ECB

The aim of this Community is to:

1.     Know and understand the programming language Scratch - origin, fundamentals and educational strengths connecting and making curriculum meaningful, and promoting STEM
2.     Share resources, knowledge and ideas that lead teachers to learn and feel comfortable about taking this tool into their classrooms and mediate its use.
3.    Motivate teachers to use Scratch in the classroom, or other educational contexts, in an enthusiastic regular basis connecting subjects and creating meaningful contexts/environments to use mathematics and other STEM contents
4.    Engage in active conversations/interrogations about Scratch and its role in promoting a better technologic fluency development at school, a more motivating and demanding environment for learning (changing students from almost only consumers into active and creative designers, builders and effective problem solvers).

During 6 weeks we will:

Try to find answers to some questions, such as:
 
1.    What is Scratch,  and what are its main educational features? (Why is it unique?)
2.    What can I do to motivate my students to use Scratch in the classroom and at home? (What to expect when we present this tool to students?)
3.    How can I effectively  mediate the use of Scratch by students (are there good ways and bad ways to work with this tool?)

4.    How can I integrate different (technological and traditional) tools in the use of Scratch (is it open enough to permit it?)
5.    How come Scratch has the ability to promote STEM education and engage students in such themes?
6.    Where can I search for help and resources (after CoP ends) and where can I share my own materials and my stories?
7.     … the ones that will arise from discussion and sharing along the way

At the end of the 6 weeks we will have:

1.    Answered most (all?) of the above questions and added some more to think about
2.    Learnt some lessons about Scratch and developed the skill to use it effectively with students
3.    Understood how Scratch can be used to promote STEM education (connected to other subjects)
4.    Experimented some activities in the classroom promoting the use of Scratch by students
5.    Seen some works made by pupils and listened to some stories of good practice examples
6.    Find out who's Teresa and how she began EduScratch Project in Portugal.
 

This Community of Practice is open to:

All inGenious school teachers.

Who is this Community of Practice's expert?

This Community of Practice is organised by Teresa Marques, from EduScratch (in Portugal)
 

Teresa Marques works at the ICT Competence Centre of the School of Education (ESE), Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (Portugal) in a project called EduScratch, alongside its coordinator, Miguel Figueiredo.

EduScratch is about the use of SCRATCH in an educational context and provides training and support from pre-school to secondary teachers as well as in-service training for educators and prospective teachers all over the country. The project not only supports teachers and schools but also shares resources, stories, news and examples of good practice (using the EduScratch website/community that has a forum for interaction with those seeking  for online help) to motivate and support other teachers that want to know more about it and to start working with Scratch.

Teresa has a degree in Geology, University of Lisbon (Faculty of Science). She has worked as a Maths and Science teacher with 5th and 6th grade students and is also a Maths teacher trainer. She has a Master’s Degree in Education – Educational Technology (Faculty of Psychology and Education – University of Lisbon). Her thesis is about the use of Scratch in the Maths classroom.

She is also a writer and one of her published books (poetry) is part of the Portuguese National Reading Plan as recommended reading to be used in schools.

More about Teresa Marques.

Youngsters seem to be more and more passive consumers, little autonomous and less motivated intrinsically for learning at school. The innate curiosity, imagination, creativity and the need that is the mother of invention all vanish in most pupils along 11 to 12 years of pre-university school. Therefore, many youngsters do not develop high-level competences that can make them pro-active, autonomous, critical citizens, inventors and constructors in the future.

Taking into account the easy and close relation that youngsters presently establish with information and communication technologies (ICT), together with the still not much generalized use of ICTs as learning tools at school, it is pertinent to support the use of learning tools like Scratch in the design of stimulating and motivating learning environments, where the youngster can play an active role building his own knowledge with the help from teachers and their peers.

Scratch is a new networked, media-rich programming language that makes it easy to create stories, presentations, animations, interactive games… work cooperatively, communicate and share the creations on the web.