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MIT App Inventor - Canyons App Club

2/27/2013

 
Picture
MIT App Inventor is a program for creating mobile applications (apps) for the Andriod operating system in a drag and drop manner.  It was a program which began as a Google Labs project and is now currently managed by Media Lab team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  MIT's App Inventor provides an introduction to programming concepts where students are able "build it & test it" in real world (immediate) fashion.

Why Teach Programming Skills?

Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer. . . because it teaches you how to think. –Steve Jobs
Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today. –Mark Zuckerberg
Read more:
We need more gamers...
Will Robots Take your Kid's Job?

Canyons School District is helping interested students learn to program through an after-school called "Canyons App Club."  Students from all high schools meet formally at least once a month. Jared Ward, one of the club organizers explains,  "Students drive the momentum for this club, they would love to meet after-school every day!" Students in the club range from a very beginning skill level to quite advanced developing C++.  In addition, some of the students have completed or are currently involved in the programming classes at CTEC.  Club organizers, RachelAnn Murphy and Jared Ward, are Canyons School District Education Technology Specialists at the high school level.  The idea for a high school app development club started to take form after watching a few TED Talks by kids who are currently creating apps.  These students are amazing and Canyons School District has amazing students as well.  And even though the district has a programming course for students, the programming courses isn't always accessible to all interested students.  And so, the idea was born to start our very own Canyons App Club.

The Canyons App Club is designed to provide a community of learners, a variety of resources to student, and business partnerships.   Each month students earn badges as app creation levels are completed.  The MIT App Inventor website provides a wealth of resources in the form of tutorials, forums, and a gallery of created apps.  Each of the MIT APP Inventor tutorials teaches a certain aspect of app development and the tutorials get more complicated as they progress.  After each tutorial is completed, students are then challenged to use those same concepts in an app of their very own creation.
 For example, the first badge level in the app club is called "Hello Purr" ( a creative twist on 'Hello World', the first application programmers typically create).  In this app when a picture of a kitty is clicked it will purr.  Once students complete this app they receive the Hello Kitty badge and then are challenged to make a similar app of their own choosing.  One club student created a missile app and when a picture of a missile is clicked it sounds like a missile taking off.  Another student created dinosaur app that roared when clicked.  These student who have created their own app have earned the Hello Advanced badge as well as the Hello Kitty badge. 
Are you interested in playing along?  Complete these levels to learn on your own!
  1. Hello Purr & Hello Advanced
  2. Magic 8 Ball & Magic Advanced
  3. PaintPot & Paint Advanced
  4. MoleMash & Advanced Mash
  5. Quiz Me & QuizMe Advanced
  6. Map Tour – Advanced Tour
  7. Stock Quotes – Web Service Advanced
  8. Colored Dots  - multiple screen advanced
  9. Pizza Party  - Advanced Data Table
  10. Mini Golf – Advanced Gaming
These resources are helpful starting points:
  • App Inventor Tutorials
  • App Inventor Course in a Box
  • App Inventor Video Tutorials
  • App Inventor Code Snippets

Kids can create apps - look below!
  • Utah's own student - Bubble Ball
  • 5 Apps Made by School Kids
  • 20 Apps Created by Students
  • Thomas Suarez on Ted Talks
By Jared Ward & Rachel Murphy

The Great Grant Rescue

1/7/2013

 
Many people began the school year hopeful that their special ideas for the classroom were going to be funded by grants through Donors Choose and Chevron.  There are a large number of classrooms that benefited tremendously from this grant.  The Canyons Education Foundation also has generously supported many teacher-driven innovations as well.  

Due to funding limitations, there are also some grants that have not received the support teachers were hoping to have.  We want to let teachers and schools know that hope is not lost .  There are still ways to apply for funding.  Check out this video podcast that discusses some things you can do!  Find out more on our Grants page.

Thanks to Katie Dewey, Danae Reff, and Jared Ward for the creation of this video podcast!

Check Student Learning With Twitter

10/8/2012

 
PictureThe CSD Ed Tech Endorsement class with a twitter backchannel.
A few weeks ago, I worked with a couple of other teachers in my ed tech endorsement class on a presentation about exit surveys. An exit survey (or exit ticket) is a very short and quick way of checking students’ understanding right at the end of class.  It can be a single question or a couple of quick problems to solve.  The purpose is to check a student's understanding on the key points of a lesson. It also serves as a check for the teacher so that they can see what, if any, material needs to be reviewed or retaught before moving on to another topic in the next class.

One of my ideas for our presentation on exit surveys was to host a live twitter chat where class members could ask questions during the presentation and then we asked them to post a final tweet summarizing what they learned about exit surveys during our presentation. It was a lot of fun and could be used in many secondary classrooms as a means for collecting student feedback. I have seen several live twitter walls/backchannel websites in the past, but for this presentation, I chose to use Visible Tweets and Twijector. 

A couple of weeks later, I set up the twitter backchannel again for our closing presentations. I connected a second projector to a computer running live broadcast of our class hashtag #csdendorse using Twijector (click to see the feed). I thought it would be fun to post responses to everyone's final projects in a group discussion forum. Visible Tweets (click to see the live feed) creates a beautiful, albeit less functional, version of the same information. 

All you need to get started is a twitter account (students probably already have one), a class hashtag (you can make this up, just be consistent), and a projector (though you don't need to project the live feed for this to work.)

Picture
Visible Tweets running in Rotation Animation mode for our #csdendorse final presentations.
Here are some ideas for how to use Twijector or Visible Tweets in your classroom:
  1. Exit surveys. Ask students to tweet what they learned in class today using a class #hashtag.
  2. Class discussions. Students who might be reluctant to ask questions in class can post questions and responses to twitter.
  3. Historical reenactments: students can play the role of a historical figure and can send timed messages to relive a historical event. Read about an example of this from our endorsement class HERE.
I also found a really nice blog post titled: "Beyond the Exit Slip: Closure Activities for Classroom Instruction." The article gives some great examples and rationale for providing students with authentic learning activities at the end of a class.

Leave a comment below to share ideas about how you might use exit surveys and/or twitter as an assessment tool.
-Posted by Jared Ward

    What We're Learning

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