Reflections on Scratch Educator Meetup @ MIT: Saturday, February 19, 2011

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us at MIT for today's Scratch educator meetup!

Some notes, reflections, and next steps...

1. Things we saw in Show & Tell

I love Show & Tell because I'm always surprised and always learn something new. Here's what we heard in today's Show & Tell session:

• Lorraine Leo shared some of her students' projects, and details of her Scratch Day collaboration with Yoshiro Miyata of Japan.
• Vicki Gold shared some of the projects her students have been creating, including a challenging project by superzipzop! In the process, we learned how to save scripts as pictures (right-clicking or control-clicking on the Scripts area) and how to write summary of a project to a text file (shift-clicking the "File" menu and selecting the "Write Project Summary" menu item).
• Lisa Radden shared her experiences with the TechSperts program, including her blog where students are posting their Scratch reflections.
• Sandra Bleecker, Janet Dee, and Vicki Gold demonstrated a project they co-created during today's meetup - an interactive recording/playback drawing project. A nice collaboration that I hope they'll post and share a link to!

2. For the beginners

I had a lot of fun working with the people who were having their very first Scratch experiences. Here are some resources that you might want to check out, to support your further explorations with Scratch.

• Getting started guide - How to make a first Scratch project.
• Scratch cards - Twelve cards that illustrate a basic Scratch technique (such as keeping score or playing with graphic effects).
• Design studio activities - 16 suggestions for design activities, such as making a project that includes the "random" block or making a project that has an orange square and purple circle.
• Creative computing workshop - This is something I just finished -- I haven't event posted the sum as a resource on ScratchEd yet! This is a sequence of activities for getting started with Scratch. Any feedback on the sequence and activities would be appreciated. How could it be changed to be more useful?

3. Future events

There are lots of ways to keep participating in ScratchEd professional development:

• Hang out on ScratchEd
• Come to the monthly meetups - Register for next month's meetup and be notified about future events through the quarterly newsletter.
• Attend the monthly webinars - The next webinar is all about Scratch Day and is taking place on Monday, February 28 at 7pm EST.

4. What's next?

We asked people to record their thoughts about what might be next for them and might be next for our next meetup. Here's what was shared on sticky notes:

• Experimenting! teaching my own kids
• Playing/learning more about Scratch, so I can teach to others
• More in-depth with PicoBoard
• Go home today and play; get lessons for ELA project
• I came in today knowing NOTHING about Scratch. I am excited now to brainstorm & look @ other people's projects to see how I can use it, specifically w/my young students.
• After this workshop I hope to learn how to further develop what I have learned and bring it into my curriculum.
• Recruit more teachers to attend next teacher meetup
• Going back and completing the online tutorial, then apply!
• Keep playing with Scratch, get more comfortable, so I can teach it.
• Collaborate with other classes.
• Get more knowledge, meet more new Scratchers
• Next meeting: learn more advanced skills
• Have Modkit creator as part of groupBring a friend to next meetup
• Modkit break out group

Thanks again for attending today's event. We look forward to seeing you at MIT in March and on ScratchEd in the interim!

K

P.S. Video from Michelle...