Well December was peaceful in my classroom. We finished our Digital Citizenship focus for the year and embarked on the Hour of Code. Only I elected to do more than an hour. My 6-7-8 grade students worked on the accelerated code course and my 3-4-5 students are completing course one on the code.org site. They are loving it and have made my days very easy! There are many sites out there that offer your students a taste of coding but code.org certainly has made it particularly easy for teachers to manage classes. I thank them for giving teachers the tools to introduce their students to coding in a very simple manner. The only drawback came in December when they decided to shut down the "save and progress" area. It was frustrating for the students to not see their progress saved and also frustrating for me as a teacher to not have that documentation of what they had completed. The postings that I read from other teachers were comparably frustrated.
Well I explained to my students that anything web based will have it's issues and this is just one and we move on. That has to be one of my main goals in working with people/students with technology in that there will be frustrations, there will be glitches, there will be problems, but we try to fix, amend, or do what we can and move on. Sometimes there is nothing you can do but getting annoyed and irritated with the internet or program doesn't matter. There are bigger things in life to use that energy on.
