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Edcampstl Coding! (Guest post by Tarren)

By Colin Davitt
Fritz 2018 LindberghU EdCamp Doc

Here are some of the things that got me most excited at EdCamp this year. Some I had heard of or even used before but I included here to share with other people and some were new to me. I was the only primary teacher in the room but it was good to hear what is happening at the intermediate and middle levels. Also a few of the participants ran after school computer clubs and that is something I am interested in starting at Dressel.

App Inventor- MIT (good for after Scratch) http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/

Google CS First (FREE) introductory to advanced cs-first.com

Code.org (FREE) Hour of Code and Courses A-F code.org

Digital Passport- Digital Citizenship Digital Passport

Project Lead the Way- very expensive, interface was convoluted and not user friendly Make Code Micro Bits https://makecode.microbit (recommendation: Start with a 12.99 piece from MicroCenter)

Sparkfun https://www.sparkfun.com/

Adafruit https://www.adafruit.com/

Code Monkey ($50/yr) (text coding games) https://www.playcodemonkey.com/

Code Combat (FREE) (text coding games) codecombat.com (NOTE: This one generated the most excited conversation from the group)

WeDo 2.0 LEGO Kits (for young kids) https://education.lego.com

Ozobots- color code robot https://ozobot.com/

Cubetto- Robot, great for little kids (kindergarten) https://www.primotoys.com/shop/

National Computer Science Standards - CSTA- www.csteachers.org/page/standards

Interested in forming CS4MO? Contact Beth Casagrand, GlobalHack, at beth@globalhack.org (This seemed like a very good group to connect with the stay current and possibly even be proactive within the computer science community)

Another fun tool I learned about was peardeck https://www.peardeck.com

I got to see a demonstration of WeVideo--a Google compatible editing app that is comparable to Adobe according to the presenters. I downloaded it on my phone but have not used it with the students yet. What I am most excited about is the Green Screen option for the kids.

Finally I did not get this at EdCamp but it is too good not to share with my colleagues. Let me just say EdCamp motivated me to get this :-).

http://bit.do/50trendytechtools

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