According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, there will be a decline of over 21,000 computer programming jobs in the U.S. Why? Is it because the demand will decline? No. The answer is that computer programmers can be hired to do their job from anywhere in the world. The sad fact is that future businesses will fill those jobs with people with more experience than our workforce. They will have better training AND be cheaper.
What does the Bureau base this on? It’s already happening. Our students are years behind those in other countries in this area. A college degree isn’t going to catch them up.
Even though our job is to teach the standards mandated by the state, it is an even more important part of our job to get our students ready for life after us.
How do we do that AND teach the standards? We figure out a way to do both at the same time. Thankfully, there are a lot of resources out their to help.
One resource is Vidcode. Vidcode has paid courses to help school-age children learn to code. It also has some free courses available through the Hour of Code initiative. The idea for my lesson came for a coding course offered at Region XII with Josh Essary. During the course, a representative of Vidcode told of a teacher using the Bestie Greeting Cards project to send postcards to characters in literature.
Since I was scheduled to teach persuasive techniques and persuasive writing about this time, I decided to blend those with the project.
First, I created a video. I pretended to be myself from the future and asked the kids to send messages to my future students to convince them to read.
I then loaded the video into a free app called Let’s Recap. I created a Journey in which students researched persuasive techniques and also facts about the importance of reading. Students then wrote a script for their video to send to the future.
They recorded their videos using a free web camera online that allowed them to save the videos to their Google Drives.
Then, the moment of truth, we went to the Vidcode website to “mail” our messages to the future using the Gestie Greeting Cards.
I felt like the project was a success because students had taken ownership over learning the persuasive techniques to “save the future.” They took it really seriously.
This student spent a lot of time researching reasons why reading is important.
This student used a testimonial as her persuasive technique. I’m not totally sure she is accurate, but she DID use a persuasive technique.
What I didn’t anticipate was the reading lesson Vidcode taught them. We had only studied procedural text a couple of weeks before this project. In order to learn how to code and complete the project, the students had to do A LOT of reading. They also had to follow the directions exactly. No skimming!! It was teacher heaven. I kept saying, “Did you read the ALL the directions?” After failing a few times, most of them gave up and started really reading. Look at these directions!
Students learned persuasive techniques. They wrote scripts. They learned the importance of carefully reading procedural text, AND they learned a little bit about computer coding.
Not every day in my room feels this productive, but I’m working on it. The future of my students may depend on it.
Teaching Without Twitching 