Get ready for the CIRCL Educators’ Book Club!

CIRCL Educators’ Blog is written by a small group of educators from across the nation who collaborate and think together about issues related to learning and technology. We share research, resources, and best practices. We have so much fun as we learn together that we decided we should open up the space and see who else would like to participate in the learning fun.

Our goal is to discuss a few books as a book club in 2019. Our first book will be Coding as a Playground, inspired by the Infosys Pathfinders Institute. The book club will start on 1/13/12019. To discuss our first book, we will use Flipgrid. Flipgrid is a video discussion platform that is used in classrooms and universities. If you haven’t used Flipgrid, we’ll help! It’s a platform used by a lot of teachers in their classrooms and most find it pretty easy to use. When you visit the CIRCL Educators’ bookclub site on January 13th, you will be able to click a green “+” to add a Flipgrid response. After you click the green “+” you will be prompted to share your reflection. Flipgrid will walk you through how to make your response post. There is no password or code needed!

We will also use Twitter to discuss conversations! Follow our Twitter account @CIRCLEducators and use the hashtag #circledu to share your thoughts!

The book club will have two questions each week and we encourage you to share your thoughts and interact with other members of the book club on Flipgrid! If you are new to Flipgrid, see an overview and a video showing how educators use Flipgrid in their classrooms.

As a way to show our appreciation for your participation, we will be giving away a free book for our next book club! In order to qualify for the drawing, you must participate in the discussion on Flipgrid each week! (While we love twitter, we are afraid it will be difficult to make sure we find all tweets for the drawing.) In addition, if you do participate in Flipgrid each week, you will receive a certificate of participation from CIRCL Educators.

Sign-up for notifications about when the book club is starting and to get the questions each for the book club.

About the Book:

Coding as a Playground is the first book to focus on how young children (ages 7 and under) can engage in computational thinking and be taught to become computer programmers, a process that can increase both their cognitive and social -emotional skills. Readers will learn how coding can engage children as producers-and not merely consumers of technology in a playful way. You will come away from this groundbreaking work with an understanding of how coding promotes developmentally appropriate experiences such as problem-solving, imagination, cognitive challenges, social interactions, motor skills, development, emotional exploration, and making different choices. You will also learn how to integrate coding into different curricular areas to promote literacy, math, science, engineering, and the arts through a project-based approach.

About the Author:

Marina Umaschi Bers is a professor in the Eliot-Pearson of Child Study and Human Development and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the Developmental Technologies Research group where she studies innovative ways to promote positive childhood development through new learning technologies. Marina co-developed the Scratch Jr programming language in collaboration with Mitch Resnick from the MIT Media Lab and Paula Bonta from the PICO company. She is also the creator of KIBO, a robotics platform for children 4 to 7 that can be programmed with wooden blocks (no screen needed), which allows young builders to learn programming and engineering while integrating arts and crafts.

*The information about the book and author is quoted from the book Coding as a Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom.