For further information on what is discussed on my video, please scroll to the bottom for website links.
Journey of an infinitely loopy coding teacher
For my Coetail Graduation Final Project, I chose to run a Primary School Coding Club. I called the club, the “Infinite Loop Coding Club”, inspired by Mick Resnick’s Learning Spiral. The Learning Spiral goes like this: First we “Imagine”, then we “Create”, then “Play”…”Share”… “Reflect”… and then back to “Imagine” for a never-ending spiral. I look at it as an infinite loop of learning, thus I came up with this club’s name. Recently, I found out Apple headquarters is on a street in Cupertino called Infinite Loop. Hey! Steve Jobs thinks like me! 
My Coetail final project has to be a video documenting application of our learning and studies from the past 18 months of Coetail. Final Projects are peer-evaluated. You might be interested in my self-evaluation of my Final Project.
Graduates receive a Coetail Certificate. Coetail stands for “Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy”. My Coetail certificate comprises half of my M.S. studies with my chosen focus of Technology Integration in Education.
W00t!
It’s hard to believe that I’m finishing up my Coetail Course, now. I’ve heard the word “transformative” so many times during the course from other people referring to Coetail. I always nod my head in assent when I hear it too, but have not much to add, as I can’t quite find any better word to describe the experience (and for me to be rendered speechless is no small thing!)
et voìla! You may view my video above!
I used the SAMR model of Technology Integration as an organizing point for my final project video. The “R” in SAMR stands for “Redefinition”. I neglected to say in my video that Redefinition is also what happens to Coetail graduates through their 18 month long journey. 
In normal fashion for me, I couldn’t keep my video under the 10 minute length guideline 
I made my four children (ages 10, 13, 15, and 17) watch it. To my delight, they all agreed that it was a good video and there was nothing that I should’ve cut out. When my 15 year old boy gave me his stamp of approval, I knew I had hit gold! So, hopefully the 17 minutes will go by quickly for you!
If you read my self-evaluation and have any comments to add or points to disagree with me, then please feel free to add them in the comments box below, or on the actual self-evaluation page.
Useful website links that compliment information in my video, in order of appearance:
- Infinite Loop Coding Club promotion video (a video I made to promote my club at school)
- SAMR model of Technology Integration
- About Coetail
- (Gulp) You mean I signed up for a Revolution? (a blogpost I wrote after two weeks of being in Coetail)
- attribution for the Red School House image
- Code.org 20 Hour Course
- reference to statistic: 1 million more computer programming jobs than programming students by 2020
- Definition of Gamification
- Scratch Programming Website
- Mitch Resnick’s TED Talk: Let’s Teach Kids to Code
- Learning Creative Learning (MOOC )
- Page of links to my blogposts about my studies in the Learning Creative Learning MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).
- Everything I need to know, I Learned in Kindergarten , Mick Resnick’s Learning Spiral
- Mick Resnick’s Twitter Account
- Vivian’s Scratch Studio (Infinite Loop Coding Club Scratch Studio)
- Lego We-Do (Lego blocks that connect up to Scratch programming for Robotics)
- World Scratch Day
- Primary School Global Codeathon (shout-out to fellow Coetailer Dan Slaughter @dslaughter)
- The Story of the Primary Global Codeathon (as storified by myself!)
- Code Week EU (European-Wide Coding Week)
- My lesson-notes for the 20 Hours of the “20 Hour of Code” program by Code.org
- Infinitely Loopy Coding Teacher Times (Paper-Li of my curation of interesting web content about coding in the elementary school)
- Summer Scratch Challenge by Pursuitery.com
- Jeff Utecht @jutecht Moonshot Video “The Future is Now!” at Learning 2013 Conference
- The Google+ community I moderate for Coetailers working on their Coetail graduation final project
- Coetail Coaches (mentoring of new Coetail students)
The Future is now…
My son (nine years old at the time) asked for a Rodes microphone and Camtasia Screencasting Software and started recording tutorials on how to make virtual worlds in Minecraft. He uploads them to Youtube. Yesterday at the ripe old age of 10, he asked for (and got) Turtle Beach headphones. The headphones will allow himself to hear better and to record his own voice, while the Rodes microphone records the sounds from the computer. (What I just wrote is only semi-intelligible to me, so don’t feel bad if you don’t understand what he means either!) These are the kids sitting in our classrooms. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to 30 year old computer geeks in kids’ bodies. If you have any doubt, know that the future is indeed NOW…
It begs the question, “Where are we, as educators, on their learning curve?” Hopefully my video and the videos of other Coetail Graduates can give you a glimpse of where we can be. (Coetailers would say “should be!” ) My favourite Coetail graduation video was done by Carlene Hamley @learnit2. Look at what she did with Kindergarteners! Kindergarten: More than Just Cute! If Kindergarten is here, where should the rest of us be?
I would like to send a huge thank you to Jeff Utecht @jutecht who was my primary instructor throughout Coetail, the other Coetail instructors, the 13-14 Coetail Cohort that I am apart of, and the wider Coetail Community for teaching me, stretching me, and transforming me. You set the learning curve so incredibly high and asked us to reach for the moonshots. I’m so proud to be a part of this community—edging out the boundaries and pushing the comfort zones of what authentic teaching & learning is about. Like Jeff says, “It’s not about the Technology; it’s about the Learning.”
Though I’m now done my final project, I’m glad that it’s not a goodbye. I’ll still be here blogging until Jeff kicks me off. ;p~~~ The next step of my journey is mentoring new Coetailers, as a Coetail Coach. As we discussed during our Coetail studies, when we are networked educators, the learning and mentoring never stops. With my Coetail Certificate in hand and my M.S. around the corner, it’s really only the beginning…
Onwards and upwards! See you all at the curve by the moon!
~Vivian
Congratulations @ChezVivian its amazing to see all you’ve done & learned through #COETAIL love the part about moving toward coding to learn
— Mindy Slaughter (@mjslaughter) July 21, 2014
