Thursday 24 November 2011

Getting Kinect-ed

I finally set up the Kinects in the computer lab today at the school and had lots of fun showing the students how Scratch can interface with it. I make a little game that featured a bat flying though caverns. You have to duck and jump in order to avoid the stalactites and stalagmites. We are using Kinect2Scratch, a program developed by Stephen Howel in Ireland that enables Scratch programmers to interface with the Kinect.  I can't wait to see what the students are able to come up with!

Monday 12 September 2011

Kinect2Scratch

 I was impressed before with the capabilities of  scratch to interface with the pico boards and LEGO WeDo, but now I think I've found a new favorite. Stephen Howel, a computer science lecturer at the Institute of Technology in Tallaght, Ireland had created a way for Scratch to interface with the Kinect. I suppose this means I'm going to have to get a Kinect...
Check out his video here:

http://vimeo.com/18562642

Tuesday 30 August 2011

Reusing Google Forms

I recently discovered Google forms and am really loving the potential they have for the classroom. I decided to put together a little survey for my students for the beginning of the school year, and tested it a few times. I was really impressed with the way the results of the survey were shown on the summary page. Each question had pretty little colourful charts. Everything was looked great but when I tried to delete my fake responses, I discovered to my dismay that there is no way to delete bogus responses or refresh the form. (Google, you really need to fix this!) Luckily, after a bit of searching on the net, I found a workaround which you can find here as a pdf download made possible by Linda Zehr: http://bit.ly/google_forms_reset_workaround 

Yay! Thank you Linda!

Sunday 28 August 2011

Welcome to my blog!


I figured it was high time to get a blog up and running. It's one of those things I've been meaning to do for some time now, but never seem to have the time - or energy. I was at an EdTech workshop series just this past week in Mill Bay and had a number of colleagues ask for my blog or website address so I figured I might as well toss something together. I think the hardest part was coming up with a catchy title - I  couldn't come up with anything catchy or profound, so I decided to just go with "Learning to Scratch" which also doubles as the title for my new book.  I'm not completely sure what I'll be blogging about, but I can assure you it will have something to do with my adventures as a Middle School Teacher in my new position as IT Teacher and EdTech support person at our newly formed Middle School.