We took a break from Swift Playgrounds to discuss Digital Citizenship. We talked about not falling for fake and finding the clues to determine if a site is safe. We applied our learning by going onto Interland and completing the Reality River challenge.

We also explored Lego WeDo - a building a coding program with Lego. See us at work here!

We have been working on Swift Playgrounds this month. Swift Playgrounds is a free iPad app that teaches how to program using the programming language, Swift. We are currently working on the Learn to Code 1 activity and will continue this through next month.

My Christmas gift to the 6th grade students this year was the gift of teaching them how to organize their Google Drive! Over the years, most of the student's Drive's have gotten cluttered. We spent time talking about organization and how to manipulate Google Drive.

We started to learn about the Swift coding language with the iPad app Swift Playgrounds. We completed the Code Machine activity with partners during class.

The students were able to learn how to program and use Spheros! Spheros are spherical robots that can be driven and programed through an app.They can connect to the device through Bluetooth. They are waterproof, very durable, and super fun!

This month we focused on podcasts! This was a collaboration project with Music, Spanish, & Technology class. The podcast that they created were Spanish interviews and had original music imbedded in.

The students started with writing their scripts in Spanish class based on the Spanish questions that they were given. They then went to Music class and created an original track with Garageband. Lastly, they recorded & edited their podcast (with Soundtrap), & created their original cover art (with Canva) in Technology class. You can give some of podcasts a listen in the Sixth Grade Gallery!

At the beginning of the month we went through a MAP test training. This training taught the kids about the different tools that are available on the MAP test. We started to use Typing Club to learn how to type using the correct fingers on the correct keys. Going slow in the beginning will help us begin to type fast later.

Our Digital Citizenship lesson this month was "Share with Care". We discussed reasons why people might create fake social media accounts and identified the possible results of posting from a fake social media account.

We started learning about block coding and used CS First and Scratch to guide this learning. The students created a project "Animate a Name" and presented it to the class. They also created a "Two Truths & a Lie" project in Scratch and the class was able to guess which was the lie. The students programed their characters to do something if the correct or incorrect answer is guessed.

This month we talked about class expectations and procedures. We had our first Digital Citizenship lesson on Finding Balance in a Digital World. We discussed our digital media habits and came up with goals on how we can "Unplug" throughout our day.

We started learning about block coding with CS First by Google and Scratch. We created our first Scratch program, "Animate a Name". We will continue to use CS First and Scratch to become more familiar with block coding.