Being a 21st Century Teacher

I LOVE being a 21st century teacher! 

By most measures, teaching in general, and teaching computing in particular, is easier and more fun than ever before. A bold statement perhaps?  For me, the way technology facilitates community is key.

For starters, social media allows me to join a great club of fellow professionals. Entry criteria: a twitter account and a willingness to learn and share.

With the advent of resource-sharing sites like TES and primaryresources.co.uk, not to mention our own site, there really is no excuse for poorly planned, boring lessons.

If I get stuck and need to learn something new myself, well, just like Neo in the Matrix you can get on Youtube and learn just about anything (it can take a bit longer than it did for Keanu). For example I learned lots of Kodu tricks from @GeekyNicki and returned the favour with some Kodu and Flowol tutorials of my own.

In a typical day I can wake up to inspirational tweets from the likes of @urban_teacher,  @markbarnes19 and @ICTEvangelist. I can teach lessons from plans I've found and adapted from CAS, TES or computing super heroes like Simon Haughton, and in the evening I can study Computer Science at MIT.

I can't imagine, now, not being able to connect quickly and easily with the best educators in my chosen field.

Teaching from just your own experience, behind a closed door, from a book? 

That's so 20th century, darling!

Debugging a lesson on Debugging - Mobile Mistakes #1

iPads are wonderful devices. No really, they are. Even if they make you start a sentence without a capital letter.

This post however, is about what can go wrong in an IT lesson using mobile devices and the lessons learned.

I am working with a school that has amazing IT provision, with one-to-one across the board: iPads in LKS2 and Macbooks in UKS2, plus a suite of networked machines. I have occasional use of an iPad, so I borrowed one with 'Hopscotch' installed, to plan my Computer Science lesson on debugging for a year 3 class.

I put together what I hoped was a well-structured plan for making a tilting 'etch-a-sketch' game, with debugging being the focus, but with some cross-curricular maths work on angles included.

However, what I did not plan for was that within the class set of iPads, two different versions of hopscotch were installed, neither of which were the same as the one I had used to plan with!

You would not think that this would be so significant for something as simple as a tilting 'etch-a-sketch' game. However, what if one version of Hopscotch required using angles to set the direction of motion of the sprite, and the other used +ve and -ve co-ordinates for the same task? Some advice: don't try teaching angles to 360° and cartesian co-ordinates and negative numbers to 2 sections of a Year 3 class simultaneously. It doesn't go well.

Despite this, and the fact that it was the last hour of the last day of half term, and that there'd been a cake sale immediately prior to the lesson, the children were great. Most of the 'angle' children succeeded, and some of the x-y group got something working. But was it a great lesson on debugging? Only for me.

Lessons learned:

• Check all the mobile devices you are going to use have the software you want installed.
• Check it is the same version on all devices.
• Plan your lesson using the same device the children will use (or at least the same software)