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Innovators Assemble
Ingenuity, persistence, creativity, and diligence are at the center of my teaching practice. I strive to make sure these values are instilled and practiced throughout my classroom. Starting this course, I thought I was going to learn about innovation and how I could help my students apply themselves in new ways with new technology. I…
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Proteins to Predators: Reimagining an Innovative Biology Lesson
One of my favorite parts of teaching is seeing a great idea and wondering, “How could this work for my students?” For this project, I challenged myself to adapt an innovative high school biology lesson into something meaningful for my third graders. Rather than just simplifying the content, I wanted to preserve what made the…
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From One Lesson to a Learning Journey
When I first designed my innovative learning experience, I envisioned a single lesson where students would use Makey Makey, a physical computing device that transforms conductive objects into keyboard inputs, along with Scratch and Play-Doh to create an interactive vocabulary museum. Students would sculpt a vocabulary word, record an explanation, and invite classmates to guess…
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Building Without Barriers
Every teacher is a builder. We build lessons, classrooms, relationships, and opportunities. But this week I realized something I had not considered before. If I spend all my energy designing something amazing without considering who can actually build alongside me, have I really designed an innovative learning experience? That’s when I landed on the phrase…
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Sculpting Meaning
Sometimes, planning the lesson can be more challenging than teaching it. That was the challenge I faced this week. After spending three weeks exploring Makey Makey, I wanted to create a lesson that felt epic. Naturally, my first thoughts went to math and science, the familiar subjects where technology often feels like it belongs. But…
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Debugging My Mindset
I have always been an ambitious person, so when I’m challenged to think outside the box, generating ideas is never the difficult part. The challenge comes when my desire for perfection becomes a barrier. This week, I wanted to create something with Makey Makey that felt more polished than simply holding a handful of wires.…
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Learning Innovation Through Play
When I first read that I would spend ten hours “playing” with a new technology, I was not entirely sure what that would look like. Like many teachers, I am used to approaching technology with a lesson plan already in mind. Instead, this assignment asked me to explore first and plan later. After researching several…
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Exploring Physical Computing with the micro:bit
Up to this point in the course, most of my experience with creative computing had been on a computer screen through music and text-based coding. This week I was introduced to an entirely new way of thinking by bringing programming into the physical world with the micro:bit. Our quickfire followed the familiar Use-Modify-Create progression. First,…
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From Coding Stories to Teaching Storytelling with Code
One of the biggest ideas I have explored in CEP 833 is that coding does not have to be taught as an isolated subject. Instead, it can become a creative tool for helping students communicate ideas, solve problems, and tell their stories. This project challenged me to design a complete learning experience around that philosophy.…
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Learning Python Through Use, Modify, Create
For this quickfire, we explored Python using the Use, Modify, Create framework. Rather than starting with a blank screen, we were first given a working program to explore, then challenged to modify it before creating something of our own. I absolutely loved this approach! Figure 1. Starter Python code provided by Bill Marsland for the…
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Alexis Flanders 