How to "remix" the way we teach

One of the greatest things I find about the new Scratch (2.0), and online education in general, is how normal it makes sharing projects and ideas. I remember back in the day, being punished in school for talking and walking around to other lab pairs in a classroom! As if I were cheating. And how being curious and being worried about showing initiative to make learning my own got me shut down. Check out this cool npr interview podcast with author Elizabeth Green, comparing how we teach in US classrooms against the Japanese approach. Sadly, in the US we seem to be better at creating great educational initiatives, but not so great in their execution in the classrooms themselves.

I'm working now on creating a couple of new lesson plans for a current Computers4Kids (c4k) partnership and for the upcoming Saturday UVa Enrichment sessions Jan-Feb 2015. Stay tuned and I'll summarize my progress! For c4k, we're blending Blogger with Scratch and Microsoft Publisher to create a "Kickstarter" mockup to simulate a 7th grade business plan. For the Saturday EP series, I'm exploring re-teaching 3D programming using Kodu, tagging it's functionality to demo CS concepts loops, if/then, if-then-else, variables, procedures and alias building in a way that's elementary school friendly and Xbox compatible. And, checking out ways to incorporate Sculptris to let kids create 3D printing projects.