants to “change thinking that computers and programs are
just things as they are.”
But how young is too young? According to Professor J. Paul Gibson,
PhD, in a Wired article, “You can start teaching computer science before
students even know how to read and write.” Gibson’s research led him
to develop several games and puzzles that successfully teach kids aged 5
to 11 popular programming algorithms. As more mobile tablets are finding their way into the hands of our
younger learners, it is exciting to see the appearance of apps such as
Bee-Bot whose developers also believe that KIDS CAN CODE (cue.
tc/BeeBot). As supplier for the popular Bee-Bot and supporting
instructional materials for early elementary, TSS Group was one of the
first to offer an age-appropriate mobile app for teaching early learners
the coding skill of sequencing. No reading skills are necessary for
students to create a sequence of instructions that move the digital bee
through a maze similar to the mats that accompany the Bee-Bot robots.
Kodable speak to kids with its gamification features (characters, high
scores, badges), it addresses the needs of teachers and parents. The
site offers learning guides and opportunities for teachers to set up
classrooms where students can support teachers and parents who have
NO previous programming experience. As they learn to code, the adults
become partners with their children in the endeavor. The Kodable app
levels quickly advance to include some rather complex coding concepts
such as logic, sequence, conditions, loops, functions, and debugging. Once students become early readers, they are primed to start using apps
like Hopscotch (www.gethopscotch.com) that provide students with a
more open-ended creation environment using colored blocks of code
that fit together like Legos. Fans of Mitch Resnick will recognize these
apps as providing a similar pedagogically sound creative environment
to Scratch (scratch.mit.edu). Students start by writing short scripts that
are set off by triggers such as “when I tilt the iPad” or “when I touch the
iPad” to create animations and games while they also learn about angles
and the coordinate grid.
According to Professor J. Paul
Gibson, PhD, in a Wired article,
“You can start teaching computer
science before students even know
how to read and write.”
Another option for learning to code using a mobile device with little
to no reading required is the Light-bot app developed by Danny
Yaroslavski (danny-yaroslavski.com/)—who learned programming
when he, himself, was 12 years old. Danny even released a special
cross-platform version of the Light-bot app (light-bot.com) especially
designed to help students complete their Hour of Code. But don’t be
deceived by the simple tasks of helping a robot turn on a switch. The
app quickly progresses to levels that help players gain understanding of
programming concepts such as procedures, loops, and conditionals. Probably the most complete approach to helping young learners code
on a mobile device came in the form of a family of cute, fuzzy characters
that are part of the Kodable app (www.surfscore.com). Not only does
10 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
Dave Bouchard, enrichment teacher at Jericho
Elementary School, leads an entire class of second
grade students through a session of Light-bot during
the Hour of Code week.
Photo: Dave Bouchard
Feature Lucie deLaBruere
LEFT: Jericho Elementary
School (VT) students join Hour
of Code week using Kodable.
Photo: Dave Bouchard
Resources such as Wes Fryer’s free e-book, “Hopscotch
Challenges ~ Learn to Code With an iPad” (cue.tc/
iPadHopscotch), offer educators who are new to coding
valuable tips on how to use Hopscotch to provide
problem-solving challenges to students. The new Share
feature was the needed piece to take learning with
Hopscotch to a level that allows students to build a
community of users where they can mix and remix each
other’s code. This lets students experience the creativity
cycle made popular by the M.I.T. Kindergarten group (see
article referenced below for more information).
When students start to outgrow Hopscotch, it is the
perfect time to introduce them to more sophisticated
coding options available with the AppCraft app from the
iTunes store. AppCraft provides students with a drawing
toolkit for creating their own sprites (actors), a very
comprehensive collection of blocks to code with, and a
physics engine. Middle school students can start to create
some rather complex apps and game prototypes with AppCraft. One
sixth grader almost made me sign a nondisclosure before I could look
at a multi-level game he had created “on his own time” after a half-hour
introduction to AppCraft.
Although the open-ended environment provided by AppCraft is a
powerful environment for students to create their own projects, it lacks
the supplementary resources needed to guide middle school students
towards learning best practices of coding. For that task, I would make
sure the Cargo-Bot app (cue.tc/CargoBotApp) is installed on student
devices. Cargo-Bot received attention for having been totally created
on an iPad, but it deserves its praises for its potential to teach fairly
advanced coding techniques to kids in a game-like way using tools that
many programmers would find in their coding frameworks. It has a fun
debug feature that allows students to walk through their code solution
step by step, as well as a record feature, which allows students to make
movies of their coding solutions to proudly share with friends or in an
e-portfolio. I would recommend installing Cargo-Bot AND AppCraft on EVERY
middle school student’s mobile tablet, and giving them an Hour of
Code every week to anyone who would like to see amazing outcomes
that testify that KIDS CAN CODE! Although a larger selection of programs to teach coding is available on
laptops and desktops, one of the advantages of using mobile tools to
build coding skills is that many students have anywhere anytime access
to these mobile devices and can continue to play with code outside
the classroom, while riding the bus, waiting for a event to start, or at
home. This advantage moves the opportunity to code from an HOUR
of Code to HOURS of code. A mobile device equipped with the
right apps can give students increased opportunities to start building
the 10,000 hours that kids like Bill Gates and Steve Job logged in their
journeys to grow and sharpen their thinking skills. CUE Above: Middle school students
mentor younger learners building their coding skills at St.
Albans City School (VT).
Lucie deLaBruere has 30 years of experience in
K-12 schools and currently teaches at the University
of Vermont, Marlboro College, and St. Michael’s
College. She works as a digital age learning specialist
who is passionate about creativity and innovation
in schools, digital equity, and emerging technology.
[email protected]
References:
Koerner, Brendan I. “Forget Foreign Languages
and Music. Teach Our Kids to Code,” Wired, cue.tc/
WiredKidsCode
Olson, Parmy. “Why Estonia Has Started Teaching
Its First-Graders to Code,” Forbes, cue.tc/
Estonia1stGraders
Resnick, Mitch. “All I Really Needed to Know
(About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying
How Children Learn) in Kindergarten.” PDF
available from cue.tc/ResnickKindergarten
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
| 11
Feature LeVar Burton
keynote
speaker
Tech and Teaching
Just take a look at the world our children are growing up in compared
to the one we grew up in. Technology has transformed day-to-day life
in ways unfathomable just ten years ago. It has become impossible for
our kids to thrive in society without basic and even extensive use of
technology in every aspect of their lives. “Schools” and the “classroom”
are also in a metamorphosis. I put those words in quotes as our very
definition of them is changing because of technology.
Bringing in Smart Boards, tablets, and who knows what comes next
in the classroom can make the transferring of knowledge to the future
generation more efficient and effective.
It’s teachers, however, who remain the inspirational and motivational
leaders of the class. Slavery or Hitler or particle physics can be taught
from a printed book, via a streaming movie, through old fashioned
flash cards, or on iPad Airs with about the same level of detail being
communicated to the audience. What machines cannot do is excite a
young person to wonder WHY Hitler was allowed to gain power in the
first place, and why no one spoke up. An iPad will never ask a young
girl to give thought to the human face of slavery beneath the economic
reasoning for its emergence in America, the land of the free.
Only one letter differentiates Teach and Tech. The challenge for us as
parents and educators is to ensure that tech itself is never the end—but
rather the means—for expanding human knowledge and a passion for
learning in our children. One of the reasons I so firmly believed in Gene
Roddenberry’s vision of the future was that on Star Trek, the technology
never got in the way of the humanity. In fact, Lt. Commander Data was
a product of technology, a machine himself, who yearned to be human.
Geordi’s visor gave him sight, but it was his spirit, dedication to hard
work, and friendships that made him part of the crew of the Enterprise,
not his ability to see.
The challenge for us as parents and
educators is to ensure that tech
itself is never the end—but rather
the means—for expanding human
knowledge and a passion for learning
in our children.
So as we develop and exploit technology at home and in the classroom,
as we evolve from one-way communication (a book or a video) to
interactivity at all levels, it’s my hope that those of us who create
technology remember the human component so necessary for learning...
teachers. Teachers are the original and the best interactive learning tools
we have ever had. CUE LeVar Burton’s career spans many roles: actor (e.g., as Kunta Kinte in Roots; Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The
Next Generation), host and executive producer of PBS’ Reading Rainbow, television and film director (several Star Trek episodes,
and feature films including The Tiger Woods Story, Smart House, Blizzard, and Reach for Me). His latest project combines
technology and education in RRKidz (see www.readingrainbow.com). LeVar was a guest of President Obama and the co-host of the
White House Science Fair in 2013. He is a recipient of the 2013 Common Sense Media Award for his lifetime of work on behalf
of children. LeVar includes “educator” and “student” among his roles as well. [email protected]
12 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
Professional Development Barbara Bray
Kids, Coding, PD – Oh My!
Kids love to code, yet teachers need some nudging to incorporate
coding in their classes because they have so much on their plate. I put
out a call to my PLN to find out what teachers are doing with kids,
coding, and encouraging teachers to incorporate coding with their
curriculum. One teacher who stood out showed how you can expand
coding to multiple classrooms.
“We got to get kids programming.”
Rae Fearing, Educational Technology Coordinator and STEM
Coordinator for Del Norte County Unified School District in Crescent
City, California, shared with me a five-week Code In project with
5th grade teacher Bill Filsinger, in which his kids were introduced to
computer programming using the free app Hopscotch. Rae worked oneon-one coaching with Bill and his kids during the project last year. The
purpose for this project was two-fold:
it is important to increase STEM related learning activities
1 Since
for learners, exploring skills and concepts related to computer
programming and technology helps prepare learners to be
successful in college and career, and exposes them to a field with
growing job opportunities.
are new to Del Norte County USD and are primarily used for
2 iPads
skills practice and content consumption. These are excellent uses of
the iPad, but they can provide so much more. Moving to content
creation, information sharing, and idea development will help
learners with the Four C’s (critical thinking, collaboration, creativity,
and communication) that are essential skills in today’s world.
Looking for a way to provide relevance, the 5th graders were asked to
create simple programs and educational games they could use with their
1st grade buddies. One student created a game to help younger learners
learn their shapes, another did a game on times tables, and many more
similar games were created in only two hours after learning the app.
Kids were teaching each other and the teacher. Rae shared several sites
about these projects:
“Anyone can AND SHOULD know
how to code. It is the universal
language of our digital future.” – Rae Fearing
My 5th Grade Code In Project: cue.tc/EdTechyness1
5th Graders Build Games with Hopscotch: cue.tc/EdTechyness2
Winners of the 5th Grade Code In Project: cue.tc/EdTechyness3
Making Time for Coding with Kids: cue.tc/EdTechyness4
This year Rae’s coding program expanded.
“Coaching teachers so kids can code.”
She is still working with Bill from last year and has added another
teacher at another school to do a four-week project in both classrooms
(3rd grade and 5th grade). To expand the project, Rae participated in the
Hour of Code during computer science education week. She held teacher
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
| 13
esa
preview sessions to de-mystify coding and show teachers how they and
their learners could learn computer programming. Eleven teachers came
to the preview sessions. Five teachers had Rae go to their classes, and
already two have asked her to do longer projects with their classes.
Kids from last year’s Code In project recognized Rae and asked her,
“There she is! Are we going to code again?”
Rae wrote, “I am seeing teachers try new things and take risks in their
classrooms. A 3rd grade teacher with one iPad led a whole class activity
using the Light-bot app, and then I was able to come in a week later
and bring a class set of iPads, so each learner could code on their
own. Next, I will be coming to that classroom once a week to take the
learners through a month-long coding project.”
Teachers’ comments inspired Rae to expand the program:
“OMG! I wish I had a video camera right now! I had to e-mail
you during class, because we are coding. I have the Apple
TV on with the task, and the kids are coding on their white
boards. They love it, I love it, we all love it!!” I want to thank Rae for sharing her story on why coding really
motivates learners and how teachers are able to deepen learning in
their classrooms when kids know how to code. On her blog about the
Hour of Code, Rae wrote, “This year I am encouraging teachers in
my school district to code with every student. I believe programming
and computer science courses should be a requirement, not an
elective. Anyone can AND SHOULD know how to code. It is the
universal language of our digital future.” CUE Rae Fearing is a Google Certified Teacher and
Leading Edge Certified Online and Blended
Educator and Professional Developer. Previously she
taught biology and marine science courses at Del
Norte High School for 12 years. She holds a Masters
in Science Education from Oregon State University.
Prior to her career in education Rae worked for ten
years in the zoo and aquarium field as a zookeeper, sea lion trainer, and
bird of prey handler. [email protected]
Barbara Bray, Creative Learning Strategist, writes
a regular column on professional development
for OnCUE, is Owner/Founder of My eCoach
(my-ecoach.com) and Co-Founder of Personalize
Learning (www.personalizelearning.com).
Follow Barbara on Twitter: @bbray27
[email protected]
“We got a little early start, because I wanted to familiarize them
with it before next week, and now they can’t stop! :)” “The thinking and discussion that is taking place is
amazing! I’ve got kids standing up, turning their bodies,
jumping, etc., and then those who can just do it sitting at their
desks and looking at it. Wish you were here to see it!”
48
th
Annual
CALIFORNIA
STUDENT
MEDIA FESTIVAL
An event for K-12 educators, administrators,
policymakers, and industry representatives focused
on online and blended learning.
Infinite Thinking Machine
Discuss and Share
Big Picture Issues
Content & Best Practices
An engaging Internet TV show for educators to
Professional Development
Teaching & Learning Models
inspire creativity and innovation.
Tools & Technology
FREE TO
ENTER!
Deadline: April 7, 2014
Festival:
June (date TBD)
Location:TBD
www.mediafestival.org
Call for Speakers now Posted
infinitethinking.org
@itmshow
produced by
Produced
collaboratively by:
Produced in partnership by PBS SOCal and CUE
@ elearns
IGNITING CLASSROOM INNOVATION
14 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
Wells Fargo is the Presenting Sponsor of the
48th Annual California Student Media Festival
Bring CUE to your
school or district!
CUE
cue.org/
pd
Professional
Learning
CUE can provide your school or districe customized
professional development. Choose from any CUE
conference presentation or other great workshops that
CUE provides: face-to-face, online, keynotes, large or
small groups - all this and more available through CUE.
To schedule a CUE professional development event,
complete the CUE Request Form at www.cue.org/request
To register for an existing CUE event,
go to www.cue.org/registration
Danny Silva
Professional Learning Coordinator
[email protected]
925.478.3458
@CUElearns
INNOVATIVE EDUCATOR ADVANCED STUDIES CERTIFICATE
Brought to you by CUE and Fresno Pacific University
FULLY ONLINE AND INCLUDES AN IPAD OR ANDROID DEVICE.
In addition to online coursework and cohort interaction, cohort
members will participate in nine online CUE Professional Learning
workshops led by highly qualified CUE Lead Learners.
The Innovative Educator Certificate offers evidence of proficiency,
enhances a resume, and includes a letter of certification addressed to
the principal or superintendent of the participant’s school district.
Master’s
Program
Articulation*
*Completion of this Certificate (18 units) now transfers as 9 units into
the FPU Curriculum and Instruction Online Master’s Degree Program.
For further information please visit
www.cue.org/ieasc
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
| 15
Bits & Bytes
2014 BOARD OF DIRECTORS CANDIDATES
Meet the Board of Directors Candidates on Friday and Saturday
in the HUB@CUE at the Annual CUE Conference in Palm
Springs, before the raffle. Ballots available to current members
of CUE from midnight on March 22 - 5pm on April 24, 2014.
www.cue.org/election
Jason Borgen Affiliate Nominated Monterey Bay CUE
Program Director, TICAL
Santa Cruz County Office of Education
Santa Cruz, CA
Lila Wills Bronson Affiliate Nominated - San Gabriel Valley CUE
Assistant Superintendent,
Educational Services
Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District
Shadow Hills, CA
Ray Chavez Incumbent
Director,
Instructional Technology Outreach
Los Angeles County Office of Education
West Covina, CA
Michele Dawson Affiliate Nominated - North Bay CUE
Educational Technology Supervisor,
San Francisco Unified School District
San Francisco, CA
Lainie Rowell Incumbent
K-20 Professional Developer and
LEC Coordinator,
Huntington Beach, CA
Cynthia Sistek-Chandler Affiliate Nominated - San Diego CUE
Associate Professor,
National University
San Diego, CA
16 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
CUE SF:
Newest
CUE
Affliate
CUE SF Co-Presidents Susan
Kameny and Karen McGarrah
CUE welcomed its newest affiliate in San Francisco, California.
CUE SF serves educators within San Francisco County and nearby
cities under the leadership of its co-presidents, Karen McGarrah and
Susan Kameny. CUE SF provides services and support for the San
Francisco region, which have been absent for the last decade. Both
McGarrah and Kameny serve the San Francisco district as Computer
Technology Integration Specialists and have been friends since they
met at a local district meeting in 2007. McGarrah and Kameny both
felt that educators throughout the region shared a common feeling
of being in the midst of an educational earthquake. Teachers they
encountered felt that everything had been shaken up. There was a
sense that everything needed to be rebuilt. Unfortunately, these same
instructors felt there was a lack of training and support for themselves
and others with similar jobs.
CUE SF was created to address these needs. The beginnings were
grounded on grassroots organizing. Kameny compiled a list of the tech
teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District. She then created a
Yahoo group called “sftechteach” as a platform for educators throughout
the district to share ideas and resources. CUE SF leaders also organized
“after school” meetings, which occurred every couple of months. A
different teacher hosted the events in their respective computer labs.
Participants gathered to discuss projects and share resources.
While informal meetings were successful, the idea of creating an
official non-profit was daunting. Fortunately, Jan Half ’s tireless
networking made the seemingly insurmountable an actual possibility.
Half connected CUE SF with a pro-bono attorney who helped the
organization become an affiliate. Kameny and McGarrah are grateful
for the mentorship and support from veteran CUE members including
Half, Diana Paradise, and Suzanne Mitchell. After earning affiliate
status last July, McGarrah and Kameny hosted a very well-attended
launch party last September and a “CUE brew” in November.
The community response has been impressive and membership is
growing at a rapid rate. CUE SF leaders noted that peer support and
networking form the foundation of the organization. CUE SF is the
place for educators to share, compare, and learn to redesign current
technology-based practices for the benefit of their students.
CUE SF leaders are currently leveraging local support. Regional hightech companies and the City of San Francisco are eager to partner with
public schools. In response, leaders are planning an “Appi-hour” on
local radio and television station, KQED. This program is designed to
connect application developers with San Francisco teachers. CUE SF
also plans to provide technology training to teachers on new equipment
like iPad carts. CUE Bits and Bytes: Administrator’s Corner Jason Borgen
Creativity, Problem Solving, Career-Readiness:
Administrators’ Perspectives
Toward Coding In K12 Schools
The value of teaching coding
in school is obvious to many
administrators. Over 75%
believe coding should either
be a requirement or an elective
for students. This, according
to a recent survey given to
administrators across the state
of California representing
CUE’s AdminSIG members,
the TICAL Leadership Cadre,
and various other administrative
groups. Though we may be
preaching to the choir with
the 50 respondents, the data
provides a realistic view of the
benefits, concerns, and trends
in district and/or schoolwide
coding programs.
The Alliance for California
Computing Education for
Students and Schools (ACCESS:
access.ics.uci.edu/) exclaims,
“The benefits of computer
science education go beyond the
skills and knowledge acquired
in the classroom; it opens students’ eyes to career
possibilities in fields they didn’t even know existed,
both inside and outside the information technology
sector.” The survey reveals that 84% agree or strongly
agree coding courses can prepare students for a
possible career path in computer science. Do we want
to help to develop this pathway in our schools? Do
we need more reasons to provide such offerings?
Benefits of Coding Programs
From the creation of Pong to the development
of Facebook, we know that the mindset of a
programmer entails deep thought and high amounts
of creativity as they attempt to develop a program,
object, or task that is unique. There is no surprise that
86% of the respondents agree or strongly agree that
coding courses promote creativity. As students design
programs and begin to code, even using the simple
drag and drop visual program (for elementary and
middle school) known as Scratch (scratch.mit.edu),
their objective is to develop a seamless product—
even though, after writing a few lines of code (or
hundreds of lines, many times), things are not perfect
after the first go at it. The term “debugging” refers
to the ability to identify and remove errors. It takes
a great deal of problem solving to do this. Again, no
surprise, over 90% of respondents agree that coding
courses help to develop effective problem solvers. As
we move towards completing one-fifth of the 21st
Century, we need to think critically about relevant
skills students need to be active democratic citizens in
a digitally driven society. Is coding a life skill? Fiftyeight percent of respondents think that it is essential
for full participation in society. So why are coding
courses slow to be deployed in our comprehensive
K-12 system?
According to a change.org petition (chn.ge/1fsHpnk),
“Computer science courses do not currently count
towards core high school graduation requirements
in California. Moreover, neither the University of
California (UC) nor the California State University
(CSU) campuses count computer science as satisfying
a mathematics or science requirement towards
admission.” Perhaps this is why the results of the
survey revealed that only 30% offer coding as a
requirement or an elective. There is a gap in what can
be beneficial to students and what policy says meets
college and career-readiness. There are also logistical
issues with creating such programs. Thus, there are
some real concerns among administrators.
Continued on page 20
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
| 17
Bits and Bytes: Administrator’s Corner John Cradler
Local Control and the Future of
Educational Technology in California
Background: The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) combined with the demands for educational
technology support resulting from the implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and
the related computer-assisted Smarter Balanced student assessment system have given rise to an uncertain
future regarding availability of educational technology information resources and services in California.
As mentioned in prior OnCUE articles, LCFF has shifted funding to districts from current educational
technology support systems: the California Technology Assistance Projects (CTAP) and the Statewide
Educational Technology Services (SETS)—which includes the California Learning Resource Network
(CLRN), Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL), and the online
technology help desk (TechSETS).
Unanticipated Consequences of LCFF: With the flexibility offered
by LCFF, districts have almost complete discretion on allocating state
funding—as long as it addresses education. The State Board of Education
and the Legislature are expecting that districts will use LCFF and other
funding, such as the funds provided to support implementation of
CCSS, to raise the achievement of “high-need” students. Yet, in reality,
some districts are under pressure to use flexible funds for a wide variety
of other local demands to include teacher-salary increases, reduced class
size, technology infrastructure, and teacher professional development.
The result is that major inequities will occur in that some districts may
meet local needs while using the new state funding for CCSS and the
Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) assessment system,
while others will need to use the new flexible funding to address critical
local needs and be responsive to local collective bargaining units.
While LCFF has resulted in increased local funding levels, it has caused
over 30 other state-funded programs to be eliminated. Now that time has
passed since LCFF was instituted, many educators and some legislators
are realizing that an unanticipated consequence of LCFF is that
programs eliminated or block granted into LCFF that addressed specific
critical and documented past, current, and future needs have been
overlooked. Some of these include educational technology, Regional
Opportunity Programs (ROP), and adult education. For example, since
CTAP and SETS have been almost eliminated or significantly reduced
in most regions of the state, there has been an increased demand for
technology support brought on by the emergence of CCSS and the
related SBAC assessment system. Rural and small school districts are the
first to lose these regional services because large districts tend to be able
to continue to fund their own technology support.
The need for equity of services: The major reason that CTAP and
SETS were established was to increase equity of resources across all
districts because of the need to access and use technology to support
and extend teaching and learning opportunities. In fact, evaluation over
the past ten years showed that CTAP regional services tended to fill the
gaps where districts and county offices of education did not have the
staff and other resources needed to provide these services. For example,
it is currently being found that without regional CTAP services, many
18 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
districts do not have the staff and knowledge needed to apply for Federal
E-Rate discounts as well as a variety of other state and federal funding
related to technology. The elimination of SETS reduces or removes
access to information about electronic learning and online resources
aligned to Common Core Standards, statewide policy and administrative
information needed to plan and implement technology, and the online
technical assistance needed to support the use of technology. It is
becoming increasingly clear that with the implementation of CCSS and
SBAC technology-assisted assessments, the need for technology support
services has greatly increased.
Addressing the need to continue technology support:
As discussed in prior OnCUE articles, Senator Hanabeth Jackson (Santa
Barbara), introduced legislation (SB 505) sponsored by the California
Department of Education (CDE) to continue funding for CTAP and
SETS with some adjustments to ensure focus on CCSS. This bill did not
receive sufficient initial support; however, it is anticipated that Senator
Jackson will continue her efforts. CUE provided formal support for SB
505, with members testifying before the Senate Education Committee in
support of the bill.
Assembly Member Susan Bonilla (Contra Costa), author of AB 484, the
bill to authorize implementation of the technology-supported assessment
system, conducted a roundtable event in Mountain View in October,
2013, to address this need. She suggested that without technology
support, the implementation of the SBAC assessment system could be
greatly jeopardized. The Roundtable concluded that a clear focus on
the critical need to provide the types of services to schools offered by
CTAP and SETS is needed for planning and implementation of both
CCSS and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)
initiative. Barbara Nemko and John Cradler, CUE Legislative Advocacy
Committee members, represented CUE at this meeting.
The soon to be released California Blueprint for Educational Technology
will provide additional information to document and support the need
for a wide variety of state-supported policies and possible services to
include technology support for CCSS and SBAC assessments. The
Blueprint recommends increasing the role of the CDE in supporting
technology by adding a senior level CDE administrative person to be
in charge of educational technology. Also, it is well known that State
Superintendent Tom Torlakson is a strong supporter for technology
to support teaching and learning in that when he was a Senator, he
authored legislation to re-authorize CTAP and SETS, and as State
Superintendent, he established the Educational Technology Task Force.
Conclusion: The state-established implementation of CCSS and
the SBAC technology-assisted standards-based student performance
assessments is the CDE’s current most important priority for K-12
education. For example, the state just awarded a $51 million dollar
contract to Educational Testing Service (ETS) to design and launch the
SBAC assessment system. Thus, it seems that while LCFF is important
in allowing local districts to determine how they want to allocate their
funding, it can result in reduced equity of services and resources for
those individual schools and districts that cannot cost effectively provide
them on their own. For this reason, the State Board of Education and
the Legislature should revisit programs swept away by LCFF and reassess
the current and future need for some of these programs—especially
CTAP and SETS—and other possible ways to address the need for
equitable technology access and support. The implication is that the
original need for some of the “categorical” programs such as CTAP is
re-emerging and should be re-visited in order to ensure greater equity
of educational technology services and information resources across all
school districts in Califoernia. CUE Vint Cerf
Opening Keynote
John Cradler is President of Educational Support
Systems and Co-Chair of the CUE Legislative
Advocacy Committee. He has been actively involved
in developing policy and legislative proposals for
educational technology at the state and national
levels for the past 25 years. He has been conducting
formative and summative statewide evaluations of
the state-funded California Technology Assistance Projects (CTAP) and
Statewide Educational Technology Services (SETS) for the State Department
of Education and Legislature, and is conducting an in-depth study of the
impact of the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) grants on
teaching and learning. He has served as Director of Technology for WestEd,
the Council of Chief State School Officers, a Teacher Education and
Computing Center (TECC), and the South San Francisco Unified School
District. John was awarded CUE’s 2010 Legislative Advocacy Award, and
was also named ISTE’s 2010 Public Policy Advocate.
[email protected]
www.cue.org/advocacy
Registration Now Open!
Jaime Casap
Closing Keynote
March 22-23, 2014
Palm Springs, CA
CUE
West Coast Summit
produced by
Featuring Google for Education
giesummit.org #giewc
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
| 19
Continued from page 17
Concerns about Coding Programs
With the Common Core taking our schools by storm, coding and
computer science initiatives have not been a so-called “priority” area for
many school district leaders, though conversations about programming
curricula are happening. Forty-six percent of respondents do agree or
strongly agree CCSS alignment is a valid concern; interestingly enough,
24% can’t decide. So what are some concerns? Staffing, of course! Well,
92% of survey respondents think so. There are great teachers out there,
but hiring effective instructional facilitators in coding and computer
science is a new paradigm for many. With the reality of the Common
Core, as well as the Next Generation Science Standards, integrating such
courses into the curriculum takes some creativity and forward-thinking
governance and leadership. This is probably why more than two-thirds
of survey respondents mentioned scheduling as a concern. How can we
learn from the other third or so schools and districts?
From Computer Science week and the Hour of Code (csedweek.org),
to change.org petitions, there is a growing awareness and emphasis on
coding and computer science. When survey respondents were asked
on a scale from 1-5 if they were aware of programming resources with
1 being none and 5 being many, 68% gave a score of 3 and above.
Resource collection is a start to leading a systematic deployment of an
effective CS (computer science) program. Obtaining buy-in, recruiting
staff, and integrating into existing curriculum will be the next step in the
transformation. Fullerton middle school principal, Matthew Barnett,
mentions, “I think that coding is hugely important for students in the
21st Century. It’s a kind of literacy that students need to be exposed to.
20 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
It’s like a woodshop class, in many regards, because it gives the students
an opportunity to create real projects with a real purpose. If we can
connect it to other areas of the curriculum, like math, to make it less
abstract, then that’s even better. I just think we need to find a way to
integrate it rather than having it as a totally separate class.”
Although, 40% of survey respondents’ schools or districts still do not
offer any form of coding, the movement is on the rise as districts ponder
CCSS integration as well as the societal implications of digital literacy
and creativity. Elementary principal Rod Federwisch says, ”I believe that
our students will need to be educated in coding. If not, they will simply
be technology consumers.” Do we want to produce a mostly consuming
society or a developing society? CUE Jason Borgen is Program Director for the Technology
Information Center for Administrative Leadership
(TICAL), a statewide education technology service
funded by the California Department of Education
under guidance by the Santa Cruz County Office of
Education. Jason presents at regional, statewide, and
national conferences on leadership and learning with
technology. Jason is a Google Certified Teacher, Leading Edge Certified
for Online Teaching, Administrator, and Professional Developer. Jason is
co-president of Monterey Bay CUE, and co-chair of CUE’s AdminSIG. [email protected]
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Tech Coordinator Craig Miller
Guide On The Side, or
How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Accept
Knowing Less Than My Students
When the students in this
year’s Web Design class were
slow to get motivated with
updating the school’s website,
I realized I needed to provide
them with another pathway
other than informational
writing or creating multimedia
projects.
I had been kicking around the
idea of adding code writing to
the class for a year, and knew
that I was more interested
in helping the students learn
HTML/CSS code from the
ground up rather than mastering a coding editor such as Adobe
Dreamweaver.
Since we were at the infancy of our coding experiment, I did not
want to use school funds for an untested programming curriculum.
Additionally, from my background in educational technology,
I knew I desired interactive tutorials rather than those teaching
through text or video instructions.
The advanced students in the school’s Technology Club are heavily
invested in hardware and networking, but have also dabbled in code
work. They directed me to Bento (www.bentobox.io/), a wonderful
repository of coding tutorials.
I showed my Web Design students a couple motivational videos
from Code.org that point out that a love of problem solving and
perseverance in a person’s personality is far more important than
her grades or intelligence when predicting someone will become a
successful coder. My students were also impressed to learn that a
coder may immediately get their foot in the door of a local (less than
an hour away) technology company, for a solid entry salary, and
without a college degree.
Combining the information from Bento with a few Internet
searches, I quickly learned Code Academy (www.codecademy.com)
has been the industry standard for free, introductory, interactive
coding tutorials. I was awestruck at how quickly my students
immediately took to the course lessons. My previously unmotivated
students were now coming in during the break, logging in before
the bell rang, and coding the entire period without talking to each
22 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
Web Design class at Aptos High.
other about anything other than providing assistance when someone
got stuck within a lesson. Also inspiring to me was that 99% of my
students stated they enjoyed coding, including both those on the
college track, and those who were not on pace for graduating with
their class.
When Code.org announced the Hour of Code (code.org/learn), my
Web Design students immediately began working through the selfcontained one-hour lessons. They shared a Google Document with
each other, complete with a color-coded key identifying their review
for each lesson. Through this process, they agreed upon developing
a “high” skill level JavaScript lesson, a “medium” skill level JavaScript
lesson, and an “easy” visual coding lesson.
These three levels of offerings were then turned into an Hour of
Code Assignment (cue.tc/AptosCode) for the Freshman Computer
Literacy Classes. My Web Design students already delighted in the
fact that they were better coders than me; however, they now also
take a great deal of pride in having shaped the event we hosted on
December 10, 2013. After a month of pre-testing and selecting
tutorials, the Freshman computer lab saw 200+ students smoothly
run through the coding lessons and give positive feedback regarding
the experience.
Using Bento and the companies who provided free lessons for
the Hour of Code, my next step was to choose a few of the most
common coding languages—HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python,
and Ruby—and set up head-to-head competitions (cue.tc/
AptosCompetition) for my coders to determine which companies
had created the best tutorial sequences. My Web Design students
have taken this task very seriously, as evidenced by the number of
Aptos High computer literacy freshmen
show off their Hour of Code certificates.
disagreements between students who challenge each other’s preferred
tutorials. These disagreements among previously uninterested
students have resulted in students arguing their points using
highly specific justifications.
My students know their work and opinions are valued by me
because they:
a) have a greater expertise for this project than I do.
b) are creating the learning sequences for next year’s students, as
evidenced by the deletion of the lower-rated tutorials from the
competitions based directly upon their arguments.
c) are helping to determine whether Coding will ultimately split off
from Web Design and become a future class unto itself.
Coming to a comprehensive high school from alternative education,
I value differentiated instruction and feel the most fulfilled when a
low achieving student engages in a project and creates something
she did not know was inside her. I see coding as a way to level the
playing field at my school that focuses so heavily on the college
track. Here are skill-based lessons I can offer my low achieving
students who now exude a rarely felt academic confidence in class
because they realize coding does not require them to compete with
the prior knowledge possessed by the students achieving higher
levels of academic success.
For my part, I would absolutely love to participate in the Code Year
(cue.tc/CodeAcademyYear); however, during the academic school
year, I do not have as much discretionary time as my students. I
have always prided myself in being an overly prepared instructor.
Many late nights are spent testing new ideas and tweaking lessons
to perfection so that I have a plan as well as a backup plan in case of
“technical difficulties.” In short, I have relished my role as the “Sage
On The Stage,” supreme master of all the knowledge existing within
the realm of my classroom.
I see coding as a way to level the
playing field at my school that
focuses so heavily on the college track.
I am now trying to come to terms with the fact that Bento alone
displays nearly 100 different coding languages. For me, the plethora
of different coding languages provides me with relief. If there were
only 5-10 languages, I might attempt to learn them all. A hundred
languages means I cannot possibly be expected to master all of
them. I am now resting easier and easier knowing that my job is
to guide students through their own exploration and mastery of
the various coding languages rather than being able to solve each
of their problems for them. Thankfully, new companies are going
online all the time that understand my time crunch as a teacher with
3.5 preps. LearnStreet (www.learnstreet.com), for example, offers
nearly 24/7 chat support for students when they get frustrated. My
students are currently putting the LearnStreet tutorials through their
paces with generally positive reviews.
I possess only a fuzzy picture of where our school’s technology
program is heading from where we currently reside; however,
working as a team to solve new problems is precisely what excites me
the most about teaching and subsequently leads to my most creative
instruction. Now I just have to come to terms with the fact that it is
unlikely to be “direct instruction.” CUE Craig Miller is a Technology Instructor at Aptos
High School, Aptos, CA, and District Tech Liaison
for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District.
[email protected]
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
| 23
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Continued from page 5
While Logo developed a following, it never became part of the accepted
culture of educational computing at large. It is, however, by no means
dead. Logo has grown in two directions to reflect Papert’s idea that Logo
had no floor and no ceiling—there was no barrier to entry, or limit to
what could be done with the language. Two examples that show this are
MIT’s Scratch language (scratch.mit.edu), and Northwestern University’s
NetLogo project (ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo). Scratch uses jigsaw
pieces to assemble program elements, allowing it to be used by young
students. NetLogo supports the modeling of large systems (flocks of
birds, insect colonies, etc.) and is used heavily by graduate students in
many disciplines all over the world.
Today’s challenge
Living as we are, in a world rich with existing programs, one easily
can go through life without having to write a single line of code. This
does a disservice to our students, though. The skills they develop in
writing their own software lead to productive strategies in the solving
of problems of all kinds. Fortunately, the current focus on STEM skills
affords an opportunity to embrace student programming as an activity
that makes sense at almost all grades. In my view, this would be quite
beneficial. CUE Dr. Thornburg has been involved in computers
since the late 1960’s, and has written dialects of the
language PILOT (another language for young users)
and Prolog (a theorem-proving language that is an
alternate to LISP). He is the author of numerous
books on Logo and used to speak extensively on this topic at CUE conferences
in the early 1980’s. His current work in staff development focuses on the
Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core State Standards
of mathematics. [email protected]
CUE CALENDAR
2014
For more information:
www.cue.org/events/
CUE ROCK STAR
TEACHER CAMP 2014
www.cue.org/rockstar
June 18-20
Monterey
March 20-22
Annual CUE 2014, Palm Springs Convention Center, Renaissance and Hilton
Hotels, Palm Springs, CA www.cue2014.org
March 22-23
Google in Education West Coast Summit, Palm Springs Convention Center, Palm
Springs, CA www.giesummit.org
April 10-12
Leadership 3.0 Symposium, produced in partnership by CUE, ACSA, and TICAL
San Mateo, CA www.lead3.org
June 28-July 1
York School, Monterey, CA
and...
Tulare County
Sundale School, Tulare, CA
June 23-25 Lake Tahoe
Alder Creek Middle School,
Truckee CA
July 23-25, 2014
Saugatuck, MI
ISTE 2014, Atlanta, GA www.isteconference.org/2014
July 29-31
October 24-25
Manhattan Beach
Fall CUE 2014 - Launch Next Gen Learning, Napa Valley, CA
www.fallcue.org
December 4-6
eLearning Strategies Symposium, produced in partnership by CUE and CLRN
Northern CA www.elearns.org
26 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
Manhattan Beach, CA
Future Annual
CUE Conferences:
March 19-21, 2015
March 17-19, 2016
On IT with CETPA Lisa Kopochinski
A Roundtable Discussion About CCSS:
What’s Involved and How Do We Get There?
Part I
“Anyone can AND SHOULD know
how to code. It is the universal language
of our digital future.” “On IT with CETPA” is a regular column
that provides voice to K-12 IT professionals
throughout California, and is a direct result of the
partnership between CUE and CETPA (California Educational Technology
Professionals Association). In exchange, CUE leaders write the “CUE View,”
a column that appears in Databus, CETPA’s quarterly journal.
According to the Common Core State Standards website at www.
corestandards.org, the mission of the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS) is to “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students
are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to
do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant
to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young
people need for success in college and careers. With American students
fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to
compete successfully in the global economy.”
While this goal is a lofty one, many believe it is achievable. However,
few argue that it will take some time to navigate the hurdles involved.
CETPA’s DataBus editor recently sat down with the following
individuals—Thomas Tan, Director, Network and Computer Services
for the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District; Jim Klein,
Director, Information Services and Technology for the Saugus Union
School District; David Thurston, Information Technology Director
for the Colton Joint Unified School District; Luke Hibbard,
Coordinator, CTAP 6-California Technology Assistance Project with the
Stanislaus County Office of Education; and Kelley Day and Christine
Sisco, BTSA Induction Consultants from the Instructional Services
Division at the Stanislaus County Office of Education—to get their
take on CCSS and what it means to their district and county office
in terms of interpretation and preparation as well as the challenges
involved. Here is what they had to say.
What do you consider the main benefit to your district of
implementing Common Core State Standards?
Thomas Tan: I’d have to say the main benefit is the goal to graduate
high school students who are college and career ready. It’s a goal that
we can all rally around and support—students, educators, parents,
and the community. The last five years of the great recession have
been particularly nasty. Data has shown the value of post-secondary
education for people to weather rough economic times. Future
career opportunities that we can foresee point to growth in careers in
science, technology, engineering, and math backgrounds. The power
in “common” is that we can now borrow resources developed by
teachers in other states using the Common Core State Standards. It’s a
competitive world. Our students are not just competing with the kids in
the neighboring district for opportunities. CCSS helps us all pull in the
same direction.
Jim Klein: I would say the biggest benefit of the CCSS is the
weaving of authentic technology use throughout all of the academic
disciplines, which is further driving our efforts to implement evergreater, more effective use of technology in the learning space. When
the standards describe students who “use technology and digital
media strategically and capably,” they are not describing the sort of
technology “as an add-on” or content delivery mechanism that has
plagued ed tech across the country. Instead such statements demand
deeper, richer, more thoughtful strategies for technology in the
learning space. David Thurston: From a curriculum perspective, the depth and rigor
required by the CCSS is going to significantly enrich our students’
educational experience. This will better prepare them with the critical
thinking skills necessary for their college and career choices, while also
providing more opportunities for project- and process-based learning.
As far as IT and ed tech is concerned, the CCSS provides the greatest
opportunity yet to further integrate technology into the classroom.
cue.org • Spring 2014 OnCUE
| 27
Under the CCSS, technology is no longer a subject supplement or
an enhancement employed by only a few “techy” teachers. It’s now
a requirement that will be foundational to teaching, learning, and
assessment in all classrooms. This will drive the district to make
organization-wide resource commitments to provide teachers and
students the ed tech tools and training they need to meet the demands
of the new standards. Luke Hibbard: There will be greater teaching in depth rather than
covering more topics in less time. This encourages students to use
their critical thinking and problem-solving skills in addition to asking
students to translate ideas, concepts, and skills into the 4 Cs of 21st
Century skills. The 4 Cs speak to communication, collaboration (new
emphasis in CCSS on the speaking and listening standards, which
are integral to working with classmates, co-workers and customers in
a worldwide arena), critical thinking, and creativity. Preparations of
lessons need to be more thoughtful to address all levels of Depth of
Knowledge (DOK 1-4). Kelley Day: Right. And this all weaves nicely together with the
Standards for Mathematical Practice, which encourage the same
qualities in the area of math (also meshes with Next Gen Science
and Next Gen ELD standards). There are many cross-curricular
benefits, which include ideas such as writing in all content areas
(including math, PE, music, etc.), reading critically, and applying
information to extended situations—for example, taking information
read in a technical manual and applying that to a real life/handson situation. Technology integration is not just for presentation of
lessons, but embedded within Common Core. Students are being
encouraged to be technologically fluent in all arenas (research,
publishing, problem solving, public speaking, etc.). All of the above
is working toward making students college and career ready and
subsequently more productive and employable citizens.
How is your district preparing for the implementation
of CCSS?
Thomas Tan: Now that’s the million-dollar question. CCSS is new
for everyone, so we’ve been using every bit of information we can
get our hands on to map the way forward. We have worked with our
assessment people to conduct online pilot tests at schools sites. Our
business, instructional, and technology people have been meeting
weekly to focus just on Common Core. Having all the functional
groups and departments around the same planning table has been
very useful. We all hear the same info and can anticipate future issues
early on and work on solutions. Attending the CETPA regional group
meetings has been a great source of information on how other districts
are handling online assessments and classroom technology. The
CETPA statewide listserv has also been an invaluable source for an
ongoing running flow of discussion about CCSS.
David Thurston: First and foremost, we’re training teachers on the
new standards. Colton has made the commitment to train all of our
teachers in the new ELA and Math standards by 2015. We’ve been
28 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
hosting regular (three to four times a week) CCSS staff development
sessions and will continue to do so for next the next two years.
Additionally, our Curriculum Council and Educational Services
Departments are preparing for new and much-needed CCSS aligned
textbook adoptions scheduled for next year. On the technology
front, we’re completing our district-wide wireless network rollout
and refreshing the majority of our network infrastructure so that we
can handle the expected increase in bandwidth/access demands. On
the ed tech side, we’re starting the implementation of Google Apps
for Education (GAFE) this year, and we plan on selecting an official
Learning Management System. I expect that both of these systems
will play a large role in enabling the collaboration and project-based
learning that the new standards will require.
Jim Klein: Our district is marshaling all of our expertise across the
entire array of departments, working together to meet the demands
of the new standards and testing requirements. A key strategy of ours
has been to be involved from the get-go with the Smarter Balanced
Assessment Consortium (SBAC) pilot program. We participated in
both the early and late rounds. These pilots enabled us to evaluate
not only our technology capabilities and needs, but also the demands
and expectations of the tests on our students. These experiences have
aided tremendously in our development of strategies for the learning
environment. In addition, we’ve engaged a number of educational
services and technology committees, with plenty of cross-pollination,
to deconstruct standards, build/collect resources, and set strategies for
the future.
Christine Sisco: As a county office we are supporting 26
districts in the roll out of these new standards. All departments are
working together to further our districts’ implementation of CCSS
(Instructional Support Services, CTAP, BTSA/SpEd Induction).
Throughout 2012-2013, our County Office Instructional Support
Services division hosted the CCSS Leadership Institute, which
introduced districts to the CCSS and how they are structured. This
five-day academy helped districts create an implementation plan
for the 2013-2014 school year and beyond. Districts brought key
players to the Institute such as teacher leaders, educational coaches,
administrators, and curriculum coordinators. And last summer,
the ISS team hosted a county-wide conference titled “Splash into
Common Core,” which gave participants both the opportunity to
“DIP” (two days of 90-minute workshops focused on implementation
of common core and practical classroom application) and “DIVE”
(three-day intensive workshops which allowed participants to dive
deeper into specific standards by grade level in ELA and Math). The
“DIVE” sessions are being reoffered throughout the 2013-2014 school
year. The Technology and Learning Resources division supports the ISS
team in helping districts craft vision and effective uses of technology to
reach the Depth of Knowledge required of the new standards. CUE Lisa Kopochinski is a veteran journalist who has
extensive experience writing and editing publications
in a wide variety of industries in both the U.S.
and Canada. She has been the editor for CETPA’s
Databus magazine for more than 10 years.
[email protected] www.lisakcommunications.net
leadership • technology • innovation
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The CUE Review Melody McGill
Make the Turtle Do What??!!
And Other Creative Possibilities
“For this week’s assignment, load your program and then program your turtle to create a design within a square box. Once the design is completed,
have the turtle create a quilt of repeating squares.” Those were the directions for the programming assignment I was given. The challenge: I had
no idea of how to get the turtle to move, much less create a design in a square. However, failure was not an option! Many days of anguish, phone
calls to my cadre mates, and frustration later, my turtle moved in the box creating a design. The instructor’s feedback, “You have a unique way of
programming!” The program went something like this: forward 5, back 2, forward 3, turn left 30, turn left 40, turn right 10, forward 8, back 1,
back 3, forward 1, turn right, turn left. I think you have the picture, my turtle moved like someone learning to drive a car for the first time: lurching
forward and backward until the square design was completed. Programming is never easy, but can bring wonderful rewards when the program works
correctly. This edition of reviews brings you a group of websites that involve programming, crafting and/or building. The “Turtle Pond” brought back
fond memories of my turtle project. Enjoy! Create and build away!
Title: Turtle Pond
Publisher: Illuminations
Grades: 3 - 6
Media Type: Photos and/or Images, Sound Recordings and Audio,
Special Requirements (broadband access, plugins, etc.), Written
Materials/Other Printed Texts
URL: cue.tc/TurtlePond
OER: Secondary Source
Students estimate length and angle measurements. Students enter
a sequence of LOGO commands to help the turtle get to the pond.
Children can write their own solutions using LOGO commands and
input them into the computer. The turtle then moves and leaves a trail
or path according to the instructions given. Interactive Math Tools
are Java applets that can be used to explore math and create interactive
lessons. They are provided by the Illuminations site, which is designed
to bring alive the ideas and recommendations set forth in the National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Principles and Standards for
School Mathematics, and contains an array of Internet resources that
can be used to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics.
Title: Alice
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University
Grades: 6 - 12
Media Type: Photos and/or Images, Sound Recordings and Audio,
Special Requirements (broadband access, plugins, etc.), Video, Written
Materials/Other Printed Texts
URL: www.alice.org
OER: Free Software/Web Tools, Productivity, Drawing/Painting
Alice is a 3D programming environment resource that makes it easy to
create an animation for telling a story, play an interactive game, or create
a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory
computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to
facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.
Elements of this application must be downloaded and installed on a
local computer for use.
Title: Hands on Crafts
Publisher: Mint Museums and the Public Library of Charlotte and
Mecklenburg
Grades: 3 - 6
Media Type: Photos and/or Images, Sound Recordings and Audio,
Special Requirements (broadband access, plugins, etc.)
URL: cue.tc/HandsOnCrafts
OER: Reference / Free Tool The website provides a virtual art studio where students can create
various works of art (clay, quilts, clothing, etc.) and learn about the steps
and tools required for each process. Studio 1 contains North Carolina
Road Trips that provides links to museums where students can view
pottery, quilting, weaving, and basketry; The Clay Lab has pottery
facts; Mud Works Gallery includes current exhibits of mud works; and
The Clay Studio has detailed directions for creating a slab self-portrait.
Studio 2 has detailed information and examples about basket weaving,
quilting, and weaving.
Title: 123D Make Intro
Publisher: Autodesk, Inc
Grades: 7-12
Media Type: Photos and/or Images, Written Materials/Other Printed
Texts
URL: cue.tc/MakeIntro
OER: Apps iOS
123D Make Intro allows students to create 2D patterns from a 3D
model. This iOS application provides an introduction to the free
desktop Mac software (available at the Mac App store) and includes a
revolver tool and a sampling of patterns available in the full desktop
version. CUE The California Learning Resource Network (CLRN) is a statewide education technology service of the California
Department of Education, administrated by the Stanislaus County Office of Education, Brian Bridges, Director.
Search the CLRN database at clrn.org. Permission is hereby granted to California educators to copy this material
for instructional use. The document may not be distributed for profit.
Melody McGill, CLRN Review Coordinator [email protected]
30 | Spring 2014 OnCUE • cue.org
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