Expectations for teaching time

Students get at least 30 lessons 45 minutes long in a school year.

The Standards

We are addressing the standards at https://media.doe.in.gov/standards/indiana-academic-standards-grades-k-8-computer-science.pdf Some of these are taught in the classroom, so this is a partnership with the classroom teachers. Students are tested on these starting in 3rd grade. You are part of helping them be successful!

Please Do

Teach your students to TURN OFF their Chromebooks at the end of class. There are 2 reasons for this:

• New updates only install when restarting or powering up from being off.

• When students log in after just shutting the lid, they are just logging into the device, not the Google server. Then they get sign-in errors. When they log in after a hard shut-down, they are logging into the Google server, reducing sign-in errors (hopefully).

Options for how to turn off: (Teach students what the power symbol looks like. Draw it on the board.) 

• Press and hold the power button in the upper right corner of the keyboard until the screen goes black

• Click in the lower right corner of the screen and  click on the power symbol.

Teach the method your building prefers. Get with the other specialists and teachers to come to an agreement.  It's best to have everyone do it the same way so you can check.

Establishing a culture of excellent digital citizenship

• You are the positive force in your building to establish a culture of excellent digital citizenship. We teach students to be responsible online and with their devices. 

• These are the Chromebook care guidelines: Chromebook care slideshow This is the language we use throughout each class to reinforce how we treat our devices. 

• Please start each K and 1st grade class with this slideshow to build this foundation. 

• Frequently remind the upper grades and review these with them. Here's a slide to use at the beginning of every intermediate class.

Tracking attendance and participation for grades

Since you need to give grades, you need to track attendance and participation. If you have your class lists in Google Sheets, you can type in comments about participation. The participation grade can take into account the following:

• whether their batteries were charged 

• they brought headphones

• they had their hands in home row position while they were typing

• they were on task in class. 

It's easiest to take attendance and make these notes while the students are doing their 15 minutes of typing. You can walk around and see what their battery symbol is and make notes. It is important to have documentation for participation for every week to justify the grades you post.

100% participation = S+

90% participation = S

70% participation = S-

When posting S+, S, and S- in PowerSchool, that’s the percentages they translate to. 

Teaching Digital Citizenship lessons

The first two weeks of the school year are unplugged lessons (students do not need Chromebooks) focusing on digital citizenship. Code.org also incorporates some digital citizenship lessons that you teach as you get to them throughout the year. You will find the resources you need for the first week of school here and the second week here.

Here's the whole technology curriculum at a glance with links.

Typing skills

• Students who gain fluency with their typing, able to type their thoughts without hunting and pecking, improve their scores in spelling, writing, and reading comprehension. You can have a direct, positive impact on their academic skills if you are diligent in how you teach keyboarding! Research shows it takes 50 hours of good practice to get to fluency with keyboard skills. 

• We start on touch typing skills in 2nd grade. Younger than that, their hands are too small for touch typing. See resources for them here.

• We use typing.com. Students log in with Google. It is self-paced. 

• You set up your classes by Google Classroom and assign curriculum by grade level. 

• Students need to get the correct finger placement into their muscle memory. They will only use the correct position if you walk around and enforce it and praise the ones who are doing it. Stress accuracy over speed. 

• Posture is important, too, in getting it into the muscle memory correctly. Have them sit up straight and use good posture. 

• Do 15 minutes of typing each class period. Start an onscreen timer when they walk in the door and praise students who start immediately. Have them do the lessons, primarily. If you want to direct them to do a test once a month for a friendly competition, that's fine. Steer them away from the games until they've completed the Learn the Keys curriculum. Games are a privilege for those who have completed the basics.

• If you want to look over their teacher's guide, here it is. 

• Students thrive on positive reinforcement and recognition. Walk around the room while they're typing. Call out students who earn badges. Complement students who have their fingers in home row position. Praise students for high accuracy scores. When typing time is over,  show everyone how much typing time everyone got in. In typing.com, click on Classes and then the name of the class. Click on the arrow by Typing Time to sort the list from greatest to least. Praise the students who spent the most time on task. Create a culture of excellence.

Teaching the Google Suite

After the first two weeks, 2nd-5th learn to work with Google docs, slides, sheets. You will find the skills checklists to print off for each class and all the resources you need linked on the Google Teaching Resources page.

Teaching letter recognition and click and drag

Many kindergarten and first grade students are not ready to dive into code.org right away. They don't even know their letters! After the first 2 weeks of digital citizenship lessons, you will work with them on learning their letters and then click and drag skills. All the resources you'll need are here.

Teaching code.org

• The biggest reason we teach code.org is the computational thinking skills. We know that the vast majority of students will not grow up to be programmers, but the ability to look at a problem, break it down into its components, and figure out each step it takes to solve it is a life skill. You can pep talk the students on the value of computational thinking whenever they feel overwhelmed and need a push to put the effort into solving a difficult puzzle.

• You’ll need to do some of the puzzles in advance to see what will trip up the students so you can set them up for success. It’s ok not to have all the answers, though. It’s ok to say, “I don’t know how to solve this. Who can do this and wants to come up and show the class?” It’s ok to do it wrong and let the class see you struggle to debug and problem solve. Here's a hint, though: When you're logged in as teacher, you should see "For Teachers Only" in the black bar along the top just to the right of "Instructions." Click on that to see the solution. ;-) 

• These are the courses to assign for each grade level: K = Course A; 1 = Course B; 2 = Course C; 3 = Course D; 4 = Course E; 5 = Course F

• Code.org allows you to hide upcoming lessons. This is definitely best practice. If you do not hide any lessons, the students who get done quickly will go on and do lessons before you teach them. It quickly becomes unmanageable when your students are all over the place in the curriculum. You want early finishers to either help other students who are struggling or to do an independent, creative project. Then when you deem enough students are finished with a unit to go on, you’ll teach the next one before opening it up for students to start working. 

• It’s ok to move slowly through the curriculum. There is no expectation that you will get each class to the end of the code.org curriculum by the end of the year.

Paired Programming

• You will always have students who really struggle to get it. You can pair them up with proficient student who will always sit beside them as their “navigator” and help them. See all paired programming guidelines and helps here. (Another time paired programming is useful is when a student does not have a working device.)

• Another strategy is to gather a group of students who are stuck up to the board and have everyone do the puzzle together with you. You solve it, talk through it as you solve, and they’re doing it on their devices with you.

Google Classroom

We use Google Classroom to push out links and assignments to out students. It is set up to automatically sync to PowerSchool to pull in your classes. 

PowerSchool will sync with Google Classroom and automatically set up you classes for you. But since kindergarten is graded differently, they do not sync. You will have to set up your own classroom for kindergarten, or have the classroom teacher add you as a teacher to their classroom.

• You will want to set it so that only the teacher and post and comment. Students abuse the privilege and blow it up with silly stuff. 

• You will also want to turn off email notifications for yourself. 

  • Click on the three lines in the upper left corner. 

  • At the bottom of the drop-down list that appears there will be a gear icon. 

  • When you click on it, you see a setting for notifications. 

  • Now you can turn them off so your inbox doesn't fill up with Google Classroom notifications. 

Classwize

Classwize is a tool you can use to see what all students are doing on their devices. It syncs with Google Classroom, so you cannot use it until you have that set up. The Greater Clark Code is clark.county.in.us.

• You can pause the network for students who are off task. 

• You can open a website on their devices.

• You can allow access only to certain websites. This is the Focus feature.
  This article explains it.
  Find step-by-step directions here.

•  Tutorial for using classwize with code.org--how to pause their internet, open a website, and send a message

Handy tips

• To log your device in as a student so that what you demo looks exactly like what they see, use the account 000XES@mygccs.com. (Use the initials for your school instead of XES) The password is abc321.

• If you just want to do an incognito window to log into Google with a student account, here's a video tutorial. 

• Here are the K-2 passwords for each school