If time permits, I intend to give students a chance to trade protocols. A member from Group A encodes using A’s protocol, but then a member of Group B must decode using A’s protocol. If a protocol is sufficiently well defined, decoding will be no problem. This extension will help students see the challenges inherent in designing formatting protocols.
Me too. I wish there was a video and sample work.
I will use all the resources for this lesson. A great time to review MS Office formatting similarities and to also use Google webpages and look at the HTML.
Using the resources provided will help the students to understand what they are looking at. I also plan to have them look up addtional material on the subject to build their understanding. I plan to have them demonstrate their protocol to the class (does it work) and have other students try it. They will have to send a message to their team and see if they get the same response.
This lesson and the one that follows it will really push the comfort zones of my students. I plan on giving my students some extra time , especially on this assignment as the level complexity, in terms of what students are expected to generate, seems to be increasing.
So, as with others who have written in this forum and that of Lesson 10, I am curious to see if anyone discovers student protocols that fall outside of the expected A<–> 1, B<–>2, etc. This particular lesson sounds like a blast, and while a simple concept, really will push kids.
I think this will be a good lesson because they will have to create something, which is always a good thing. It builds on the previous lesson which dealt with numbers- now text. Will definitely use the Activity Guide.
I like the progressions these lessons make. There’s a definite HTML feel to it and I suspect many of my kids will make that connection, especially once they see the activity requirements (it’s written in an extremely similar format to how I wrote my assignments in ECS when we covered HTML). One of the best way I found to determine how well students have come up with a protocol is to have them trade it with other groups and see if others can understand how to use it. Once the groups have tested their protocols to make sure it works as they know it, I will have them exchange it with other groups to make sure it’s clear enough for others to use. I also think this is a great way to show them that clear communication is important, especially when they get to the writing and connect how they wrote protocols to how they write in English.
I’m confused about the questions that go with the Blown to Bits extensions. Are they mixed up by any chance?
Hi Caroline,
I’m checking into the questions for you and will try to clarify this for you soon.
Thanks for bringing it to our attention
Dani
Hi Caroline,
The team looked at the questions and made some updates. Let me know if you still are confused and which parts I can help clarify further for you.
-Dani
This could easily extend beyond a single period. I like the concept of trading completed protocols with someone else and testing them out. It could prove interesting to see how well they’ve developed and documented their protocols for someone else to use.
I felt like all of this making protocols was going a little slow for my students, at first they were excited and challenged by it, but now many of them have the way “they” do protocols. I combined lesson 10 and 11 into one day by having students create an encoding system for text as a warm up and then transitioning into talking about formatted text. This seemed to work well. We were a little short on time, but they were engaged the whole time. I also made a one-pager showing them an HTML of a blog that I created which seemed to connect well to the lesson. I have linked this one pager here. Feedback from students was positive and they liked communicating things that mattered. I am also linking up my testing document here which was good but I would add more punctuation to test kids a little more.
Overall, fantastic sequencing of lessons here! My only concerns are students getting a little “done” with protocols… the formatting lesson added an extra layer of challenge for the students.
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Hi Kaitie
Thanks for sharing your resources! Always good to see how different teachers make the materials work for their classroom. Also thanks for all the helpful informative feedback on the lessons so far. We definitely read all of it and take it into consideration as we design and update materials.
-CSP Team
Of course - thank YOU! I also maybe spoke too soon about my students being done with protocols. They actually asked to do what we were doing yesterday (the sending formatted text) again today so they really liked it! I asked them specifically about protocols and one student said he still liked it because I liked the challenge of creating effective protocols. Your scaffolding seems to be right-on for my students!
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I like your html blog. I did this lesson this week and was surprised that the students didn’t connect it to HTML on their own.
I wonder if it would make sense to use an html example in the compression lesson to reinforce the html and to show them that there is more repetition in web pages and other formatted files than we might see at face value… Maybe I will try this.
Katie, do you have a link to the actual blog post? Thanks
Thanks! My idea of compressing html is not going to work because the widget interprets the html. I don’t know if it was a good idea or not anyway…
Ahh… I see. I don’t think I understood it until now. I think that could have been a great extension idea… I could see students appreciating the “real-world” look to compressing the code/text.