I’ve been trying to organize my summer learning goals a little better, and one of the purposes of this blog post is to do so a little further.  Also, I’d love to invite everyone to participate in these things, if you share an interest.  Right now, I’m focusing on four major summer learning goals – computer programming , making and/or design thinking, Spanish, and engagement/motivation/inquiry/PBL.

PROGRAMMING and WEB DESIGN

There’s a lot of stuff out there for learning programming.  I’ve bounced around a lot, but I really like the self-paced EdX course from Harvard – CS50x.  Or, at least, I like it so far.  It’s a lot of videos (some of them are kind of long, but most are good.  It’s lecture, but it’s decent lecture.  You can also watch in 1.25 or 1.5 speed – fast enough to understand most of it.)  There’s another course available – a MOOC, of course – through MIT that teaches programming with Python.  I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff with Python (a programming language) lately, and I think that’s the language that I want to start with.

Here are some other free Python resources that I’ve used that were cool (or that look promising):

• Grok Learning 
• Udemy – Learn Python Programming from Scratch 
• Udacity – Intro to Computer Science – Programming with Python (the “textbook” is free – the full course is not)

There are some cool related resources.  Khan Academy has a cool-looking course on Javascript.  Coursera has an intro course on programming, and, of course, code.org has some great resources (including a link to the course mentioned above from Khan Academy).

And then there’s codecademy.org – a site that will let you learn any number of programming languages (Ruby, Python, etc.), and it’s more hands-on (less video-based).

I’d like to spend some time familiarizing myself with some of the tools available from Mozilla Webmaker – through the Web Literacy Map and the Webmaker Training.

This is a lot of stuff.  I’m hoping to try out a bunch, decide which is best, and focus on that.  I might do more than one course, or bits of many.  The goal for me isn’t completing a certificate or anything like that – it’s to learn how to code.

MAKING/DESIGN THINKING

The big thing here is CLMOOC – the Connected Learning MOOC.  It’s a series of “makes,” where participants make something about once a week, based on certain guidelines.  It’s pretty big, there are lots of cool people making and sharing cool things, and it’s a wide-open way to connect and share with teachers.

I also have a book about design thinking – which, to me, is a related topic – called The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell.  I’ve read a few chapters and enjoyed it.  It’s the kind of thing I like – a broadly-applicable way of thinking that is new to me.  (Well, not completely new.  Mostly, it’s a really thoughtful and insightful way of thinking about creating things.)

SPANISH

I’d love to be able to communicate with Spanish-speaking parents more effectively, and my Spanish isn’t quite there.  I’ve been working on Rosetta Stone for years, and it’s made me semi-literate in Spanish.  I’d like to continue that work.

There’s a ton of Spanish learning resources out there.  So many that I don’t have a strong preference yet.  I’ve been playing a little with SpanishDict, but it’s not quite enough for me.  Or, I don’t feel like I’m learning enough, fast enough.  It might take several resources.  I’ll try to share more about this area later.

ENGAGEMENT, etc.

There are some online courses on these things.  I’m not sure that I want to do too many online courses about this – though the class on tinkering on Coursera looks okay.  There are a lot of courses that you can pay for, as well.  Though that gets expensive, and my experience with paid online PD has been generally negative – with a few exceptions.

I’ve been surfing for Ted talks about this, and I’d like to post just about this at some point this summer.  It’s a big topic, and it will take more than a little piece of a blog post to talk about it.  I’m also hoping to get through some books that I’ve been nursing on engagement – Teach Like a Champion, Engaging Students, and Self-Driven Learning – and a bunch of other books that are related (at least in my mind – like Notice and Note).

There’s a ton of stuff here, and I realize that a lot of it won’t happen.  That’s fine with me.  If I do 10% of this, I’ll have learned a lot.  I have other, non-academic goals – like sleep, watch bad (and maybe a few good) movies, read a bunch of kids books (and maybe some grown-up books), do some gardening, spend time playing with my kids, and some travel and social time.

I think that’s enough for now.