Tag: Education

Ben Honeycutt is the Executive Director of non-profit Open World Cause and a Social Studies Teacher at Woodland Park Middle School in Colorado. As an educator, Ben’s mission is to provide his students with real world opportunities, so they can learn more about the world around them and take action to make a difference. One of their latest achievements was to help fund the construction of a school in Kenya. We met with Ben to learn all about this amazing, life-changing learning experience:

It all started with a Skype call

In June of 2015, we had a Skype call with Livingstone Kegode, the director of HIPAfrica, and were so impressed with his work that we were committed from the moment the call was over. A little over a year later, Livingstone informed us that the country of Kenya had changed its zoning standards for schools, and unless HIPAfrica could raise over $14,000 for three new classrooms, a new washroom, and new fencing, HIP would have to close its doors to the 59 children who attended its school.

We traveled out to Kimilili to survey HIP and the surrounding community in May of 2017. We surveyed that over half of the students would no longer be able to attend a school if HIP closed down. Additionally, we observed that 10 of the students had descended stomachs on Monday morning, and teachers had guessed that up to 15 of them received their only meals at the school.

The structures the school were using were deteriorating, as they were using semi-permanent structures for their classrooms. We found through conversations with a local architect that the bathrooms were about to collapse. It was at a point where it was creating unsanitary conditions for the entire student body.

HIP’s administration was completely committed to doing all they could to help their students. We were inspired to not only help lead a campaign to save HIP, but to look into providing sustainable clean water, nutrition, and educational programs to ensure that HIP’s students were receiving the best long-term education possible.

At the time, when we found out about the challenges facing HIP in 2016, I couldn’t conceive how to start a successful initiative to help solve this problem. Instead, I focused on what I could do on a micro level to start helping from my classroom. Two of my middle school students, named Amelia and Christina, came up with an idea to start a project called “Kenya Help?” where they collected shoes on behalf of an organization called Funds2orgs – “Kenya Help?” collected over 1,000 pairs of shoes and in exchange received over $1,000 toward HIP for their efforts.

It was after seeing my students go above and beyond that I started wondering about how this movement could go from my classroom to classrooms around the world. I designed and published a Collaboration on Skype in the Classroom’s website, calling for classrooms all around the world to join. In six months, over 50 classrooms from around the world got together and helped raise $8,000 for HIP, helping us collect a total of over $16,000 to fund the construction of three new classrooms, a washroom with hand-washing and sanitizing stations, and fencing. All this allowed HIP’s students to continue their education.

The new washrooms

After this experience, I would encourage every educator to start their own global projects and give their students real world issues to solve. Take the leap and don’t look back!

I was inspired early on from Dr. Neil Gershenfeld’s 2005 work, FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. Gershenfeld talked about how students have the potential to create “laboratories of learning” when they have ownership of their projects. Gershenfeld articulated that when students have this ownership, they often go above and beyond their outlined expectations. It’s 13 years later, and I believe Skype in the Classroom can be a platform for what Dr. Gershenfeld was advocating. In the “Day in the Life” project, when middle school students had the agency that Dr. Gershenfeld advocated, they soared past the outlined goals and propelled each other to do something as impactful as saving a school in Kenya.

With resources like Skype in the Classroom and the tools that universities provide, teachers can have their students not only start incredible real-world projects that they will remember for the rest of their lives, but also ones that make a real impact around the world. I’ve seen students go on to use technology to help people, start businesses, and take a classroom project and turn it into a worldwide campaign. Students today have the power to change the world from the screens of their devices – what’s stopping them?

Contact me through the Microsoft Educator Community to learn how your class can help teachers and schools in Nepal and Kenya today!

P.S. I’d like to thank our partners Jacqueline Jumbe-Kuhara, Fredrick Manzugu, Livingstone Kegode, Michael Soskil, Eric Crouch, Garrett Wilkinson, Sue Levine, Dr. Joe O’Brien, Professor Melissa Collum, Professors Beth and Jeremy Gulley, and acknowledge the works of Dr. Eric Hartman, Dr. Neil Gershenfeld, Dr. Paul Farmer as well as our many supporters who make our work possible.

Teachers: Explore all the available Skype Collaborations to connect your students with classrooms around the world to work on projects, explore different cultures, and build greater compassion and empathy for one another. You can also create your own Skype Collaboration—learn more by taking the Skype collaboration course.

For a while now, my good friend and colleague Amit Pawar and I have been talking about launching a podcast to talk about the crossover of technology and education. After a bit of back and forth, we have finally made it happen (with a lot of help from Liezl Milan!)

In this first episode, we discuss why you should manage devices, the role of an MDM in supporting this, and how Microsoft Intune can simply this process for schools.

There are more pods in the works, so stay tuned.

“When I measure the value of education, I look at those ‘aha’ moments. I had a lot of those moments here. I’ve been really happy with the program.”

GIX trains students to think globally and ethically in an era of rapid change and increasingly shorter business and technology cycles, says Vikram Jandhyala, GIX’s co-executive director and vice president for innovation strategy at the University of Washington.

“How can we build a future set of innovators who will create products and services and be part of organizations that can navigate this changing landscape and lead innovation?” Jandhyala asks. “That is the premise. It’s not business as usual.”

Most of the 10 team projects of GIX’s inaugural class were sponsored by the institute’s industry partners, which include Microsoft, Boeing, T-Mobile, AT&T and Chinese technology company Baidu. Company leaders pitched loosely defined projects to GIX students, then mentored the teams as they developed their projects, leveraging the companies’ technologies.

That approach to learning makes GIX unique, says Ranveer Chandra, chief scientist for Microsoft Azure Global and an advisor on the chicken-monitoring project, named Cluck AI.

“The students are able to take the latest research from industry, build on top of it and show what can be achieved,” Chandra says.

“This kind of an industry-academic collaboration, where industry’s not just handing off something to students but providing them with cutting-edge research and working closely with them, is something I haven’t seen before as part of a curriculum.”

The Cluck AI team worked with Microsoft engineers to use machine learning to identify when chickens on a farm are in distress — when a predator is nearby, for example, or when they are overheated. A microphone captures the animals’ sounds and sends them to Azure storage containers. When an anomaly is detected, the audio data is pushed to a dashboard, along with an image of the chicken in apparent distress. The farmer, who may not be onsite to monitor the livestock at all times, gets an email notification and can assess what’s wrong.

“It’s kind of like a baby monitor for poultry farmers,” says team member Padraic Casserly, 32.

The solution uses technology developed for Microsoft’s FarmBeats project, an artificial intelligence and Internet of Things platform that harnesses data to increase farm productivity and cut costs. The four-member GIX team launched the project after Chandra, then the principal researcher behind FarmBeats, suggested that audio data could have untapped potential in farming.

The team decided to focus on chickens, interviewing farmers and even buying two chickens of their own — named Margarita and Daisy — to record them. The students hope to develop the solution further and are looking into possible funding for a start-up.

As much as we enjoy tearing open a cozy couple of socks or peeling back the paper on a snazzy blender (you shouldn’t have!), we’re of the firm belief that educators reign supreme when it comes to giving the perfect gift. For them, giving is an almost year-round thing, and the results are useful for the rest of your life. In our last episode of What’s New in EDU for 2018, we look back on a year’s worth of tools that supercharged learning and the amazing educators who brought it all to life for students around the world.

If that’s you: Thank you! Over the past year we’ve heard from thousands of teachers, districts, students – even parents – who are excited to step foot in today’s classroom and step up the possibilities available to their students in the future. With your feedback, we’ve been able to keep tailoring tools for educators want to boost and protect student voice, elevating it above the din of our demanding lives. We’ve seen that when students feel heard, feel seen, and feel acknowledged, their motivation to learn grows substantially.

Our passion for empowering all students went big this year, with our CEO Satya Nadella announcing our partnership with the Made by Dyslexia initiative. Together, we’ve rolled out new features to make learning more accessible for the 700 million students living with dyslexia.

Our Learning Tools also got major updates, like the Picture Dictionary, and continued to grow alongside the students who rely on them for reading every day.

We also saw another brilliant Hack the Classroom event, where changemakers in education and the passionate innovators in student-centered learning invented new ways to help students build future-ready skills and ignite their interest in STEM learning.

Computer science got a bit of a makeover in 2018 as well – as you’ll see in the video above, there’s a reason “the world doesn’t need any more computer scientists,” with educators expanding the subject to include all different kinds of creative projects, passions and people.

You might also remember catching #FlipgridFever this year. We were happy to announce that Flipgrid joined the Microsoft family, helping recast the role of video in the classroom, from a passive experience to a tool that empowers and amplifies every student’s voice. We also kicked off our You Can series of Tips (You Can catch up on all of them here).

And we can’t forget Minecraft: Education Edition’s year of cool coding updates: We announced the new Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial, Voyage Aquatic, where students use their creativity and problem solving skills to explore and build underwater worlds with code. We also expanded coding possibilities in Minecraft: Education Edition with the new Code Builder update. If you’re looking forward to having some time off during the holidays, you can download a free trial of Minecraft: Education Edition now and practice coding at home!

Finally, let’s squeeze in one more thank you to all you hard-working educators. You’re changing the world, inspiring us constantly and always pushing us to think of new ways to help you write those student success stories. From inclusivity to STEM, to the addition of new tools like Flipgrid into the Microsoft family, it was an amazing year.

We’re primed and ready for next year – and beyond!

Catch up on 2018:

Wow, 2018 has been a remarkable year for educators. Our #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets have brought us together every month and unfurled so much knowledge, we’re going to need some extra help looking back and capturing the highlights. Well, with over 140 hosts joining us for this special Best of 2018 TweetMeet, we just might do it!

Over the last twelve months, many of you joined the Microsoft Educator Community and have taken part in the courses, learning paths, lesson plans and other resources it offers. The global MIEExpert community continues to grow with incredible collaboration projects taking place between classrooms around the world.

Here on the Microsoft Education Blog, our 2018 was just a flurry of great news about OneNote Class Notebook, Learning Tools, Microsoft Teams, Minecraft: Education Edition, Flipgrid, Skype in the Classroom, Hacking STEM and Microsoft Whiteboard for Education. Thanks for following along and helping us wrap up the year with a collaborative recap for the TweetMeet.

Join the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet on Tuesday, December 18, at 10:00 a.m. PST (check your time zone here) to learn more. (Sounds great, but what’s a TweetMeet?)

This month we’re offering more simultaneous language tracks than ever before, for a total of 17. New this month are Македонски (Macedonian), हिंदी (Hindi) and Česky (Czech).

For each language track, we have one or more hosts to post the translated questions and respond to educators. As always, we’re super grateful to all current and former hosts who are collaborating closely to provide this service.

The #TweetMeetXX hashtags for non-English languages are to be used together with #MSFTEduChat so that everyone can find the conversations back in their own language. For example: Portuguese-speaking people use the combination #TweetMeetPT #MSFTEduChat. English-speaking educators may all use #MSFTEduChat on its own.

Our #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet is celebrating the best learnings from 2018! Join us on Tuesday, Dec. 18 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST. #Bestof2018 #MSFTEduChat Click To Tweet

#MSFTEduChat TweetMeet changes in 2018

The monthly #MSFTEduchat TweetMeets by Microsoft Education themselves underwent significant changes in 2018 as well. Our events are now multilingual and more global than ever. Team TweetMeet, which organizes the events, now consists of three people: Marjolein Hoekstra, Francisco Texeira and Anica Tričković.

Last September we decided to move all preparations for these Twitter events to Microsoft Teams. The switch to the Teams platform allows Team TweetMeet and our expert hosts to collaborate more effectively, because it combines the power of group conversations, file sharing and meetings all in one system. Being able to add guests to our teams is an incredible benefit, too.

Celebrating 2.5 years of TweetMeets

The first Microsoft Education TweetMeets were held in the summer of 2016. To celebrate their 2.5 years in existence, and to close 2018 in style, we decided to invite all former hosts to return once again. As many as 143 of these former hosts immediately accepted this invitation. They are very much looking forward to your best experiences, products and resources from 2018.

With so many hosts coming together for this special occasion, we just had to make a video to introduce (or re-introduce) them all to you:

More ways to participate

• Post-event summary: We will publish a new post after this #MSFTEduChat event summarizing the key lessons from the conversations during the TweetMeet. The hosts will collaborate to curate a top selection of the tweets and trends they found most significant. For even more highlights from the TweetMeet, the blog post will offer multiple Twitter Moments – curated stories and conversations from Twitter. Look for this blog post on Thursday, December 20.
• TweetMeet fan? Show it off on your Twitter profile: Every month more people discover the unique nature of the TweetMeets and become passionate about them. Well, you can now show your passion for the TweetMeets right from your Twitter page. The dimensions of our Twitter Header Photo are 1500×500 – the perfect size for your Twitter profile. Get this month’s image here: #MSFTEduChat Twitter Header Photo.

Why join the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

TweetMeets are monthly recurring Twitter conversations about themes relevant to educators, facilitated by Microsoft Education. The purpose of these events is to help professionals in education to learn from each other and inspire their students while they are preparing for their future. The TweetMeets also nurture personal learning networks among educators from across the globe.

We’re grateful to have a support group made up exclusively of former TweetMeet hosts, who volunteer to translate communication and check the quality of our questions and promotional materials. They also help identify the best candidates for future events, provide relevant resources, promote the events among their networks, and, in general, cheer everybody on.

Our hosts are thrilled about this upcoming TweetMeet. Watch how each of them has their own exciting way of inviting you to the event:

When and how can I join?

Join us Tuesday, December 18 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT on Twitter using the hashtags #MSFTEduChat, #Bestof2018 and #MicrosoftEDU (which you can always use to stay in touch with us). To find the event time for your specific location, use this time zone announcer.

From our monthly surveys we know that you may be in class at event time, busy doing other things or maybe even asleep – well, no problem! All educators are most welcome to join after the event. Simply take a look at the questions below and respond to these at a day and time that suit you best. You can also schedule your tweets in advance. In that case, be sure to quote the entire question and mention the hashtag #MSFTEduChat, so that everyone knows the right question and conversation to which you are responding. Mark the exact timings – they are different this month.

How can I best prepare?

To prepare for the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet, have a look at the questions we crafted this time. Because of the enormous scale of the December event, we will have 4 questions this month. This will give everyone more time to engage with each other.

TweetMeet Questions

Hosts

With 143 educators on this month’s #MSFTEduChat hosts team, it’s not possible to list everyone’s profile in this announcement like we normally do. We did once again make a Twitter list so you can easily follow everyone.

What are #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

Every month Microsoft Education organizes social events on Twitter targeted at educators globally. The hashtag we use is #MSFTEduChat. A team of topic specialists and international MIE Expert teachers prepare and host these TweetMeets together. Our team of educator hosts first crafts several questions around a certain topic. Then, before the event, they share these questions on social media. Combined with a range of resources, a blog post and background information about the events, this allows all participants to prepare themselves to the full. Afterwards we make an archive available of the most notable tweets and resources shared during the event.

Please connect with TweetMeet organizer Marjolein Hoekstra @OneNoteC on Twitter if you have any questions about TweetMeets or helping out as a host.

Join for next month’s topic: Transforming classroom time

Today we’re debuting a new tool that can spark collaboration in the classroom. We’re excited to be able to share a preview of a new, free app: Microsoft Whiteboard for Education.

 

 

Taking the magical simplicity of an analog whiteboard and adding interactive, collaborative technology, Microsoft Whiteboard for Education gives the whole class a new space to engage, ideate, and create. Teachers and students can brainstorm and grow ideas on this limitless canvas, coming together on lessons, projects, and more.

 

With Whiteboard for EDU, you can:

Collaborate in real time, wherever you are.

Give ideas room to grow using Whiteboard’s infinite canvas. Drive an interactive lesson from the front of the classroom on a large display. Flip the classroom by letting students contribute with notes, images, diagrams, and more on their individual devices. Brainstorm with others and be inspired by their thoughts in real time. Provide a limitless space for lessons, student ideas, and group projects.

Unlock creativity and interact naturally.

Work with whatever feels most natural to you. Teachers and students can use their fingers to make quick additions or draw the finer details with a digital pen. The pen-first, touch-first technology gives students immediate creative power, right at their fingertips. Don’t have pen or touch? Whiteboard for EDU works great with a keyboard and mouse too.

Supercharge your learning experience.

From the ground up, Whiteboard for EDU has been designed with teachers and students in mind: to work the way you already do. 

Export your board directly to OneNote Class Notebooks for safekeeping. Change Whiteboard’s background to a variety of new colors (including blackboard mode!) and reduce eye strain. Play with different line styles to support writing and graphing. Use education-themed stickers with your students to collect poll responses and give feedback in real time. 

Increase the readability of quickly-jotted notes with Ink Beautification, which analyzes handwriting and automatically replaces it with more legible strokes. Choose different ink and colors to give handwriting extra oomph. And for teachers and students who occasionally use analog whiteboards, you can convert pictures of your notes into real digital ink with Ink Grab, making the move from analog to digital seamless.

Get Started Today

Whiteboard for EDU launches today for Windows 10 and next week for iPad! After downloading, login to Whiteboard with your Office 365 Education account and enable “Education Preview” from the Settings menu. To learn more, provide feedback or be inspired from others using the preview, join our Whiteboard for Education Facebook group.

This post was originally published on this site.

During Computer Science Education Week, millions of students around the world will participate in Hour of Code.  They’ll learn the fundamentals of coding and how much fun it is to create. What they might not learn is how they can apply that learning to their current passions and interests, or their future careers. That’s where Skype in the Classroom comes in!

On December 3^rd until December 7^th, Skype in the Classroom is partnering with Code.org to host a five-day series of free, 30-minute Skype broadcasts called Meet Code Creators! We’ve invited computer science professionals who are also artists and have taken their passions for dance, movies, storytelling, games and the environment, and used their coding skills to bring those passions to life in new ways. They’ll help make what students are learning through Hour of Code relevant to what kind of jobs they might want to do in the future.

On Monday, you’ll hear from two artists using code to create wearable technology.

On Tuesday, we’ll go behind the scenes with Minecraft.

On Wednesday, we’ll see how computer science brought the magical illustrations of a Harry Potter book to life.

On Thursday, we’ll explore how technology is used to animate movies like Coco and The Incredibles 2.

On Friday, we’ll learn how Artificial Intelligence is helping address some of the world’s biggest problems.

You’ll have a chance to hear about the Code Creators’ career journeys and ask them questions via our live global chat for an hour after each broadcast.

To connect your classroom with one or all five of the artists in the Meet Code Creators Series, register here.

Each episode of the series will broadcast twice at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. EST on December 3^rd – 7^th with the live Q&A directly following.

And if you haven’t already signed up, have your students do Hour of Code with Minecraft by playing the free Minecraft coding tutorial, Voyage Aquatic. No computer science experience is needed!

To connect with more global live learning experiences, visit Skype in the Classroom to see how you can bring thousands of virtual lessons into your classroom. You’ll also find dozens of Activity Plans to help provide learning activities around your Virtual Field Trips, Guest Speaker Sessions and connections with other classrooms to play games like Mystery Skype.

For a full look at what’s to come for Computer Science Education Week, check out the latest episode of What’s New in EDU:

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Inspiring students to look beyond themselves

Disale is not alone. Shiva Kumar, who teaches in the sweltering farmlands of southern India, is Asia’s first Skype Master Teacher, a designation for volunteers who use Skype often in their lessons and are willing to train other teachers in how to use it to connect their classrooms.

Through Skype sessions, his students have traveled millions of miles around the world, virtually. Living in a flat, hot region, Kumar’s students were amazed when they experienced a Skype call with an Arctic research team. “It was eye-opening for them to discover that such a cold region exists in the world,” he says.

After more than a thousand interactions with classrooms or experts in dozens of countries since 2015, he’s still amazed by the surprising lessons learned.

Take the time his class of 8- to 10-year-olds had a Skype call with kids in a Kenyan refugee camp. “We found out that six kids were sharing one textbook there, and my students were shocked to learn of the difficulties they have and yet see the empathy flowing among them despite it all,” Kumar recalls. “My students realized there are a lot of poor people in the world, and it inspired them to start sharing more amongst themselves. Even small things like lunch, or a pencil or eraser, or sports equipment — they began sharing everything.”

“We’ve had sessions with 78 different countries,” says Kumar. “But in spite of all that diversity, the sense of commonality is what comes through to the kids. When they laugh and share things, that’s what they identify: oneness within diversity.”

For this year’s Skype-a-Thon the students in Kumar’s 10 STEM classes will bring their sleeping bags to school so they can do eight-hour shifts of 30-minute Skype sessions. The two-day marathon of virtual travel has become a staple for Kumar’s classes ever since they did the first one four years ago, when the students’ connections with classrooms around the world spanned more than a million miles. The kids decorate their school with lights and showcase their Indian culture through traditional dances and musical instruments, as well as modern STEM projects.

Disale will also be participating in the Skype-a-Thon, where he will be connecting 30 classrooms across 17 countries. Last year, almost half-a-million students from more than 90 countries participated, traveling 14.5 million miles. The goal is to meet or exceed those figures this year. For every 400 miles virtually traveled in the Skype-a-Thon, Microsoft will donate the resources for a student to attend school in one of the nine WE Villages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with a goal of helping 35,000 kids.

Calling all classrooms with up-and-coming coders and app makers-to-be: Computer Science Education Week is happening on December 3 – 9 this year. In celebration of this event, our 14 global hosts are excited to offer you a new #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet on Computer Science, Hour of Code and Computational Thinking.

Joining from all over the world, our hosts hope to inspire you in empowering your students to prepare for their futures. For a glimpse of what’s in store, catch up on the most recent #HackTheClassroom event and watch some changemakers in action.

This month’s TweetMeet also dives into Voyage Aquatic, a brand-new Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial just launched in close partnership with Code.org (@codeorg).

Join the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet on Tuesday, November 20, at 10:00 a.m. PST (check your time zone here) to learn more. (Sounds great, but what’s a TweetMeet?)

We offer a total of 8 language tracks this month: In addition to English, you can also participate in Español (Spanish), Italiano (Italian), Português (Portuguese),اللغة العربية  (Arabic), Sprski (Serbian), Deutsch (German) and Nederlands (Dutch).

For each language track, we have one or more hosts to post the translated questions and respond to educators. As always, we’re super grateful to all current and former hosts who are collaborating closely to provide this service.

The #TweetMeetXX hashtags for non-English languages are to be used together with #MSFTEduChat so that everyone can find the conversations back in their own language. For example: Portuguese-speaking people use the combination #TweetMeetPT #MSFTEduChat. English-speaking educators may all use #MSFTEduChat on its own.

Our #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet is celebrating #CSEdWeek and #HourofCode with tips from the pros! Join us on Tuesday, Nov. 20 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST. #CS #MSFTEduChat Click To Tweet

More ways to participate

• Post-event summary: We will publish a new post after this #MSFTEduChat event summarizing the key lessons from the conversations during the TweetMeet. The hosts will collaborate to curate a top selection of the tweets and trends they found most significant. For even more highlights from the TweetMeet, the blog post will offer multiple Twitter Moments – curated stories and conversations from Twitter. Look for this blog post soon after the event.
• TweetMeet fan? Show it off on your Twitter profile: Every month more people discover the unique nature of the TweetMeets and become passionate about them. Well, you can now show your passion for the TweetMeets right from your Twitter page. The dimensions of our Twitter Header Photo are 1500×500 – the perfect size for your Twitter profile. Get this month’s image here: #MSFTEduChat Twitter Header Photo.

Why join the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

TweetMeets are monthly recurring Twitter conversations about themes relevant to educators, facilitated by Microsoft Education. The purpose of these events is to help professionals in education to learn from each other and inspire their students while they are preparing for their future. The TweetMeets also nurture personal learning networks among educators from across the globe.

We’re grateful to have a support group made up exclusively of former TweetMeet hosts, who volunteer to translate communication and check the quality of our questions and promotional materials. They also help identify the best candidates for future events, provide relevant resources, promote the events among their networks, and, in general, cheer everybody on.

When and how can I join?

Join us Tuesday, November 20 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT on Twitter using the hashtags #MSFTEduChat, #CS, #HourofCode, #CSEdWeek  and #MicrosoftEDU (which you can always use to stay in touch with us). To find the event time for your specific location, use this time zone announcer.

From our monthly surveys we know that you may be in class at event time, busy doing other things or maybe even asleep – well, no problem! All educators are most welcome to join after the event. Simply take a look at the questions below and respond to these at a day and time that suit you best. You can also schedule your tweets in advance. In that case, be sure to quote the entire question and mention the hashtag #MSFTEduChat, so that everyone knows the right question and conversation to which you are responding.

How can I best prepare?

To prepare for the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet, have a look at the questions we crafted this time.

[embedded content]

We’ve also lined up the following resources that cover Minecraft’s Code Builder, a useful Computer Science curriculum and a convenient course on how you can bring Computational Thinking into your classroom:

Our hosts have also assembled this great Flipgrid:

TweetMeet Questions

Hosts

All 14 hosts have been carefully recruited from across the globe based on their expertise in and passion for engaging their students in Computer Science, Hour of Code and Computational Thinking:

• Alfred Thompson @alfredtwo (High school computer science teacher from New Hampshire, USA)
• Amanda Calitz @AmandaCalitz (MIE Expert, MIE trainer 21CLD lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand- Johannesburg, South Africa)
• Amanda Ford @aford78 (West College Scotland Games lecturer, MIE Expert, CoderDojo Mentor & Mini Game Jam organiser – Glasgow, Scotland)
• Areej Alghamdi @Areejabdullahsa (MIE Expert, MIE trainer – Jeddah city, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia)
• Brian Dang @8bitclassroom (Program Manager on Microsoft PowerApps, maker of educational apps – Bellevue, WA USA)
• Doug Bergman @DougBergmanUSA (Innovative, Project-Based Computer Science teaching, author – Charleston. SC, USA)
• Francisco Tejeira @ftejeirab (ICT Coordinator and Digital Design Teacher at SEK Alborán International School, MIE Expert – Almerimar, Spain)
• Marco Neves @mbrasneves (MIE Expert, Computer Science Teacher, Educational Project Coordinator and Teacher Trainer – Batalha, Portugal)
• Michael Drezek @m_drez (District Technology Integrator/TOSA at Lake Shore CSD. MIE, Minecraft Global Mentor, Flipgrid Global Rockstar, Ignite Speaker – Angola, NY, USA)
• Monia Mahmoudi @mannou77 (MIE Expert, Computer science teacher,  International School Award coordinator ,leading teacher of Europe code week in my country  – Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia)
• Olalekan Adeeko @lincolndemo (ICT Teacher, MIE Expert and co-founder of Codeliners – Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria )
• Patricia Gartland @p_gartland (CEO/Superintendent School District No. 43 – Learning Without Boundaries – Success In Life For All, International Educator – Coquitlam, BC, Canada)
• Pauline Maas @4pip (Teacher ICT Special Education Needs, Author of 5 coding books for children, giving lots of lectures and workshops to teachers how they can implement Computational Thinkings in their schools – Netherlands)
• Sacha van Straten @svanstraten (Head of ICT, Computing & Digital Learning. MIE. MA in Computing Education – Windsor, England)

As of November 2018, the TweetMeet Team is proud to be joined by Anica Tričković. This educator from Serbia is well-known among Microsoft educators for coordinating the highly popular, multi-lingual SuperSway TweetMeet invitations that the hosts collaborate on every month. As a member on the TweetMeet Team, Anica will continue to collaborate with the hosts, guide them through their preparations for the event, and keep the resources up-to-date. You can follow Anica on Twitter @AnicaTrickovic.

What are #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

Every month Microsoft Education organizes social events on Twitter targeted at educators globally. The hashtag we use is #MSFTEduChat. A team of topic specialists and international MIE Expert teachers prepare and host these TweetMeets together. Our team of educator hosts first crafts several questions around a certain topic. Then, before the event, they share these questions on social media. Combined with a range of resources, a blog post and background information about the events, this allows all participants to prepare themselves to the full. Afterwards we make an archive available of the most notable tweets and resources shared during the event.

Please connect with TweetMeet organizer Marjolein Hoekstra @OneNoteC on Twitter if you have any questions about TweetMeets or helping out as a host.

Next month’s topic: Best of 2018