Skip to main content

Generate Instant Pear Decks

By
  I’ll keep this short as the video explains most of you. Any new educational technology can be complicated to dig into from scratch as you attempt to align it to learning outcomes.  Well, a new feature that Pear Deck has introduced has taken a giant leap forward to help educators do just that.  Before we jump into the new features, if you are unfamiliar with Pear Deck and why my students and I consider it the #1 EdTech tool that helps their learning, check out the video in the previous blog post.   But if you are more concerned with why you should even dive into Pear Deck or learn about this new AI generation of Pear Deck sessions to a learning target, check out the video below. Like I said, I’m keeping it short so you have time to watch the video. If you have questions, please contact me at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org or the Pear Deck Learning team at support@deck.peardeck.com . Also, check out the amazing Stacey Roshan's video on this update. 
Post a Comment

#IMMOOC Week 2: Coding is not Confidential

Image
By

As a physics teacher, I am constantly looking for new ways for my students to conceptualize their knowledge and experiment with it. For this reason, I am always on the hunt for great new simulations. PhET Interactive Simulations have been a fantastic resource for my classroom. They are a great way for students to manipulate variables and see the effect instantaneously. These simulations aren't the only place they would see digital representations of physics.

 Every platform game has some form of a physics engine in it that students get to interact with. In my classroom, one of the games students analyze is Angry Birds.

 As I think more about this process on using simulations, I feel that there is something missing. Yesterday at the Wisconsin ASCD conference, I was able to hear Agnieszka (Aggie) Salter speak about the passion her elementary students have for coding in the classroom.  I honestly know very little about coding.  In fact, I dropped a Java course in college after a week because I felt completely lost. With the rise of code.org and The Hour of Code, though, coding is now a powerful educational movement.  Seeing this work, I believe there has to be away to connect it to the physics we do in the classroom.

 Wouldn't it be great if rather than consuming another person's simulation, students could design their own.  It would be super primitive, but would give them a place to apply those concepts of forces and motion as they program movement. They would be recreating the rules of the physical world in a digital space. 

 Two years ago, I had an AP Physics student program this as a part of our Genius Hour projects.  



I don't expect to get anywhere near here.  But I know in 3rd grade I was able to program a turtle to move forward in logo on an Apple iie. Yeah, I'm old school.




One of the great moments of Aggie's presentation was the talk of coding as a work of learning from failure.  A program rarely works as intended the 1st time. The process of debugging one's own code or seeking assistance from a peer to help debug is apart of the coding culture. Isn't this exactly what we want in our lifelong learners? The ability to learn from mistakes and seek assistance from peers in the process. Let's start calling corrections, debugging. I look forward to having students debug assessments in my classroom.

 As I said before, I know next to nothing about coding. I've played with Spheros and Makey Makeys in Scratch, but I've never tried to model physics using code. So, yesterday I signed up at Code.org and plan on taking courses so that I can know enough to start doing what I'll be asking my learners to do.  Many of them will know much more about coding than me and can help us out. But, I hope by being vulnerable and letting learners that this is new for me to, we can take the journey together. 

 If anyone has other resources they'd be willing to share, I'd love to hear them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

By
So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot ...
14 comments
Read more

Personalized Learning Tasks and Roles

By
Yesterday, I read a great post by Jim Rickabaugh dealing with the roles of learner and teacher in a personalized learning environment by looking at tasks . The roles were set up on a continuum. This article timed perfectly with a reflection on part of Students at the Center by Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick on idea generation and task development I had in mind. These two works are the focus of my reflection here. I think a key misunderstand teachers have when it comes to digging into personalizing learning is that for planning purposes, we no longer begin with standards but with student desires.  I believe like all good instruction, we need to start with the standards.  Think about it, standards are what we want all learners to know and be able to do as a result of passing through our educational system. That is why it is essential that we make sure that standards are representative of what we believe is important for learners to be informed and productive in th...
1 comment
Read more

Pear Deck 101 + Q&A

By
  Last week, I presented as a part of Pear Deck’s Pear Fair 2020. My presentation was Pear Deck 101 for Google Slides. During the presentation, there was a live chat. Many people said it went too fast for a 101 Session. Luckily, it was recorded so it can be rewatched.  Also, many said that they wanted to know how to build a Pear Deck first. I structured the presentation to show what Pear Deck was before showing how to make one. Perhaps that wasn’t the best structure. But, I’m going to stick with my philosophy of showing what something is before showing how to make it. The presentation, which can be watched below, was structured in several different sections What is Pear Deck? Providing an overview of the experience from the Teacher and Student perspectives. How do you build a Pear Deck in Google Slides? How do you start a Pear Deck presentation? How do you end a Pear Deck presentation? Here is the Slideshow I shared during the session bit.ly/pearfair101 Time really flew in...
2 comments
Read more