NECC: Stories from the Worldwide Scratch Community

NECC Session: Stories from the Worldwide Scratch Community

Mitch Resnick of MIT discussed how teachers can help students learn to create, build, and invent in the digital world. Digital natives are comfortable with interacting with technology, but they tend to need support to create and build things with technology tools.

Scratch is a free download from the Internet where you use building blocks of programming to create stories, games, and animations and share them with the web. By utilizing the programming blocks, students do not spend weeks and weeks writing code. Instead, the focus of Scratch projects is on creating content instead of programming code. Most of the users are between 9 – 16 years of age and have uploaded a variety of projects to the Scratch website such as Barack vs. McCain games, advertisements, announcements, science simulations, birthday cards, games, and remixes of other scratch animations. But the best part of Scratch comes with the collaboration among users. By posting animations and creations to the Scratch website, users can take those animations and remix them into a new creation.

Before I attended this session, I toured different student Scratch projects in the Student Showcase section of the conference. I was amazed that I saw students as young as second grade explain how they create their projects in Scratch. The only disheartening piece that I heard from them is that most of these students learned about Scratch in after-school programs or Saturday school clubs. Ideally, I’d love to see Scratch integrated into the school day so that this program is available to all students.

NECC: Authoring Books with CAST Book Builder

At NECC I had the pleasure to attend a session called "If You Build It, They Will Read It: Authoring Books With CAST Book Builder" by Loudoun County Public Schools in Virgina.

The technology specialists presented about Book Builder, which is a FREE tool that allows you to create books online to adapt to the needs of your students. It is a free online authoring tool for educators and students. Book Builder has three characters to guide student thinking as they read the book: Pedro, Hali, and Monty. Pedro engages the affective networks by prompting readers to actively think about the text. Hali engages the strategic network by providing hints. Monty engages the recognition network by offering models of expert strategy use and think-alouds. The best part about the coaches is that you can customize them to make them say whatever you want to help children with their reading strategies.

Book Builder was created with the "design for all" concept of Universal Design that focuses on three principles: Representation, expression, and engagement. A teacher creates one account but multiple students can use to create their own books. Multiple users can create separate books on the same accounts with no problem. In fact, if students want to work on the same book at the same time, they can as long as they are on different pages. Book components can include: text, pictures, and recorded sound. There is also a multimedia glossary and 3 coaches (described above) to guide students' thinking as they read. The iTRTs that presented student books from Book Builder also passed around the book once it was printed out. They added symbols to each word in the story in a binder so that kids could have a print copy and not just a digital one.

Tips for Authoring on Book Builder

Explore Books on Book Builder

Post any thoughts you have on Book Builder to the presenters' AT Tips Blog. For a link to their presentation, visit their website. There is also links to handouts of fold out pocket mods and videos on how to use it.