During the Spring semester of 2010, I will be taking a class that is an internship in the area of educational technology. For the purposes of updating anyone who may be stopping by this blog, here is some information about me. I am a K-4 elementary library media specialist. I have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, a master’s in school library science and I am finishing my education specialist in learning resources, focused on educational technology/online teaching and learning. I am very interested in technology in education.
For this class my main focus will be working preparing for and then presenting at a conference. The conference I will be presenting at is TechNet. TechNet is a conference in the Kansas City, Missouri area that focuses on technology in K-12 schools. The topic I will be presenting on is animation software, specifically one piece of software called Scratch. Scratch was created by students at MIT and was designed for students ages 8 and up. I am presenting along with a colleague, who will be presenting on another piece of animation software called GoAnimate!, which was created for older students. The colleague who is presenting this piece works in a high school. We submitted our application to present at TechNet in October 2009 and received our acceptance notice in December 2009. We are presenting on February 12th, 2010.
One of the pieces I’d like to include as part of the presentation is examples of student created projects. My colleague already has several student created projects from earlier in the school year. I was initially unsure of the best way to go about teaching students how to use Scratch. I wanted to be able to work with a small group and that is difficult to achieve with our busy school days. I thought it would be very challenging to teach a class of 25 students all how to use Scratch at one time, since it is a technology they are very unfamiliar with.
The school district I work in has grade level teachers gather in collaborative groups one day each week. We call this Encore time. I spoke with the principal at my school and arranged to be able to take a small group of 6-8 4th grade students during the next Encore rotation, which was scheduled to begin the first week of January. Snow days threw the start date off and today, January 13th I met with my small group for the first time.
I was nervous about meeting with them, because even though the developers of Scratch feel it is created for ages 8 and up, I just wasn’t sure how it would go for the students. Scratch is web-based software, so I took the wireless laptop cart to a 4th grade classroom. I gave each student a laptop and used the SmartBoard in the classroom to begin to teach the students how to get started in Scratch. I explained to them key vocabulary as it related to Scratch, such as the term “Sprites”. A Sprite in Scratch is any character (person, thing, object), that can have animation added to it.
Before I allowed the students to get started actually working on Scratch, I had them each select a simple nursery rhyme they could for their first project. I had 8 students and each student picked a different nursery rhyme.
Students then began to work on picking Sprites and backgrounds for their projects. I limited the students on this project to using Sprites that were already part of Scratch, rather than import any or create their own. This caused an interesting and creative development. The students discovered that not all the Sprites needed for their nursery rhymes were available. We now have recreated nursery rhymes, which include Jack jumping over flower vases instead of candlesticks and Hannah, Hannah, banana eater, rather than Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater.
All of the projects were saved and hopefully next week, the students will begin to add the animations to their Sprites.
