The Housekeeper and the Professor

Today three students from BMS (Jake and Zack R, and Parker S.) and I presented two sessions of SCRATCH at the Westport Public Library from 1-4. This workshop was in conjunction with the WestportREADS book, The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, and the afternoon included many events under the title Math, Memories and Making Connections.

We started the event with a brief story animation created in Scratch (shown below), then taught the participants some of the basics. Results can be viewed on the Scratch website that we set up for the workshop- http://scratch.mit.edu/users/wplworkshop.


http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/wpsscratch/866067

Glogster

The educational version of Glogster allows for the creation of classes with some complications in terms of account names and passwords for our elementary students. The educational account provides no advertising and access to other Glogs made only in the edu site. Pam Syndercombe, technology teacher at CES and Ed Wolf, 5th grade teacher at CES, are preparing to use Glogster in an upcoming learning activity and will provide all of us with some suggestions on how best to use Glogster with a whole class.

As Glogster use evolves, I'll add an update on some of its relative advantages in a future post.

This practice Glog will eventually have links to each of the 5 contemporary literacy areas identified in our "21st Century Skills" workshops over the past 2 years.