book.and.bloom

I have had a lot of success this week in my search for resources about coding in the early elementary classroom. My initial search tactic was to start with a general Google search of “coding” to get an idea of what was out there. I quickly learned that there was a lot out there on this topic! Seeing as I am teaching in a grade 1 and grade 2 classrooms during Manitoba’s code orange, I altered my search to “teaching coding elementary” and found some more relevant results. In fact, sifting through resources to see which will best fit my context seems to be the biggest challenge with the topic I’ve selected!  Retrieved on January 31, 2021 from https://svanews.com/2016/07/19/how-to-make-search-more-efficient-searching-on-google-tips/ Sites varied in quality and I found many which hosted lists of ideas ( such as this example ) but offered little to no specific advice. These were not very helpful as they had a dizzying amount of imbedded links  and simply lead me down an internet rabbit hole

To start this blog, I began by brainstorming words that came to mind when I thought of Information Literacy. I re-read sections of  Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in  Canada to remind myself of some of the skills needed for 21 st  century learners. I also included the skills identified from the   National Council of Teachers of English (NTCE) 21st Century Literacies as outlined by Richardson’s book  Why School  in chapter 5. By this time, my list was over 120 words long and I was no closer to identifying major themes of interest for future pursuit.  To aid me in making sense of this long list, I entered the word list that I had compiled into a word cloud generator. Although there are many available, I made use of worditout.com since it was free and fairly user-friendly, while allowing for some control over text, direction, colour and word emphasis. I’ve included the image below. As you can see the main word that rose to the surface was  inf