We briefly looked at some coding apps near the latter half of class today and while I am sure I can be convinced of their educational merit in the classroom, my extreme lack of familiarity with any of the (very approachable) platforms is such that I tend to get very frustrated at around the 30second to 1 minute mark. Granted this is a case of me not liking something if I’m not immediately adept at it – obviously a trait that should have been ironed out some time ago. Perhaps if I spent some time with some YouTube tutorials I’d be more inclined to dive deeper into some of these coding apps; I have used Twine in the past and YouTube was a tremendous aid while learning some rudimentary code. I would certainly welcome these platforms and practices into my classroom and I wonder if I allowed the students who are familiar to lead a part of the lesson how that transparency on my end (that of not knowing what the heck is going on) would affect my relationship with my students. I’m all for various ways of engaging learners, but I am also mindful of multimodality just for the sake of including multimodality. So if I were to include any of these coding apps, I would want to be clear with my intentions as to why I am incorporating them and if the learning outcome I am trying to reach is best met with these tools.
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