Summer Email 2

I would like you both to follow this ScratchEd Google group: https://plus.google.com/communities/116632236256522474009

They will be launching an online creative computing workshop from early June to mid-July. I'd like you both to participate in it, taking notes about your experiences learning in the workshop. It will culminate in a visit to Harvard on July 12. As part of your work with me this summer, I'd like you to document your experiences learning in this format... what worked well, what did not work so well, especially paying attention to the design of the learning experience and the tools used to help facilitate learning. You might also be interested in the content. :)

Matt, how is your CodeAcademy work going? Which language(s) are you learning? How is that experience going? I am going through the javascript, python, and API courses right now, too. 

As you might be able to see, part of our work this summer is figuring out best practices of blended and online learning and professional development around web-based creative tools. In Codeacademy, it's the coding tools; in the Scratch workshop, it's Scratch 2.0. What I hope to gain out of our study is a set of tools and best practices that we can use to develop similar workshops in future summers and years around Noteflight.com and some of the EchoNest hack tools I will be developing. Even though I'm going to NYU this Fall, there will be opportunities (hopefully funded!) for you all to continue to work with me if you'd like. 

Part of taking our Scratch+Music work further is developing similar workshops and tools for learning for students and teachers. Our work this summer will help move our team toward that. It would be great to be able to run some online short courses for teachers around Scratch and MaKey MaKey using similar formats and tools this coming year. 

Another aspect of our upcoming work will be to assemble, preserve and present many of the student projects - code, audio files, images, and videos - from our Sound Thinking and MaKey MaKey computing+music classes and workshops in an online site for educators. We'll also want to tag and cross-reference this content to computational and musical concepts and processes. Keep your eyes peeled for technologies and sites that may be good models for us. We'll definitely populate a couple YouTube/Vimeo channels and at least set up a learning community/blog... possibly as a part of the ScratchEd website - http://ScratchEd.media.mit.edu/.

If there are any specific goals or things you'd like to have as outcomes from this summer project, please let me know. I know I asked you about these before, but they might have clarified or shifted in the intervening time. Just let me know. 

Are you all free for an all-day meeting on Friday, May 31? We could use that as our first orientation day. Also, I would like to invite you to participate in our Music Technology Educator Meetup on Saturday June 1 from 10am-1pm.  This is our last one of the year. Teachers have met the first Saturday of each month on campus to share projects and to learn more about music education technology throughout the year. It would be great to have you there.