Lesley STEAM

KLO

KLO Rocks Hour of Code

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Above: The 4th grade students became programming mentors, helping to guide Kindergarteners through exploring Scratch Jr.

Students at the Kennedy-Longfellow School didn’t just spent one hour coding for the National Hour of Code Week: they spent 31 hours of collective coding! All grade levels, including preschool and Special Start students up through 5th grade, were invited into the school makerspace during the week to participate in hands-on coding activities. Following our model of student-centered learning, we set up various centers, depending on the age range, and let the students free to explore!

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Girls Make Games

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YodaAbove: a 5th grade coder mentors a 1st grader using Scratch Jr. 

A group of nine Kennedy-Longfellow students spent a weekend in November coding as part of the first ever Boston-based “Girls Who Make Games” workshops at MIT. These students immersed themselves in game design, art, and programming using software called Stencyl.

Not only did they get to network with other local girls who code, they were mentored by local professional developers. We sat down with these students and asked them to share their thoughts on what makes them tick as programmers at K-Lo, and beyond. To view the video, click here.

KIBO Brings Robotics Alive for JK-2nd Grades

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Code

This fall, K-Lo launched robotics in the primary grades in partnership with Tufts University’s Eliot Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. The school piloted the KIBO, a robot designed with support from the National Science Foundation, with one kindergarten, first, and second grade class. During the seven week project, students learned about programming, sensors, and the engineering design process with ties to readers theatre in the kindergarten, and earth science in the first and second grades.  

The Lesley team will continue to support the other primary classrooms in learning about the KIBO and how it can be used to deepen understanding and engagement in other curricular activities. To see more about the KIBO, you can see the company discussion of this innovation, and stay tuned to hear more from K-Lo students about their own experiences with robotics!

Check out a couple videos of students presenting their final projects:

4th Graders Gone Green

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Meet KLO’s first paperless classroom! Karla Anderson’s 4th grade class has jumped into the paperless fray with digital notebooks for science and math. Ms. Anderson walked the class through setting up individualized math and science notebooks in the Notability app. Notability was chosen over other apps because of the following features:

  • Creation of separate, color-coded notebooks.
  • Ability to easily sync with student and teacher district Google doc accounts.
  • Ability to import PDFs and images and draw on top of them.

To share assignments with students, Ms. Anderson simply places a worksheet in a Google docs folder shared with all of her students. Students log into the Google Drive app on their iPads and open the worksheet right into Notability, where they can either type or draw their answers. When finished with the assignment, they “share” the worksheet back into their Google Drive so Ms. Anderson can review, comment and grade the work.

The app Book Creator has long been a favorite KLO app for students to create their own eBooks. Ms. Anderson has found an innovative use for it thanks to Tim Harkins (@mrtharkins), 2nd grade teacher at West Elementary School in Andover, MA, who presented his science eBook idea at the 2013 fall MassCUE Conference. Ms. Anderson has created eBook “texts” for each science curriculum unit. The eBooks are shared out with students via Google Drive. Each student then brings the ePub into Book Creator on their iPad and plug in their answers, photos and videos as the unit progresses. Each text also included pre and post assessments so that students and teacher could see the measure of student growth nested conveniently among the content.

We asked two students to share their experience using the eBook texts as well as to give a brief tutorial on how to use the Notability and Book Creator apps:

Ms. Anderson will then take you deep into her Google Drive process to demonstrate her paperless workflow:

Teaching Teachers to Code

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Twenty junior kindergarten – 5th grade students from the Kennedy-Longfellow School (KLO) took on the challenge to teach teachers, and other community members, how to code at this year’s Lesley University Community of Scholar’s Day. The KLO/Lesley Technology Partnership team are in their third year teaching Scratch and other programming tools to students at the KLO Community Schools Afterschool Program.

BeeBot

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The Confidence to Create

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Yodamael St. Rose isn’t your typical 4th grader. In the past year she has directed her own movie, programmed interactive games in Scratch, and created a tutorial for other students on how to connect and use the school’s Raspberry Pi (the “3P K-LO”) computer packs at home. We asked Yoda to share what kind of tools and projects give her the confidence to create and here is what she shared with us: