Keith at Edina Community of Practice

On Monday, Keith traveled across the river to Edina, MN to help me with my Community of Practice participants that were interested in SCRATCH.  It was really fun to have him in my environment and to meet some of the teachers that are getting more and more excited about SCRATCH.  On Monday I had two teachers that taught grades 3-5 interested in SCRATCH but they had never even seen the program.  After a short intro into what SCRATCH was, there were 4 teachers who were very interested in seeing the program and how they could use it in their classroom.  Keith took these 4 teachers to a quieter space and gave the teachers an introduction to the program and showed some of the main concepts, vocabulary terms and programming things to get started with scratch.  I came out to visit with the Keith and the teachers near the end of the 1.5 hour preview and all of the teachers were so excited, so amazed and super motivated to get this program into the kids hands.  One teacher looked at me and said "On a scale of 1-10 this was a 1-Million."

So what were my take aways from this day...
1. Keith rocks and is very motivating and inspiring for teachers
2. Teachers only needed a short introduction to the program to get excited about introducing it to kids
3. Teachers will run with it!
4. Teachers shared SCRATCH with kids the day after this training!
5. I need to spread the word about SCRATCH to more teachers...I really didn't know they would be this excited!

What are my next steps:
According to my plan I'm going to start working with these teachers and a few others from some of the other schools to get SCRATCH in the kids hands.  I want to do the 4 corners project with a few classrooms to familiarize the kids with this program so we can work towards the SCRATCH boards.

I'm encouraged, motivated, excited and thankful.  These are great feelings...I have a great job!