By Sharon Muench, PYP Curriculum Coordinator and Littleton Teacher
Welcome to the Technology Curriculum v1.1. We are not in beta any more!
The Technology Committee (All School representation from Boulder and Littleton parents and staff) made great headway in thoughtfully maximizing some of your auction donations in sustainable technology practices for students.
Inspired by Boulder parents with keen minds (huge thanks for Allison Barto, Oren Bierkatz, and Ed Goyette), we all sprang into action this last fall to create and begin to implement a technology curriculum that carefully and authentically connects with current IB units of study, builds technology skills necessary for the 21st century, and is sustainable from Kindergarten to 8th grade. It was imperative to us when developing the curriculum that it was not another add-on that teachers had to do or something that would distract from our rich inquiry, arts integration, and other solid foundational pieces. We wanted to ensure the added technology pieces fit into the classroom naturally, provided students with exposure and confidence in using a variety of computer technologies, and gave students long-term skills which they then could apply to many situations in high school and in life.
In our first meeting, we solidified four strands of technology education to weave into our existing units.
The following basic skills desired by the time a student graduates from Mackintosh:
- Basic “User” Skills: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Keyboarding
- Presentation & Multimedia Skills: Power Point, Prezi, Movies, Sound Editing
- Software Engineering & Programming: Java Script, C, Website Development, Embedded programming (hardware), App development
- Electronics & Hardware: Basic and advance circuits, Robotics
We felt we could not let these great ideas “die in committee” and be postponed yet again. Our children want to be fed these skills now and we could immediately ensure we include some of the practices and ideas into our upcoming units.
To this end, we purchased ten Vex Robotics kits to immediately be infused into our current unit of studies in 2nd-3rd grade, 4th grade, middle school, and for extracurricular teams and exploration. (See Allison Barto’s email this week for upcoming Boulder opportunities.)
The first unit we will be infusing a strand of technology into is our current 2nd-3rd grade unit simple machines. Students will explore the various simple and then complex machines with many materials, including the Vex Robotics. The 2nd-3rd grade class in Littleton has jumped into using the robotics pieces and the 2nd-3rd grade class in Boulder is waiting to be able to apply their learning into making a full robotic, using the visual, easy-to-follow instructions that Boulder parent Ed Goyette created. The Vex robotics company gives us very simple to follow curriculum directly related to simple machines that we are enhancing with our own creativity, including a very interesting gear ratio inquiry that teachers are excited to include in student studies.
The next educational experience we apply the Vex robotics to will be in 4th grade. The 4th graders on both campuses will build the robot to tie into their previous unit discussion on “What is art?” and if a robot creates “art”, is it art? This highly engaging project, with following the easy picture directions created by Ed Goyette, will allow students to build confidence and provide a platform for thoughtful, critical thinking. Then students will be able to see how they can deviate from the directions to add their own unique creativity and thinking to the robot.
In our 5th-6th grade rooms, we learned how to build basic websites and how to read the basics of HTML. Mrs. Muench gave a basic overview on the history of HTML and how to read and use it. The students listened raptly to the lecture and immediately started to apply the learned concepts. It’s basic, but a great start and gave them the tools to create their own website page of poetry to connect with their unit of inquiry of Language Creates Vivid Pictures in the Mind. We discussed how HTML is a language which creates websites. Student websites will be linked to the Mackintosh website in the upcoming weeks.
Our Middle School students have re-created their creation myths they wrote in Language and Literature class into a computer animation, using the programming provided by Scratch or a mod of Minecraft which used JAVA concepts. We plan to share our Scratch animations with a partner school in India. Many schools across the nation (and world) expose their students to Scratch. We are looking forward to including Scratch exposure to our younger students in future units.
Teachers in early January were trained on how to use all of equipment for effective implementation into the classroom, and continued training will occur as confidence increases and as teachers are inspired to authentically include technology in the classroom. The Boulder Technology team of parents led the training on both campuses. We love that our one school, two campus vision is becoming a reality. We also should note that there are parents on both campuses (who have yet to be fully acknowledged and mentioned, but we will in a later post ) who have joined the “Technology Steering Committee” led by former parent and board member, Martin Remy. Under Martin’s leadership, the team has started discussions to provide advice and man-power to ensure the technology infrastructure is as good as it can be to provide stability in achieving our technology curriculum aspirations. We have started off well and we are putting pieces in place to ensure it is sustainable, easy and healthy in its incorporation, and we are actually accomplishing, with accountability, our goals.
