1. I can't teach coding because I don't know how to code.
2. Coding has nothing to do with my subject area.
I have never met a teacher who got into teaching because of what they didn't know. Teachers have long been expected to be the expert in the room. I studied English, rhetoric, poetry, and literacy skill development in formal and informal environments to become the teacher I am today, and then I laugh because I am a K-5 technology teacher. I thrive in a professional life of decentralized expertise. For so much of the day to day challenge of how will we help the kids create whatever it is we are creating this week I rely on the insight, videos, and blog posts of others. I still get to employ my core understanding of how learning works, everyday.
Technology is not the subject of the class, it is the medium. Even when we use coding or programmatic thinking in a lesson, we are almost always learning more about something else.
I admit I have taken a couple programming classes a few years ago, but I am not a coder. I know some HTML, but I do not spend time writing code, ever. When I began developing the coding k-8 curriculum I was nervous because I know so little about coding. I have learned much over the last year, but still write more haiku than programs.
The first thing that I found was a short tutorial can go a long way. When I was really lucky the tutorial was built into the app as in Kodable, or help was on screen like the web based Tynker. In the early days of Hopscotch the interface was stark and only once I found Wes Fryer's ebook did I figure out how to make the platform useful in class. Once. I found some clear "how to" support the critical question shifted to "how can I use this in a meaningful way to support learning goals."
Once we regard tech as the medium we need to know as much about it as we know about a text book we might use, or the general operation of glue and cardboard. When people say "it is not about the tech" this is what they mean. In our new tech class we are no longer teaching the fundamentals of computer science, we are teaching movie making. We are not looking at our tablets, we are looking through them.
Something education is just warming up to is that the tablet is not a magical infinity workbook with self erasing pages, it is a digital canvas that can hold and manipulate any form of information we can produce. A portable, shareable, digital canvas allows teachers to quickly get the work in the room onto the screen. When I look at learning apps I am looking for a camera button and a share button. I was first delighted by the power of camera import on puppet pals. I paid for the app for all the shared iPads in the lower school because of the power of using the camera to import a background, or a character. The first grade turned their cut out fish into a movie about life in the coral reef. The coding app Scratch Jr has a camera import function and it is a free app. This means that in math I can have the students take a picture of their work and program the cat to walk through the steps of the problem. They can record their own voices explaining or they can type it in for the text to be delivered on screen.
This programming interface requires NO READING and allows the programming of presentations, interactive games and cinematic sequences. With the camera import function this program can do many things you would previously ask kids to do using sonic pics or explain everything.
So how do you begin to prepare to teach coding for kids in grades k-5 if you have no coding experience yourself? In my next post we are going to talk about exactly that where to start. We are going to look at some great tutorials to introduce you to coding and begin to talk about how to structure coding lessons for your students.
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