Today in class we discussed the topics of coding and computational skills and their relation to the development of students’ foundational literacies. I personally had zero experience with coding prior to today, so in addition to learning about its applications to the classroom and how it supports student learning, I had a really great time doing some learning and exploring of my own! Foundational skills or foundational literacies describe an individual’s ability to understand the inner workings of the digital world to create, communicate and participate in it appropriately. Today we discussed the importance for students to understand the platforms and programs they use to participate in digital spaces. If students do not have the foundational skills to actively understand, question and critique the information they are exposed to and the methods of dissemination, then they could potentially be at the mercy of programmers/developers, which has significant implications in society and their ability to be digital citizens. To develop foundational skills, students can engage in activities that require them to work on their computational thinking. Based on discussions from our class today, I have learned that computational thinking doesn’t necessarily only happen in computing. We as teachers and therefore our students have most likely engaged in these skills and the language in other areas in teaching and learning. Computational skills include pattern recognition, algorithm, decomposition and abstraction. Some examples of where these skills can be developed in every day learning experiences include problem-solving, linguistics and language exercises, science, storyboarding, sentence writing, population trends and social studies, just to name a few. There are also more overt ways of teaching our students computational skills, and this is where the idea of coding comes into play. During a coding ‘playtime’ I had the opportunity to explore a variety of platforms and applications that I could potentially use in my own classroom. Each of these tools have direct affordances for use in classrooms and support the acquisition of foundational literacies and computational skills. I decided to draw a comparison between Code.org and Codeacademy.com and discuss the reasons why I could see myself using one over the other in my own teaching. After exploring two different coding sites, I think that Code.org would be more enjoyable over Codeacademy.com for younger students to initially be exposed to the idea of coding. The premise behind Code.org is to make a game or solve a puzzle by connecting different pieces of code. I could see this site being very powerful for primary students to help them begin to develop confidence using the internet to solve puzzles, recognize patterns and learn different algorithms, all essential computational skills. Codeacademy.com however would be fun to really see how websites are created and the language that is used to write words and images into a site. Now that I have experience using both sites, I am excited to bring my experience and knowledge into the classroom and share my own insights with students on the importance of being digitally literate and truly understanding the inner-workings of the internet. -Miss. Coleman References that informed this work: BBC. (2017). Introduction to computational thinking. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zp92mp3/revision Yadav, A., Mayfield, C., Zhou, N., Hambrusch, S., & Korb, J.T. (2014). Computational thinking in elementary and secondary teacher education. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 14(1), 5:1-5:16.
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AuthorJessica Coleman holds a Bachelor of Education as well as an Honours Bachelor of Social Sciences, both from the University of Ottawa. She is an Ontario College of Teachers certified teacher, currently working towards a Masters of Education degree at uOttaw, as well. Archives
September 2018
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