Chris Betcher

While not every student might want to write their own software, understanding the big ideas of coding is a skill that all students would benefit from, even the very young ones. Understanding the key ideas of computational thinking – identifying patterns, thinking algorithmically, manipulating data, solving real problems, etc – is an important step in helping our students build mastery over their world. This presentation aims to take you on a guided tour through some of the resources available to your students to help them learn the principles of creating code.  It starts by looking at a range of desktop and mobile apps suitable for teaching very young students to program, right through to tools and websites that can help your older students learn to hack code, and much more. If you do actually try any of this stuff out, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. PS: This is my fourth contribution to the K12 Online Conference , and I think it's a great format for an o...

Having just experienced an interesting juxtaposition of two quite different conference modes, I was struck by the following thoughts... I spent most of last weekend putting a presentation together for the k12 online conference.  This virtual conference was started by a small group of teachers and has run every year since 2006. It is composed entirely of online video presentations of up to 20 minutes in length. These videos are presentation of ideas, best practice, classroom examples and big thinking submitted by educators from around the world. Presenters submit proposals just like a conventional conference, and these proposals are vetted by a selection panel for quality and relevance. Selected presenters then produce their 20 minute video and submit it and each year, over a 2 week period, these videos are released publicly.  There are a few live events and such to accompany them over the 2 weeks that the "conference" is running, but importantly these video presentations live...

Towards the end of the 20 minute video I made for K12 Online, Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch , I very briefly mentioned two other things that I would have liked to say more about but simply didn't have enough time in the time allowed. The first thing was the use of Scratch on the iPad and the iPhone.  I mentioned that there was a Scratch iOS app, but didn't have time to elaborate.  Since then, a few people contacted me about this app and wanted to know more, telling me that the couldn't find it in the Apple App Store.  The reason you can't find it is unfortunately quite simple... it's been removed from the App Store and is no longer available so unless you got a copy of it prior to it being removed, you're out of luck I'm afraid. So if you missed out, sorry... but if it's any consolation, the Scratch app only allowed you to browse the Scratch website and then execute existing Scratch projects.  You couldn't actually manipulate code or use it as...

I hope you've all been following the K12 Online Conference this year. There have been some fabulous presentations coming out of this year's event and, as usual, there has been a diverse collection of topics and ideas with something for everyone. You can check out the entire conference at k12online.ning.com I had the privilege of being able to contribute to the conference again this year with a presentation called Ways of Working. I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task. As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you se...

The K12 Online Conference is well and truly over for another year (well, in as much as a virtual, permanently archived conference can ever be "over"), but I thought I'd re-post this presentation I made for it.  It's called I Like Delicious Things and looks at how tagging works in systems like Flickr and Delicious , and how tags can accumulate into complete systems of organisation called folksonomies. I know it's already online at the K12 Online website, but I recently uploaded a slightly bigger, higher res version to Vimeo .  I'm guessing that there are still lots of people who never saw this on the original K12 Online site, so here it is again if you're interested... I Like Delicious Things from Chris Betcher on Vimeo .