Announcing: Modifications for Virtual and Socially Distanced Classrooms

CS Principles Virtual and Distance Learning
1

Dear Teachers,

We are excited to announce the release of a collection of resources for virtual and socially-distanced implementations that we believe will help you successfully run the CS Principles course this year in a flexible manner, tailored to your needs. Below you will find information about these resources, but we highly recommend you watch the recorded webinar for all of the details.

General Modifications

The Modifications for Common Teaching Practices document is designed to help you create a plan to implement the practices that we all know and love here at Code.org such as Think Pair Share, Pair Programming, and Debugging, in a virtual or socially-distanced environment. In it you will find recommendations and modifications in addition to handy resources that you can share with your students.

736×297

This document is linked to on the CS Principles Landing Page and every unit page.

Lesson Specific Modifications

First, let’s take a moment to discuss the different implementation plans we considered.

Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 4.45.24 PM
Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 4.45.24 PM1404×526 48.5 KB

We know that on any given day, you may find yourself teaching some students in a socially-distanced classroom with others at home. Maybe you will gather with all of your students on a synchronous call once a week, but on the other days students need to be able to work through content on their own. We designed our Lesson Modifications to account for flexible schedules. For every lesson you will find recommendations for each of these three implementation plans (Virtual Asynchronous, Virtual Synchronous, and Socially-Distanced Classrooms) so you can choose the resources that best fit your circumstances on any given day. We believe this will help you keep pace in the curriculum.

742×294

Each and every lesson plan in our CS Principles Curriculum will include a modifications document with instructions and resources. Resources include everything from digital versions of manipulatives to helpful videos to share with your students. You can find the modification documents linked in the Lesson Plans.

Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 5.15.29 PM
Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 5.15.29 PM1482×636 148 KB

How to use these modifications:

  1. Read the Lesson Plan in whole
  2. Open the Lesson Modifications document
  3. Read all of the modifications
  4. Choose the implementation for your setting
  5. Review the teacher prep section and any resources and make copies for your class

We are working hard to get these resources out to you in a timely manner. Here are the dates when you can expect Lesson Modifications to be released:

  • Units 1-3: July 29th
  • Units 4-6: August 12th
  • Units 7-9: August 26th
  • Unit 10: September 4th

Again, if you’d like more information on how to implement these modifications, we highly recommend checking out our recorded webinar.

We hope these modifications will help address any concerns you have about teaching in a virtual or socially-distanced environment this year. We are here to support you, so please let us know how we can best meet your needs.

Cheers,
Hannah & the CS Principles Team

Want to know about our plans for CS Discoveries? Check out this forum post.

10 Likes
3

You have no idea how grateful I am for all the work you have done!!

5 Likes
5

Love the digital manipulatives — these are life savers!

3 Likes
6

Hooray! This is great! I just spotted this in a training and it will help big time. Thank you.

8

I’m finally able to start planning for the upcoming school year which will be Virtual Synchronous 4 days/wk and Virtual Asynchronous 1 day/wk.

I am so GRATEFUL for the resources and work that you have done.
I’m feeling a little more relaxed about teaching in this new way.
:smiley: :smiley:

2 Likes
9

These resources have worked amazingly well in our (currently) virtual classroom. My students are working on the annotation slide deck for Unit Lesson 11 right now. I love how the first slide in the deck shows them how to annotate too! Thank you SO MUCH for creating these!

1 Like
10

The only reason I came to the forum today was to express my gratitude for this. I kept envisioning how I was going to modify the lessons since I am teaching this course virtually. You have made my life so much easier. So grateful.

4 Likes
11

@awade So glad to hear that! That’s exactly why we created them so it is so great to hear you’re finding them useful! Take care this school year!

12

As a new teacher of coding, thank you. I finished watching the webinar. I will use your resources.

13

This post really help me a lot. Thank you very much.