I’m super blessed to have our STEM coordinator, Mrs. Meade, here with me this week. It’s always nice to have some company. When she comes to visit a couple of times a year, she brings a lesson plan with her and models it, then I teach it after she leaves. I had her yesterday and I have her again today, but I’m solo the rest of the week.
Second and third grade have worked on coding on the Scratch website. First grade has explored the Scratch Jr. app and my kindergarteners have done an unplugged coding activity.
The biggest excitement this week has been using Tinkercad with fourth and fifth grade. My students have explored the site. I have also set up Classrooms in Tinkercad, which means I can see what they are creating and monitor their builds. Then, when they are ready to print, I will be able to download the file and get it to going. Students will be making wheels for a project that Mrs. Meade has going on later this year, so this is a great Segway into Tinkercad and the educational value of 3D printing. #printingwithapurpose
If you haven’t used Tinkercad in a while, I encourage you to check out their classrooms feature. The only thing it is lacking right now (in my opinion) is support with single sign on. I’d love for my students to be able to join my class and login with their Google accounts. When adding students to a classroom, it auto populates a nickname for them. I went in and manually changed all of those nicknames to their lunch numbers. The site lets you copy and paste a student list, but there needs to be a way to upload a .csv with usernames and passwords. It’s still new though, so I’m trying to have patience. As a media specialist who was creating accounts for almost 200 students though, you can imagine that it was a little time consuming to click, delete, type, and click save to change all of those passwords.