#llats18: some running-in is still needed

Well, it’s first time.

We have 246 participants but 94 only visited the post of yesterday, 16 signed-up for the discussion area in https://www.reddit.com/r/CodingAtSchool/ and 3 signed up to the MOOC.  Not enough. These steps are important.

A guess could be that not all the participants access the LearningLab mailbox. If this is true, please visit it on a daily basis. At any rate we are going to make more use of home posts, where everyone lands when entering the platform.

This afternoon we’ll try our first live event: two replicas, one at 18:00 and the other at 18:30 CET; pardon us we didn’t specify time zone yesterday.

Feedbacks

Yesterday Federica posted something interesting in Reddit. It was about the experience of a colleague of her about using Logo for teaching math, whereas all other teachers are using Scratch in her school. That’s goes straightforward to one of main topic of this course: to try critically revisiting the options available out there and, over all, to try not wasting important pedagogical reflections made pioneers of this area.

This matters are discussed in the first lesson, which we ask to study. In particular, go and browse the articles quoted in slides 10-13 of lesson 1 and 12-13 of lesson 2. I’m quoting the MOOC locations because it is easier to point to specific fragments of contents.

So, when I tell you to go and see some slides I mean to go in the MOOC:  https://www.federica.eu/c/coding_at_school_with_free_software.

This second day

In this second day, besides continuing browsing around, please go on downloading LibreOffice, activating the LibreLogo toolbar and begin tinkering with the Turtle. Resources for doing this can be found in lesson 2.

At the beginning (slides 1-4) you have an introduction of Logo, starting from Papert’s original work. In slides 5-9 some different Logo implementations are described. The course focuses on the use of LibreLogo but people willing to experiment other flavors can find their way here.
As already said, some reflections on the Scratch vs Logo issue are reported in slides 10-13. The video in slide 10 provides a very basic introduction of Scratch as well as Logo use, for those that are not familiar at all with such systems.
In slides 14-15 we explain why the LibreLogo implementation has been chosen.

The video in slide 16 is a tutorial for activating the LibreLogo toolbar in LibreOffice, something That is also discussed in the remaining slides. The instructions concern the management of graphics in LibreOffice document as well.

We do not anticipate other topics, for now. Only the following comment. In the following lessons, you have very different topics, some are good for primary school, others for secondary, with quite various level of difficulties. Do not worry if something appears to be weird or too difficult. Please, do concentrate on what you feel is good for you.

Later on we will create groups according with different interests, eventually.