Episode 62: The New Normal
Sean Tibor: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to teaching Python. This is episode 62, the new normal. I'm Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches.
Kelly Paredes: [00:00:24] and I'm Kelly Schuster And I'm a teacher who coats.
Sean Tibor: [00:00:27] So Kelly, it's  interesting after three years, I think we're really going to have to figure out a new way to introduce ourselves because I feel like you're the.  Coder who teaches also, and you're just getting things done in the classroom these days. 
Kelly Paredes: [00:00:40] We keep saying that I think, but don't know Maybe we just go back and say we're generalist sounds boring 
Sean Tibor: [00:00:44] know it's got to have some sort of spin 
Kelly Paredes: [00:00:46] Yeah I can say I am the teacher who codes all the way up to functions and read-write files
Sean Tibor: [00:00:54] As you said you're the best at teaching kids if L statements and loops and all of those things like no one else gives a better explanation for those than you do 
Kelly Paredes: [00:01:03] Something like 
Sean Tibor: [00:01:05] So it's  been a busy week We had a presentation  over the weekend We've got students doing amazing things in the classroom We're getting to the end of another quarter So our students are really coming along with their excitement and enthusiasm and proficiency in coding it's pretty cool to see now that we've got them trained up we have to start it all over again for the next quarter
Kelly Paredes: [00:01:25] You know how it goes every nine weeks we say it every nine weeks of our podcasts to hear we are about to embark on super coders I had a little monster today I created a monster today in my sixth grade And I tweeted about that We can say that later yeah it happens
Sean Tibor: [00:01:42] Yeah It's been pretty cool to see it It happens every time without fail Like every time Students get into it They just have a blast and they really get going So it's nice to see that happening this week Yeah today we're going to be talking about all the things that have have changed over the past year and how this situation that we're in Now the place that we're in right now is the new normal that it's not Going to go backwards and we hope that it doesn't go backwards So our topic today is all about Those things that we That we love about teaching this way the things that we hope don't ever come back the things that we still miss a little bit and we're going to go into details in the topic there but I wanted to start with the win of the week And I think Kelly it's your turn to go first Cause I think you've got a good one this week
Absolutely 
Kelly Paredes: [00:02:24] And I steal it from Sean I have to say one of our wins or my when you're when Arwin is that we presented at live curious go beyond and I guess that's where we are getting our topic from We had a lot of inspiration talking to people around the globe I'm from Monterrey and we presented and that was that's always a win to present but we had an engaging presentation We got to see a will Richardson who I love I've been following him since I saw him in San Paolo And like 2000 and I don't know 13 Amazing guy Great inspiration I got to reconnect with John McTiernan who taught me about ed tech back when PTC principal training center And it was just a great time to see people and get to know
Sean Tibor: [00:03:15] Yeah I think it was really inspirational Like our session was really interactive We had a lot of great questions People were really engaging with it providing a lot of good feedback our zoom chat was pretty lively with people sharing things that they were liking and wanting to do more of And I think that was the spirit of the whole weekend That was pretty great to see was that these are people that are leaning into the future of where we're going with education and especially not just because of COVID or not despite COVID but because it's been a disruption to the existing system and within that disruption as a lot of opportunity
Kelly Paredes: [00:03:52] Yeah And I just think that benefit of being able to talk to people face to face via zoom we were in Monterey in theory recording is and Monterrey but it's great to just be able to speak to them We got to go and break out rooms It's just It gives a teacher this boost of energy when it's getting to the crunch time quarter we're feeling a little low. So yeah, I had a great high
great one. 
Sean Tibor: [00:04:15] that's great.
It's such a great one this week.  
Kelly Paredes: [00:04:17] Excellent. 
Sean Tibor: [00:04:18] Okay. So for me, the win this week has been files in Python. And I don't know why I didn't think about this earlier, but one of the. 
Things, I've always tried to figure out like how to get the students to see what I love about coding. And one of the things I love about coding is taking myself out of the equation. So I write the code, but then I let the program do its thing and it can do stuff that I could never do. So this could be things like, it can answer emails at two o'clock in the morning while I'm not there, or it can take a bunch of data and transform it into something else, or it can recognize speech in other languages and translate it. 
So this idea of having code do things that I can't do is something that I've really tried to figure out the best way to do it.
And so I came up with this lesson sequence that started with.
Reading files from the file system. And being able to save them. So we started with watching a video from YouTube. Before we started so that they could get someone else to explain it and they could go through it at their own pace and listen along. And then what we did was I took the word file from my Mac, which is hidden somewhere on the file system. I'll post the. 
The link to it or the path to it in the show notes. But somewhere on a Mac computer on every Mac, computer.
Is a word file of 235,886 words, at least in my version of it. And so this word file. I took a segment of it and I gave them like 12 words from the middle of it. And I asked them to find what's the longest word in this word file. And they could look at those 12 words and immediately spot the word. 
And then I showed them. Okay. Now load up or open up the word file that has 235,886 words in it. Now what's the longest word in it. And they said, I don't know how I couldn't figure that out. And some of them came up with some  approximations or some heuristics that they could use to guess the longest word, this or them tried Googling. What's the longest word in the English language. And I said, no, that's great, but that's not the longest word in this file. And then what we did was we actually loaded the file into Python and we just looped over it. And I showed them some really basic algorithms for, keeping track of the longest word you've seen so far and just looping through the entire list. To pull out the one that's the longest word. And then one student said, but wait, what if there's more than one word? That's the longest word. And so we tried adding the longest words to a list and we improved our algorithm and. 
I think by the end of it, they all got this idea that wait a minute. This is now something bigger than myself. It's not something that I just typed in. I'm taking a huge amount of data and I'm doing something really interesting with it. Oh, and by the way, it's happening in a 10th of a second. 
So it's something that's way faster than I could do it. And that sort of process I think has really.
Interesting to them. And I had a number of kids who were like, okay, that was really cool. Now I get what you're saying with being able to do bigger things. And so I was really excited to see that happen this week. 
Kelly Paredes: [00:07:20] Yeah. Actually going to be my kind of fail and learn method because when you were doing that At first I was like Holy cow what is he doing to me He's going to make me learn something new and teach it And I was getting scared and I had that moment of imposter syndrome as well It was but it was such A great lesson and to go in there and again I had to wait a couple of times to Sean teachers taught it his It's time And I had a process And do it again To teach it I understood it but I didn't teach it And so that process of learning and failure but it was such a great lesson and the kids got to see the why the why do we do this And I think watching that happen from watching you and then also watching my own students it was just Oh yeah So that's cool my my birthday app or schedule app That we're making now we can save it that for me was a solidification of Oh yeah I forgot why we code That is pretty cool So it was kudos on that one
was a 
Sean Tibor: [00:08:20] And what was great about us And we went to using the JSON library which for what a lot of the things that they're doing where they're having like a list of dictionaries or dictionary of string values or something where there's more complex data that they're loading they can save that to a Jason file loaded again clear it out there's a lot of different file operations that they can do with that That are really simple And you don't have to know how Jason actually works for it You just know that if I want to save something more complex I can save it as Jason and loaded as Jason and I get some basic data back So it was really cool to see how quickly they embrace that And the number of students today it was really funny as they were going through and they're working on their programs Each of them is making an awesome list of awesome stuff right So that's their project now that they're working on is they're making this program that loads and saves data in JSON format to their file system And some of them are like but why Like I started my program again and it has all of these other names and I said that's because you had it all saved in your file They're like Oh that's awesome There's just really got excited about it and so the next idea that I think we're going to do is to look at some specific packages on pipe Or look at the requests library in a basic way because if they know how to load Jaison data from disk what's go get some J's on data from the web and then they can start manipulating that in Python And we can go from that idea of Doing things that are bigger than what I can type in myself to getting in getting the things that are more recent or up-to-date or real time or like fresh So that idea of fresh data that's going into my code Is a really powerful idea for them And I think we're all do things like weather stocks stuff that's like really temporal and new but there's some really cool ones out there Like how many W which astronauts are in space right now And it'll tell you that
Kelly Paredes: [00:10:12] It's really cool And lucky cause that's the third quarter and we always have extra time in the third quarter And it's just a fun thing So we get to play a little bit more with the third quarter students I don't know why I guess we just don't have a lot of interruptions
This quarter
And so it'll be interesting I'm sure I'll have another fail when I go to teach Jason I'm a couple lessons behind Sean and seventh grade but what a fun time
Sean Tibor: [00:10:34] Yeah it's a lot of fun So what's dive into our topic I don't think we have any other announcements or anything this week or any new news theirs 

Go ahead with your new news Go ahead
Kelly Paredes: [00:10:42] Yeah tomorrow
Sean Tibor: [00:10:43] News from the education world Go ahead
Kelly Paredes: [00:10:45] Tomorrow Twilio engage any everywhere They're having an event I think today was your last day to Oh probably too late to do air it But they're having an event on tomorrow February 25th and I get to see Ashton Kutcher talk about investor and entrepreneur So that's pretty cool news Report on that and see what happens in Jeff Lawson the co-founder and CEO of Twilio is going to be presenting I just think it's interesting to see how what's happening in the business while because again me being a new coder into this world I don't really 

Connect as much to the new technology developments that are happening out there it's nice to just see how this technology is on a large scale human problems how entrepreneurs are using it so that I can bring that back into the classroom I may not be able to teach it or I won't be teaching it to the sixth grade or seventh grade but what happens I
think 
Sean Tibor: [00:11:36] that's a really important thing to do though to be able to keep abreast of what's actually happening in the outside world and keep things relevant and fresh for students I was listening to the talk Python podcast This weekend the car on the way to school And they had Dr Becky who's an astrophysicist at the university of Oxford and one of the colleges that refer to exactly which one but she works on examining different galaxies and it uses Python to do it And it's really cool she has something that she likes that she calls like an egg white galaxy that doesn't have a bulge in it like a normal galaxy And it's really interesting stuff that she's working on but she was talking about one of the major discoveries that happened last year And I didn't even realize it was out there but this idea of the Radcliffe wave is this giant 8,000 light year along A dust cloud and gas cloud That's out there in the same arm of the Milky way that we are And it's only 400 light years away from us but we've been looking through it For the entire time that humans have been looking up at the stars but we didn't realize it was there until we could put the data Into a 3d plot and analyze it using Python
Kelly Paredes: [00:12:45] Very cool I
Sean Tibor: [00:12:46] thought that was very cool And it just shows that like the w the way that we are applying code and the way that we're applying these technologies and techniques and the way that human thinking is evolving about the way we look at the data around us has allowed us to start to see new things and things that were always there but maybe we perceive it in different ways And so having those new ideas or new topics to share with our students Really seems to be helping them see Oh that is a real useful thing that we could use Yeah And so as part of our new normal we're getting into that world We're getting into that world where our students are making connections They're not coming into the classroom where all they see is in the classroom on the walls around them When they're in a virtual environment where they're dialing in on zoom to the classroom I say dialing in like a rotary phone hooked up to zoom Maybe we should do that Like you could rotary dial your zoom meeting ID
Kelly Paredes: [00:13:40] was just think of that you have male kind of thing
Sean Tibor: [00:13:43] like the modem Yeah
Kelly Paredes: [00:13:45] Oh gosh
Sean Tibor: [00:13:46] they are calling in on zoom to the classroom who's to say that they can't we can't have other people call in from around the world like a Dr Becky and talk about the world of astrophysics in Python Who's to say we can't have our students go look at resources Outside the classroom outside of what we can provide to them And before when we were in the classroom I think the literal walls of our classroom kept us boxed into this way of thinking that said Everything that we have to learn is contained within these walls but this distributed hybrid distance model It forces us to think in new and different ways if all of my students aren't here with me Then I have to provide things through the internet I have to provide resources I have to find resources that everyone can access not just the students in my room And I think it does improve The equity of the way that we teach because every student is getting more access to the information not just the students that are here in the room are the students that are on zoom
Kelly Paredes: [00:14:46] Yeah and takes me back to this weekend when we were talking about. Our listening to will Richardson with the silos and education. And I think that's the beauty of computer science, because if you're a computer science teacher, you're not really in often, I should say often you're not in this silo of only my classroom, because you're always looking at that new technology that's coming around. Or, even as an ed tech, you're looking at what's new on the market for software and you're able to see globally, what's being used to benefit the world,
AR, VR, whatever.
it is, even podcasts. 
Sean Tibor: [00:15:26] I don't know that every computer science teacher does that. Cause I haven't met all of them, but I do think that a really good teacher from what I've seen is someone who's always. Plugging themselves into new sources of information. It doesn't mean that they're always plugged in, but you're there. The people that have a professional learning network on Twitter, they're the people that have three or four podcasts that they'd love to listen to. And they're always looking for that next one. 
These are the people that are reading the magazines that just really get geeked out. About the things that they teach, so that there's always something new and always something fresh because that novelty is really important for teaching. I don't, third year in, I think I would be bored if I was teaching the same thing I taught my first year. 
Kelly Paredes: [00:16:08] Yep. Absolutely. 

Sean Tibor: [00:16:09] So to take a step back for a moment about this it we've been reflecting a little bit about on about this topic of is normal anymore after the last year of COVID and disrupted teaching For us the last day of normal school Was March 13th 20 20 it's a Friday the 13th which was ominous right But it was this Friday the 13th And I remember we were all brought into a large auditorium all the teachers and we were all told that we were going home This was at 4:00 PM on a Friday That we are going home and that school was not reopening hopefully for just a couple of weeks So we were home for we were going to be home for a couple of weeks and We were told us at 4:00 PM on a Friday And we were also told that we would be holding classes and teaching remotely starting Monday morning at eight 10 And so it was a really big Disruptive change 
Right now, we were far more ready at our school than many schools around the world. And I think we're lucky for that. We prepped a lot. We talked about it a lot. We talked about. All the things that would need to happen in order to make this change occur. And I think as we went through the journey as a school and as teachers, we realized that the first two weeks that we thought we were going to be home and that hopefully we would come back we're really not going to happen. That this was going to go on a lot longer than we initially thought. 
Now we had prepared for that too. And we had a lot of things in place. But as we've gone through the last year, what we've all recognized is that we can't go back to March 13th. There's no way back to that point where things were the way they were before. And one of the things that I've always thought about with. 
Industries and business and economics.
Is the way that disruption. Shakes up everything in a business or an economy or an area where somebody who's disruptive, changes everything and shakes loose. A lot of the big players. What's interesting about this is that in education. Everyone's the big player right there. Aren't really companies that come along and disrupt education, but a pandemic has come along and disrupted education. It has changed things. 
And we've all had to really look at our business of education, both the business of it and the just regular teaching the education part of it. And say, how are we going to do this now with all of these new changes that we have all these new constraints and requirements and things that don't allow us to go back to the way we were on March 13th. 
Kelly Paredes: [00:18:50] So as I was reflecting you were just talking about this I was trying to remember where I was on March 13th and the work that we were doing before we were as Some schools were and then people in our position we were planning for what we thought would be happening what problems would access And this is what we do in education day in and day out We plan for What if a student comes in and doesn't know X Y and Z or what if we have a fire or what if we have an intruder we do all these pre planning for these events But We know what happens if we have a child that is behind or has a reading difference or has an organizational difference We know cause we have Information on that we've experienced We did not really know how open pandemic would play out so we planned for how we would continue to do our normal activities Through a pandemic And that was an interesting ride I think for a lot of teachers around the world We were trying to still do the normal events And something that wasn't really normal It was in the history of technology teaching ages not pre it the pandemic before when they shut down everything with the Thus the lungs
Sean Tibor: [00:20:19] Which one the SARS or 
Kelly Paredes: [00:20:21] old times
Sean Tibor: [00:20:22] Like the Spanish flu 
Kelly Paredes: [00:20:23] Yeah
something like that people I'll call obviously education C-store it happened at home or whatever but in our history with technology and the abilities that we have we we don't never had that experience of education being a homeschool event we were Planning for that
Sean Tibor: [00:20:39] And
try 
Kelly Paredes: [00:20:40] to put our silos our classrooms inside of a computer
Sean Tibor: [00:20:44] It's a really interesting thing because what you see when you look at other industries is that any of the existing players who try to port their business model or their product but then just do it in the new world Typically fail an example of this look at Eastman Kodak right Eastman Kodak had digital cameras back in The late seventies early eighties They had consumer digital cameras that they had come up with in their labs and Kodak Sheldon They said no this is not our business Like our business should still be photos and film And if people want to get photos and film onto their computer they'll just use a scanner Why would anyone want to have a lower quality digital image when they can have a beautiful quality Print image or film image from a camera And they're gone Basically right They're there they've been relegated to nothing because they tried to take what they had always done and just like import or layer that on top of this new world that is disrupted for them And so when we look at education we don't want to be like the Kodaks of the world that take our existing education model and just let's do the same thing but do it over zoom instead you can't do that 
Kelly Paredes: [00:21:55] Yeah And it's been tight it's it's taken us a while to look into that and adjust we knew it And I think with any educator out there we knew that it might not work or it could not work Or what I did before was really good It has to work We kept saying these things like all these discrepancies one teacher would say yeah I could totally
do this that way or no I can't do it that way But we didn't go in and say wait a minute 
Sean Tibor: [00:22:22] Stop 
Kelly Paredes: [00:22:23] Let's just think about what things are going to go wrong or what's going to look let's look for those loopholes of the things that are going to just change And make something Better
Sean Tibor: [00:22:34] And when I say we this is not just our school 
Kelly Paredes: [00:22:37] Globally This
Sean Tibor: [00:22:38] globally This is everything that's happening across education around the world And some are adapting better than others Some are already better prepared for this than others And I think I talked with the president of our school and she was saying there's so many things that I hope we don't lose from this So many things that we are doing better than we've ever done before that were coming out on the other side of this stronger So the idea with this new normal is what are the things that make the most sense The things that make you stronger on the other side of it when we emerge from the masks and the quarantines and the Pure distance learning and plexiglass and all of those things where we can have Normal classrooms What are the things that should be kept and saved and encouraged what makes that new world stronger than the one we left back in March of 2020
Kelly Paredes: [00:23:32] Yeah And at the conference curious will Richardson presented an article that was written by and I'm going to totally
Sean Tibor: [00:23:42] the same 
Kelly Paredes: [00:23:42] up I
ran the Hattie Roy It was in the Ft We'll put a link we can't put a link to the Ft but I'll put a link to video where the pandemic is a portal And I thought it was great summary of what
Sean Tibor: [00:23:57] What
Kelly Paredes: [00:23:57] just talking about here but In the article it says historically pandemics have forced humans to break with the past And imagine the world a new And this pandemic this one is no different a portal It is a gateway between one world and the next and I think as educators we're really starting to see that we actually have a portal Do we jump through it And the end of that article says we can choose to walk through it dragging I love this dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and And whatever we can walk through it lightly with little luggage ready to an imagine another world Imagine the educational world the education system Of we Embrace this change this new normal this new way of teaching let's focus only on computer science right now this new way of teaching computer science these things that I've learned to love about COVID the ability to share my screen or my other students to share their screens and show their errors on On the whiteboard and everybody have a an error looking contest or this ability for a student to be coding at the dentist office while they're waiting to get their braces This fact they don't have to come to school sick and meet a certain attendance record and they can still attend school even though there might be driving off to go skiing Yeah Vail or Beaver Creek the fact that All these great things that have happened because of COVID
Sean Tibor: [00:25:29] right And I think I love the analogy of the portal also I think the key though to me is not as you're right We don't want to drag the rotting carcass of ODA was before I think that's a great visual kind of gross but a great visual We don't want to drag all of that through but we definitely want to loot the body before we go So we want to take all of the things that are great about all the things we've learned We can't just throw it all away We take the great parts the stuff that's wow this is really important Or this is really valuable And we bring it along with us We don't know if on the other side we're actually going to use it but we shouldn't just throw away everything We should look at all these individual pieces of a puzzle and figure out how they assemble themselves in new and interesting ways On the other side for example like there are things and maybe we should do this as a top five list Here are the five things that we love about the new way of teaching this year Here are the five things that were not sad at all at the seat go you
Kelly Paredes: [00:26:27] let's do
Sean Tibor: [00:26:28] let's do it Okay
So
number one and in no particular order my one of my favorite things about teaching in the new world is that I have students who don't miss as much like they can join from anywhere And I have students who have dialed in from as far away as Alaska To be able to join the classroom and be a part of it And it means that I have these really great individuals these perspectives coming from all over the country and my students are getting these great experiences By being able to travel a little bit They don't like travel everywhere but they go to different places They dial in from wherever they are They are able to attend And they don't miss because they have the sniffles or because they're not feeling great or whatever they come in from zoom wherever they are And that means that They have that consistency of the experience all the way through
Kelly Paredes: [00:27:20] Yes So why one of mine is since you took that one One of mine is I actually feel really connected to a lot of my online students because they Enter zoom sometimes earlier in the kids or the kids at school or transitioning and they're getting their stuff out The kids on zoom Are already there I can look at them and I like to have all these little conversations with them that normally the other kids are trying to wrestle rushing to get there they packed her bags I closed her bags They bring their computers out They have to settle in they have to move around So we lose a lot of time at the beginning of class but my kids on zoom sitting there they're already ready get to find out mom is doing this or this is my dog or yeah today I made breakfast for my mother and I get to have these great little conversations that I think I forgot to do a lot as a teacher because to get the kids started So for me it's that connection taking the time to connect with the people that sometimes feel disconnected from not being in school
Sean Tibor: [00:28:24] That's a really interesting point And I know you do a better job of that than I do it's One way to think about it is that when you're sitting at your screen And you have those few minutes of talking with people The student may be physically located The 2038 2000 miles away but they're four feet away through the screen right For the distance from your face to the camera and their camera to their face is probably about four feet
Kelly Paredes: [00:28:50] Oh it's one foot I stare I get in the
screen I'm like full on 
Sean Tibor: [00:28:54] Here
right there Ready to go but it's there's that enemy there's that intimacy Of being face-to-face and being close to one another And that's something that zoom can do for us because you can't have all of your students that close to you In a regular classroom So that's something that is available to us Alright So my next one that I love and I hope we don't lose is I love that our students have more focused time When especially when they're zooming there's more time for them to focus on what they're doing and because our classroom is less full there's also more space for the students to focus fewer distractions There are still some going on but they have more time to focus on coding And then the other thing that we did this year that I think is adding to this as we went to a block schedule I think I stole Kelly's next one
Kelly Paredes: [00:29:45] that's okay You just took two in one but
Sean Tibor: [00:29:46] Yeah I think it's the same thing though It's just that longer time to really dive in and focus and dig into what they're doing Because what I always found was that switching time between classes Eight into the core time when they could actually learn something or figure something out So I'd rather have 78 minutes of time for them to dig in and really get into it really sink their teeth in Rather than 39 minutes where half of it is transition time
Kelly Paredes: [00:30:15] Yeah the other thing that I really Really love about what COVID forced me to do
It
Forced me to make screencasts and videos And I did this at first for asynchronous teaching at the beginning And I thought it was a great way to go over the concepts that I'm constantly teaching or the questions that I always know I'm going to have
Sean Tibor: [00:30:43] But
Kelly Paredes: [00:30:43] was always a fear for me to make these videos We get nervous and I have YouTube channel for my kids Where I've gone over concepts of objects and methods I've talked about Here's how you make some functions and simple functions And quality that I want to promote on our teaching Python podcast Probably not and sometimes I was outside and there were like my kids screaming but were useful and it showed me that I can make great screencast and actually ended up making them in two to three minutes and I was able to get better at them think that was something that I don't want to lose
Sean Tibor: [00:31:24] Yeah Yeah I agree I think the last one that I'm going to add on this list for me Is I really like the fact that we can do teacher meetings virtually now too I think that's really helping a lot And I hope that we don't lose that Because there was something about being in a large room together That didn't always lend itself to tackling what we wanted to or getting done what we needed to and the part that made it better than what we had before was the breakout rooms in zoom So the ability for teachers to collaborate together it made our meetings much more effective because instead of just disseminating information And your eyes glaze over for it It became so much more interactive right It was like this part isn't relevant to me So I'm gonna check out for a second and think about something else or daydream like our students do Into no I'm in a room with two other people and we're going to figure this out And the meetings that we've had with those breakout rooms have been far more interactive and purposeful in their approach than what we had when we were all just sitting in a room together
Kelly Paredes: [00:32:25] And I will second that with the actual use of using breakout rooms and meetings with students So I have two students that are clearly friends but they actually work really well together when they're in class they sit across from each other across from the plexiglass And they are very efficient They get their work done Yes They may be chit chatting about volleyball because it's one of the things that they like But they're also making apps about volleyball and who to invite to their volleyball parties So I'm able to put kids like that who I know can work into their own breakout room They are talking about code they're using code they're encouraging each other And just the ability to say okay here you are you're partnering up You're going to go into this breakout room Can't really do that as well Because when you do that in a classroom And everyone's in the classroom trying to work on a partner it's really loud and it's very distracting being in a breakout room with another person Is just it's mind blowing because you feel like you're in this room alone
Sean Tibor: [00:33:29] And then when you add the screen-sharing onto that Where students can share screens with one another they Oh let me show you my code Here's my approach that seems to really increase the effectiveness of it So there's a lot of benefit there All right So what's
Kelly Paredes: [00:33:43] wait no wait one one more We
Sean Tibor: [00:33:45] more bonus
Kelly Paredes: [00:33:46] without we're making time We're
almost at 
Sean Tibor: [00:33:47] I'll go
Kelly Paredes: [00:33:49] He's no
Sean Tibor: [00:33:50] Go ahead 
Kelly Paredes: [00:33:51] Last
thing plexi glass I love the plexiglass I know you don't like the plastic us but I love writing on the plexiglass I don't want it in front of the desks But I want a wall With plexi glass so we can have another writing service think it's good
Sean Tibor: [00:34:04] could be cool
Kelly Paredes: [00:34:05] and then you can erase it Like you can see through it It's not a white wall But you still write on it
Sean Tibor: [00:34:10] Could be cool 
Kelly Paredes: [00:34:11] Yeah
Pull down plexiglass From the ceiling
Sean Tibor: [00:34:14] Okay That I'm struggling to understand a little bit but okay okay So things that we do not miss about the way we used to teach 
Kelly Paredes: [00:34:21] The
way we used to teach that's all the opposites
Sean Tibor: [00:34:25] Maybe there are things that I don't want to see brought back Like I don't want to see this idea that everybody has to be in the same room together I we have figured this out now
Let's turn 
Kelly Paredes: [00:34:35] this question into and I love this question from Woolwich Why do we do X
Sean Tibor: [00:34:40] Oh okay I like okay let's do that
Kelly Paredes: [00:34:43] So why do we have to be in a room to learn together or whatever you said go ahead we
Sean Tibor: [00:34:47] don't we don't write that's what this taught us is that honestly learning can happen anywhere and in fact learning happens better often outside of the classroom than it does inside we've seen that here We're experimenting with outdoor learning stations because sometimes the ability to go sit outside and have fresh air and a nice place to set stimulates your thought processes Sometimes you want a dark room that had just has a nice keyboard and it's a big screen and that's fine too But that variety of learning experiences places where you can go to learn I think it also teaches our students that School Isn't a place where they go It's a state of mind that they enter into when they're learning So if we can show them that school is something that they Experience as a way to learn and not a building or not a room like they don't have to go to Mr Tibor or miss Parade This is room tour in computer science They can grab a book and go outside They can be on the road somewhere and learn about it They can listen to a podcast and learn more about coding or about how computers actually work
Kelly Paredes: [00:35:47] And I was going to add onto that with a kind of Mo and other too Whatever So why do we have to have school synchronously I don't learn that way You don't learn that way Yes I do like to go to MOOCs Yes I like to watch videos Yes I love hearing lectures I love hearing someone do a presentation and We do have that opportunity to talk to somebody But sometimes I need to process that information by myself I need to read a book I need to watch a video on my own time I need to write I need to reflect Those asynchronous learning opportunities or activities do they have to happen within 72 minutes of a classroom or 42 minutes of a classroom do I need a teacher to talk to me for 42 minutes of a classroom about the stuff that I can actually read
Sean Tibor: [00:36:36] Why 
Kelly Paredes: [00:36:38] By
a professional writer not saying that the teachers aren't professional but why not I
Sean Tibor: [00:36:42] think that's very valid Like why do we have to learn everything live It's a great question Like we have a lot of things that should be done live or maybe that are better done live I think discussions are better done live right conversations Disagreements are better done live right But learning information absorbing information It's really tough And it's hard for me I think because I've now been out of the school setting so long It's hard for me to go to a live training and learn about stuff especially when It's not relevant Or I already know this part or I don't see how I'm going to use it So I w I had that moment I was doing a live training the other day and I realized this is what our students are experiencing here The person is speaking about something That Maybe relevant to some of the people in the classroom but it was really hard for me to see how I was going to use it because it wasn't really my responsibility It wasn't something I was going to set up So why am I sitting through this training Listening to something that I'm not going to use in the future And so it gave me that insight into our students and how they need more of that choice and the ability to find the information that they need But then the other thing that made me realize too is they need to build the skills to learn how to dig into something deeply on their own able to really learn it And we're seeing that as I'm going through the projects they're having to learn how do I actually learn this information How do I read more And there's a lot of students who like just bail out there Hit the rip cord like I'm outta here because I had to read more than four sentences yeah you're going to have to write or you're going to have to find a video
Kelly Paredes: [00:38:14] Yeah absolutely I was just thinking about this and we didn't get to experience this and this isn't something that has happened during the pandemic But I wish It could happen eventually but why do we have to have sixth graders in a class together in computer science or in a class together in math Why do we have to have grade levels And I know it's easier for us as educators some of my sixth graders can out code some of your eighth graders and it's not because Maybe it's not because the curriculum is different
It 
Sean Tibor: [00:38:48] has different paces
right 
Kelly Paredes: [00:38:49] paces They might have not had sixth and seventh grade coding Or they might not have put in the effective effort in sixth grade or seventh grade lot of reasons but I have kids that are passionate In sixth grade that I've said this before on our podcast that will out code me And by the time they're in eighth grade they're that good So why do they have to do it And we as computer science teacher Here we have made it so that we allow them to extend their learning So they're not doing necessarily the sixth grade curriculum If they're past the sixth grade curriculum we give it but why do they still have to sit in and listen Thankfully with the COVID we were able to give them this asynchronous activity Oh you want to learn Python arcade Here you go While I'm teaching about lists go make some sprites
and go make your
own list Making this game think about it Why do we have grade level
Sean Tibor: [00:39:41] I think it's I think it's a great question for certain subjects Maybe you don't need it at all And maybe that's something that I think is the right answer for us here is I think that's a big change right in the way that we structure and think about our grade levels and courses in the way that students progress There's definitely a logistical challenges with that And certainly with everything that we've done over the last year that probably is a little too much to tackle 
Kelly Paredes: [00:40:05] I mean
there's differentiation I know everyone Some educators are sitting out there screaming That's why we do differentiate
Sean Tibor: [00:40:11] Sure 
Kelly Paredes: [00:40:11] We 
Sean Tibor: [00:40:12] Right
Kelly Paredes: [00:40:12] sometimes in in our curriculum we differentiate a lot
Sean Tibor: [00:40:17] I think the benefit is that when you are able to help students come together into groups that are roughly aligned it doesn't have to be like Oh here's honors coding or whatever But if you can group your students together they can go further together as a group of kids who get it And they're all in the same area rather than having them all spread out There's definitely some downsides to that also but there's a lot of ways that we could rethink the way that we do this That don't necessarily mean Like blowing apart Our entire class in grade level structure that could give those differentiation opportunities to students But in a way that's maybe more organic right or more natural All right So let's see here Other questions Why do we have to
Kelly Paredes: [00:41:03] I have a lot but I think I might be going to to Metta and wishful
Sean Tibor: [00:41:08] Alright how about this then  what's one thing that you can't wait to get back into your classroom that you can't do right now Or virtual classroom or physical
Kelly Paredes: [00:41:17] This is really hard because I'm one of those teachers I really I'm really having a great time with this I think what I great put away the mass put away and I'm thinking all positive putting away the mask Putting away all this horribleness not being able to see my parents blah blah blah I'm like just thinking about school only
Sean Tibor: [00:41:35] right Okay
Kelly Paredes: [00:41:36] in a silo Sorry what is something I want to get back to I want to get back to being able to use more manipulatives I think it's been a hard move for us and me having to wipe down cables or microbits kids get the microbes for nine weeks So I only have to wipe it down at the end of the nine weeks Sometimes I don't get them back but things like that being able to pull out the Legos and the robotics and just say if a kid says Oh I wish I could play with Legos and I could say Oh here you are I miss that I
Sean Tibor: [00:42:04] You know what I miss I miss watching the kids side by side at a whiteboard table or on a whiteboard wall drawing something together figuring something out together visually In that diagram And the distancing aspect of that has really been Making it really hard to do that And I know that Yes we can whiteboard on zoom and we do But there's something about that tangible That tangible tactical I have a marker in my hand I'm sketching it out I'm drawing it out I'm thinking about how it works That's really powerful And I haven't been able to replicate that yet digitally 
Kelly Paredes: [00:42:40] I
think we just made a new word tangible I like that tangible 
Sean Tibor: [00:42:44] I was
going to edit that out Thank you
Kelly Paredes: [00:42:46] edit it out tangible We're going to write an article about it Here's the tangible at the tangible tactical way of teaching computer
science
No I 
Sean Tibor: [00:42:53] You heard it
here folks copyrighted Teaching Python
Kelly Paredes: [00:42:57] as you were talking I was thinking about I was looking at these pictures when we were trying to put together our presentation and there was that picture We have a huge table that sits 
Sean Tibor: [00:43:06] Actually you're sitting at it right now 
Kelly Paredes: [00:43:07] on
it right now but it's in it's split up with four and I think it sits eight
Sean Tibor: [00:43:11] Yeah It seats eight you can have three on each side and one on the ends 
Kelly Paredes: [00:43:14] I was
looking at the pictures and last year the kids you would think that the kids wouldn't want to be next to the teachers but the sixth graders like to be like right next to you like literally if they could And it was not weird they would be like on top of you side by side And I would have seven of the other students surrounded me and fight for this table and we would sit there and code together And yeah I do miss that That ability to just to be with the kids I walk around I don't walk around that much I feel like I'm sitting down a lot in front of my computer with the zoom kids yeah I wish I could have that back sitting side-by-side coding and not having to sit down all the
time 
Sean Tibor: [00:43:52] And at the same time in that new normal like how do you make it feel like the zoom kids are part of it And as we go further as there's more things that come along in terms of technology tools and capabilities hopefully it will be like that Radcliffe wave where we have because we have the new technology We can see things that we've never seen before Things were right in front of us that's the goal Is this is an opportunity for us to rethink the way that we do education Because We have this opportunity Like it's a once in a lifetime once in many lifetimes opportunity To rethink how education works And I know that there are people out there like well Richardson and others who have been talking about all these things that could be better with education This could be better with education This could be better with education And now we actually have a shot to do that Because in the midst of disruption is when the biggest opportunities emerge to make change Because it's already broken So who says you have to put it back together The way it was 
Kelly Paredes: [00:44:51] Yeah as as we're reflecting this and thinking about these questions From the conference that we went to and our presentation This new normal That should be the hashtag thank you Roy will Richardson whoever coined this but this new normal after the pandemic this portal 
Sean Tibor: [00:45:12] What 
Kelly Paredes: [00:45:13] we do what can we do as educators around the world to help push for this This change to make education better
Sean Tibor: [00:45:21] Yeah And what's going to be interesting about it I think the way that we'll really know that we've made it there is when the new normal just becomes education It's not the new normal anymore It's just this is the way we teach This is the way we learn This is the way we educate It's no longer The new normal is just this is normal And that's going to be a big change for us to make And I think it'll take some time to get there but I know that it's going to happen I know what I've seen it on Twitter The number of you out there that are pushing the boundaries who are rebuilding the world of education through this disruption and emerging stronger on the other side It's happening And it's a really exciting thing to be part of I didn't actually think I would be part of it when I started teaching three years ago but here we are if you have thoughts about this if you have things you want to share ideas if you think were totally full of it and you have I disagree completely on whatever it is Share your thoughts with us
Kelly Paredes: [00:46:17] Absolutely And we're going to put a link of our presentation We had a presentation on what kids really learned from learning how to code I love this stuff Shawn's really embraced it as well as becoming an expert teacher it the learning theories that things that we use in the computer science classroom it takes us back into this normal of what is learning making that be the focus So if we put everything else aside what is learning And how do you know students are learning I think that can only get good things long as you're focusing on that So we'll put a link to that We'll also put a link to that video The pandemic is a portal which is a really inspiring video just to watch that intersection And what else are we going to put up there 
Sean Tibor: [00:47:02] we'll 
Kelly Paredes: [00:47:02] to find the link to a wheel Richardson's and Houma to Wagner's. Big question Institute, the nine big questions. Schools must answer. I think that's a great, that's where we were getting our ideas from and yeah. Please send us a tweet and.
Sean Tibor: [00:47:17] Show us 
Kelly Paredes: [00:47:17] are, talk about your opinions are. Questions or whatever. Yep. 
Sean Tibor: [00:47:20] So you can reach out to us through our website@teachingpython.fm. We're on Twitter at teaching Python. Kelly is at Kelly Paret on Twitter. I'm at  on Twitter. Let's see here. What else am I on these days? I think I'm on steam a lot. These days I've been playing more games than usual lately. So you can probably find me there too. 
There's a new game out called , which reminds me of all the best things of Minecraft back in the early days where everyone's just excited about it and going and do not play it. If you want to enjoy free time ever again. 
Kelly Paredes: [00:47:50] And I'm on LinkedIn and I've been posting a few blogs. So check out our blogs on teaching Python as well. 
Sean Tibor: [00:47:55] Yep. That sounds good.
And we're are, we are looking into some new channels to reach out to you. We're looking at potentially doing some live video streams. I want to expand our Patrion tears. So for those of you who are supporting on us on Patrion, thank you so much. I'd like to add some new levels of Patrion support with some perks. 
For our listeners.
In your 
Kelly Paredes: [00:48:14] lesson plan. On sixth graders or for sixth graders or the lesson plans that we use, we might be able to give you some perks or some 
Sean Tibor: [00:48:20] ideas. Or we could do a zoom and collaborate on a lesson plan.
Kelly Paredes: [00:48:23] You wanna zoom with us and help, we, we will help give you advice on or have fun talking to you. Either or. 
Sean Tibor: [00:48:31] So if you have ideas for what would look like great things for the next iteration of teaching Python. Definitely share that with us as well. And we're looking forward to hearing from you. So for teaching Python, this is Sean. Hi, this 
Kelly Paredes: [00:48:43] is Kelly. signing off.