I've been using Google's CS First's Game Design and created a chart and checklist for students to use as they complete each activity. It's an awesome club that can be used with Scratch. The best part is it's FREE! Read more about it on my guest post on EducateLLC, "CS First Clubs: A Success Story in the Lab". It will discuss how to get started easily. The Game Design Process involves three steps. 1. Prototype: What is the goal? What do you plan to create? 2. Playtest: What happens when you run the program? What do you notice? 3. Iterate: Did the program run correctly and efficiently? How can it be improved?
The checklist file below can be downloaded and edit to fit the students' learning objectives. It is one file that has a checklist for all 8 activities in Game Design.
Padlet is a flexible and resourceful tool to post ideas, share links, and collaborate wherever you are. Just imagine a virtual post-it board where you can manipulate your post-its seamlessly and instantly. Padlets can be kept private for personal notes, links and resources, while some can be toggled public to share. In the classrooms, these are five quick and simple ways to use Padlet. 1. Getting to Know Me: In the beginning of the school year, this is my way of getting to know the students and remembering their names and faces, and their computer seats. They love to take selfies and share a fun fact. I can also download and print them in pdf or jpeg format.
2. Exit Ticket: At the end of a lesson students can answer a few questions about what they've learned or found challenging. For English language learners, they can type in their language. They can also speak into the computer and record themselves. This is also good in the beginning of a lesson to assess what they already know.
3. Q+A: Students love to ask questions so this is a great way to jot their questions so the teacher can address them during class and refer to it after. In this example, I introduced Dash, our robot to the second graders and they were so curious about him and had lots of good and fun questions.
4. Resources: A page we can easily throw our ideas on and share links and documents, and refer back to on another day. At a professional development workshop, these were some fun makerspace ideas resource page that another teacher started and I got to add to it.
5. Sharing Projects: Students created games on Scratch and this was the simplest way for students to upload their links then play each other's games. I started the page and posted it on Symbaloo. The students clicked on that link and started posting, it was updated instantaneously.
Do you need help creating a Google form that offers choices and then eliminates the option after it has been chosen? Well, the video below will show step-by-step of how to use this add-on feature. It is useful for the computer lab or library sign-up, parent-teacher conferences, student to teacher conferences, party meals options, etc. The forms are very versatile and can be personalized to fit your needs.
*Just to update- choose the "Choice Eliminator 2" offered by Accemy & SW gApps.
Symbaloo is a visually appealing, accessible, and editable website of all your favorite links saved on the cloud. During my first year of teaching technology, I was constantly putting saved links in our public folder and the students would spend a lot of time clicking through to find these links. Also, it was difficult for our kindergarteners and first graders to read so I would either have to spell out the link or walk around to open the folder for 25 to 32 of them. That's time wasted! So I came across Symbaloo, which is a bookmarking service on the cloud. Symbaloo allows you to create a pretty page of tiles and fill each tile with the link to your favorite website or access to docs, slides, or PDFs saved on the cloud. You can even choose your own icon so it's simpler to tell younger students to click on the "owl" page or "letter Z" page.
Below is a quick video on how to add a tile on your Symbaloo page simply clicking on the tile and typing in the website then choosing the readily available icon or a symbol. Afterward, the most important step is to remember to click the curved arrow to upload it to the site.
The next thing I did was add it as a homepage to my browsers. I particularly like Chrome because it's faster and more seamless, but Internet Explorer and Firefox can perform the same tasks. Take the link of the Symbaloo webmix and open up a browser. Paste the link in the address bar and then click enter. When the page is up, click on the three dots to the right hand side and click on "Settings". Scroll down to "On Startup" and choose the third dot "Open a specific page or set of pages" and choose "Use current page." When that's complete, I close the browser and open a new one to test if Symbaloo opens up and it's all set for my students! This is simple and saves a lot of time, definitely highly recommended.
