Brian's Blog

The one guaranteed constant in educational technology is change, and the pace of that change is definitely accelerating. So as we approach the New Year I thought it a virtuous time to reflect on this years development in the use of technology at my school. Blogger Blogging has enabled both myself and my class to publish for a real world audience our reflections of learning. When starting out there was trepidation as many staff were worried about the amount of posts they could do. Initially I worked with one other staff member to build their confidence. We rolled it out to the other staff once they saw the benefits of creating a constant flow of information to parents and students through blogging. Pic Collage They say a picture tells a thousand words. With this in mind we enhance to look and feel of our class blogs by embedding collages created in Pic Collage. Pic Collage is a Top 10 mobile photo app. It is quick, fun and easy. Rotate, resize, edit and delete photos u...

As many articles on the Internet state the educational benefit of game programming extends beyond providing an easy and interesting introduction to programming. Students learn through discovery about ICT, media and communication. This learning occurs as the student reflects on their experiences and constructs a personal understanding. It requires logical thinking, critical reasoning, problem identification and solving skills and persistence. “Learning how to program in Scratch puts the learning completely in the hands of the students. There are infinite paths a student could take with the program. There’s no way that we, as teachers, can prepare for the direction that the student will head towards” (Sprankle, 2013). This is true example “Problem Based Learning” and “Just in Time” Teaching in action, allowing the students to become creators rather than just consumers. There are many examples where teachers have been using Scratch to empower student writing in areas such as poet...

I was recently asked by one of my students parents “what is the importance of coding?” In our current climate of education I feel that this is an incredibly insightful question. Computer technologies are rapidly replacing countless amounts of medial tasks many of us once did. We often hear the throw comment “there’s an app for that!” and in many cases, there is the software or application supported by the required hardware to complete the task. However, in conversations with many people they don’t realize behind each application, robot , TV or computer there was someone who had developed the commands or “coding” to operate it correctly. Coding is the language used to instruct an object; however, more importantly computational thinking is the set of problem-solving skills and techniques needed to complete a task. Many of us use technology daily yet how many of us truly understand how it works? Technology development is one area that us as human either flock to or flee f...