Community Engagement

My latest Comments:

Hi Meghna,

Great post! I like how you mentioned that CoSpaces Edu can be used on a desktop to avoid dizziness and the hassle of buying VR goggles – I suppose that would be a lot more easily implemented in a classroom.

I enjoyed walking through your virtual world as well! In my blog post I struggled to come up with ideas on how VR could be incorporated in different KLA’s. I thought perhaps writing a narrative and allowing students to build a world based on their narrative would inspire them to use more vivid descriptive language… but that’s all I could think of! Did you have any thoughts on incorporating CoSpaces into other KLA areas?

https://meghnasemergingtechblog.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/virtual-reality-cospaces/comment-page-1/?unapproved=4&moderation-hash=17ff6566cc2d45026d5e9212f2c6e5fe#comment-4

Hi Meghna,

Thanks for your informative blog post! I really enjoyed reading through the extensive examples that you’ve given. Tools that encourage constructionism definitely sound beneficial – their emphasis on originality, problem solving and hands-on creation make them invaluable in the classroom.

I too reviewed some Makerspace circuit development tools, however I found that a lot of them were quite prescriptive by nature instead of being inquiry-based. It was good to see that Chibitronics integrates arts and crafts with programming to make it a bit more creativity-enhancing.

Overall, great post!

https://meghnasemergingtechblog.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/constructionism-and-the-maker-movement/comment-page-1/?unapproved=3&moderation-hash=4adafff97828cd3627c12ae18dd76097#comment-3
 

Hi Change,

I agree with Miss Wilkies in that your reference to Confucius was very thought-provoking! Definitely captures the core of what constructionism is about. It’s fascinating to read about your insights into teaching Chinese – I went to a local Chinese school in Hong Kong and definitely would have appreciated some of the ideas you have presented here. Typically, the strategies that my Chinese teachers took were nothing more than 死記硬背, and I felt so uninspired! I’m keen to hear about how these strategies work with your lucky students. Please update us when you use this strategy in a classroom!

 
https://cding.school.blog/2020/06/03/constructionism-in-the-language-classroom/comment-page-1/#comment-18

I definitely resonate with your sentiment about Asian cultures not considering “play” as learning.  Thank you for sharing your first attempt with Scratch! I think you have done a great job, especially for a first go. I understand the coding blocks can be a bit confusing – the “when green flag clicked” or “when sprite clicked” blocks are called Triggers, and they often determine the sequence of codes. If you want to learn more, I would recommend checking out the “broadcasting” block on Scratch, so that you would not need to use so many triggers in your code and you wouldn’t need to write down instructions for other Scratch users to use. I only know this because I taught Scratch for 3 years! I think your first attempt was great though – just offering some advice 🙂

Feel free to check out my Scratch post! I created a game where students need to practice their time tables against a set timer.

Overall, I enjoyed reading your post, Change!

https://cding.school.blog/2020/05/05/can-game-make-learning-better/comment-page-1/#comment-19

Hi Change,

I, too, agree that your blogs are very unique and interesting to read! (Which is why I’ve commented on 3 of your blog posts consecutively…) I know this is an academic task, but I thoroughly enjoy the personal details you add to your blog, like why you’ve used Inception as an example or how pressured you felt to write this blog post! I definitely can relate to that – especially trying to learn about virtual reality when your only reality is on zoom!

I found this virtual reality app that I thought might be relevant to your Chinese teaching – the app is called Learn Languages VR, and basically it puts you into real-life scenarios where you need to converse in foreign languages to virtual people. I think it would be great to integrate into your Chinese lessons, as it really gives you a sense that you are using a language in context! Let me know if you manage to take a look at it – I’ve also reviewed this in my blog if it interests you. 🙂

祝你這個學期考試成功!

Hayley

https://cding.school.blog/2020/05/02/reality-or-virtuality/comment-page-1/#comment-20

Hi Malek,

Thanks for your extensive description of the Ozobot! It was interesting watching the Year One classroom example of how it can be integrated into classrooms – the students definitely looked engaged, and I loved how they integrated the Ozobot into their literacy practices.

However, I wonder how much the Ozobot could actually foster creativity? From the example shown, I could certainly see it being used as to develop students’ computational thinking/story recall, but I struggle to think of how students could use as a way to enhance creativity. I found this to be the case for a lot of robotics equipment!

at https://crazycreativecurriculum.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/ozobot/

Hi Brianna,

I really enjoyed reading your insight into Beebots! I definitely agree that while they’re great at developing computational and logical thinking, the functionalities of the Beebot definitely doesn’t quite give much flexibility for teachers to use them creatively.

The most I could think of (after a bit of looking around) was for students to create a maze for their Beebots, or attach a pen to the Beebot to draw a picture by coding in some instructions. Definitely not the most creative robotics equipment out there, but I enjoyed your insightful post!

at https://briannaglavinovic.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/robotics-in-education/

Hi Josh, I loved your idea of attaching a pencil to an Ozobot – what a great way to engage students! Perhaps for a stage 2 mathematics class, students could even code the Ozobot to draw different shapes, so that they would need to evaluate the angles and features of different shapes in order to code it accordingly. Do you know if Blockly code allows you to specify how many angles you want the Ozobot to turn?

at https://joshuamooreeduc3620.school.blog/2020/04/06/robotics-ozobot

Hey Nathalie!

I didn’t get a chance to navigate through all the instructions of using Lego Mindstorms either – the instructions looked complex and it seemed to take a while before anything concrete could be produced. I loved your ideas for creating prototypes and having students compete against each other though!

I was wondering – how much coding practice and explicit instruction would you think is necessary before students would be able to use these tools independently and creatively? It seemed like the instructions to build up the code was quite instruction-intensive, and would thus limit students’ creativity. Would students’ abilities to utilize this tool creatively rely heavily on their coding conceptual knowledge?

at https://wordpress.com/block-editor/page/techmeetscreativity.wordpress.com/80

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