Createch-ing

This year the CBE created an Office 365 environment for all the teachers and students. Different applications started to be available during the year: OneDrive, Sway and OneNote amongst others. As a Surface user, I already knew and used OneNote for personal purposes and soon I started to play around with it and discovered a myriad of possibilities for my lessons. I started to use it and soon it became an essential in my class, especially since I do not have a textbook for Mathematics or Spanish. From all the technological tools that I have used in my career, this one has been the most transforming. These are the main 3 reasons why I love it: You can create a Class Notebook for each of your classes. In each class you have, by default, a "Teacher Only Section",  a " Collaboration " section and a "Content" area ( shared with the students in that classroom), and a Notebook for every student. Each student Section has already these sections "Ha

This week I had planned to participate in the  #hourofcode with the school. I had everything organized but, boom! The Flu came in the way and we ended up doing two days instead of four. Two days were enough though to get a glimpse of the interest amongst students about coding and computer science. It turns out that the opportunities for jobs in computer science is not levelled with the amount of students taking computer science as a Career.  The hour of code is an event that tries to bring this our attention and encourages more presence of computer science in schools. Because, actually, everywhere we go and almost everything we do has a computer software behind. The need is huge and the possibilities are endless.  As a math teacher also, the connections with computer programming are tremendously strong. The designers behind the hour of code also did a great job to present it in a game-like way. For instance, in the Frozen tutorial, our first two math units this year in grade 7 got

Our class went to  the Microsoft Youth Sparks workshop to learn to code and to create their own apps. At the beginning they were not sure about what to expect but soon they started to discover what it was about. The students used the new Surface pro3 to learn how to code. They enjoyed the useful pen and soon started to create beautiful designs that moved all over the screen. They created a simple pattern that looked like a caleidoscope and discovered and app that they can use to create their own games at home. After, they used a special xbox to design their own video game. They chose their world, the setting, the characters and started to create their own adventures. I recognize that there was an element of literature since they had to figure out the 5 w's and also create a beginning, middle and end to their story ( game).It was really simple and the most important thing is...they can also do their games at home if they purchase that feature. In their free time, they got to pl