About the Webinar I attended

The webinar I attended today on February 21^st 2018 was titled “Bring Computer Science to Life in Your Elementary Classroom”. It was presented by Joan M. Mazur, Ph.D., Professor of Instructional Systems Design, University of Kentucky College of Education; and Jennifer Rodabaugh, STEAM Lab Instructor, Fayette County Public Schools, KY.  Not to mention that it was sponsored by LEGO® Education.    

The speakers Dr. Mazur and Ms. Rodabaugh welcomed the attendees warmly before digging deep into the computer-science title. The punchline of the webinar came to shed the light on how teachers are getting into academics and neglecting computer sciences. The introduction came to emphasize on how we humans are living in the internet of things. Then the following essential questions were raised “So what needs to be done in this case?” & “How should teachers prepare students to see the benefits of technology?”

An educational answer to the questions was presented by Dr.Mazur who suggested looking into “Computational Thinking”; a consultation which exists in the form of five stages of decomposition, generalization, algorithmic thinking(a central skill in coding), evaluation and abstraction. This benefitted me to understand how education helps kids learn the basic inner workings of computers and eventually set them up for a lifetime of successful use and management of the technology in their everyday lives.

Not to mention that the mentioned stages include attitudes and dispositions in terms of one’s confidence when dealing with complexity, persistence in working with difficult problems, tolerance for ambiguity, having the ability to deal with open-ended problems, and having the ability to communicate and struggle within groups with other members to achieve a common goal. As a teacher, I’d advocate instilling such attitudes within my students in order to empower them to become autonomous learners because there will come a time where I won’t be there for them anymore.

The second solution proposed by Dr.Mazur is including hands-on activities. I come to benefit from the examples provided in order to have students actively engaged, take ownership of the learning, give opportunities to use academic language and finally have students reflect on their learning.

Furthermore, to add to what has been presented, Ms.Rodabaugh clarifies “computational thinking” by teaching vocabularies in the form of coding, programming, looping in the beginning. This would have me train students to create real world connections to hardware independently. Therefore, educational outcomes would be having my students engage in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners and develop main ideas and themes as multimedia components and visual displays are available too( like graphics and sounds).

A decent part of Ms.Rodabaugh’s presentation focused on projects and possible educational outcomes (like building a device that detects objects remotely after determining the distances of the sun and stars from the Earth). So maybe I would transfer such projects to my classroom and have students offer outcomes in writing or speaking for different purposes. The appropriateness of computational thinking is in exposing students to skills that deal with team work, organization, sharing ideas and searching for own information and solutions.  

A coda to the webinar focuses on teaching computational thinking though it requires changing the role of a teacher to becoming a facilitator. It changes the way teachers teach because one starts to teach for application. So all in all, computational thinking comes to give platform for collaborative teaching.