Day Two:

So today we started day two of our weeklong TeacherCon. I’ve gotta say, the energy of day one would have been hard to beat. I’ve also got to say, the Code.org team did it. Today was a phenomenal day of learning.

Again, we started our day out with a great breakfast. We were able to spend time with our colleagues and discuss what we learned, what we were looking forward to learning, and discuss teaching practices from places around the country. It is certainly an advantage to be able to have professional development with people who teach from other areas of the country/world. Our crew has people from Hawaii to Maine, I believe I Sarah Fairweather of Code.org said we had 40 states represented… but don’t hold me to that exact number… but I’m in the right neighborhood.

Sometimes I wonder… WHY?

After breakfast, we fell into our welcome routine. We headed to the ballroom to have our daily kick off, where Josh and Dani do a great job of getting the room pumped and ready to roll. They recapped a bit of what we did yesterday, and set us up for the expectations of today. Many folks were nervous, as today was our first “teaching day.” Today was the day that each TLO room (if that that term is new to you, check out yesterday’s post) would have two groups teach actual lessons from the CS Discoveries curriculum. Josh and Dani did a great day of diffusing the nervous tension that existed, and kept the energy up.

After launching from our general session, we headed to our breakout sessions. We saw another model lesson taught by our great facilitators. The most beneficial part of this process is we get to discuss strategies as a group.

Next, we headed to a different room. This was the lesson planning room. Here, we solidified what we were going to teach for our lessons. As it happens, today was my group’s day. First group. Right after lunch. No worries… we crushed it. Our group worked well together, fed off of each other, and hit every objective we were after. To be honest, I was not all that comfortable with the lesson going in. Not because I was unfamiliar with the content, but because I really didn’t like one of the methods I was expected to utilize… Paired Computing.

Paired Computing is where you have two people share one computer. One acts as a navigator, the other the driver. I really didn’t like this model. I didn’t like it last year when I piloted the program, so the wall was up when I was preparing to teach it.  As it happens, today was exceptionally valuable for me. I saw paired computing work. It worked, and worked well.  Well enough it completely changed my mind of paired computing. That, in itself was a huge win for me.

We watched another group present a FABULOUS lesson on digital footprints, and the code.org team has put together a great resource on this one. It has the students work through fake social media accounts and try to gather personal information on two fictitious people. It really helps make it real how little posts and replies from friends can be put together to gain a LOT of personal information. Moral of the story… be careful what you put out there.

We then did a little digital scavenger hunt to find certain parts of the code.org website. This was nice, a good way to become familiar with the interface. What was way beyond nice was that a member of the code.org team, Marina, was in the room getting real feedback on what we thought. I discussed some concerns I had from last year, showed her what I was having issues with, and she did something not many organizations really do. She listened, wrote them down, asked questions, and seemed genuinely interested in what we had to say, and in making adjustments to the interface to help teachers. Wow.

We ended our day with our end of the day recap. The nice thing about this, the energy was just as high at the end of the day as it was at the beginning. All in all… another great day with the code.org team.