Innovation and Inspiration

Students in our district joined millions of students around the world in the Hour of Code last week. This year, we had well over 4,000 students participate! A special thank you to Blackford, Campbell Middle School, Capri, Forest Hill, Marshall Lane, and  Village for having 100% of their students participate! I started a collaborative celebration wall this year, for classes around the district to share photos:  http://padlet.com/jgoo/hourofcode Favorite coding classroom web-based resources this year were: Code.org Star Wars, Minecraft, Frozen, and Angry Birds lessons, Code.org Code Studio, Tynker, Code Monkey, and Google CS First. Favorite iPad Apps included: Blue-bot, Hopscotch, Kodable, and Scratch Jr. My personal favorite coding activities were using the robots from our STEAM Resource Libraries! Some of our TK - 2nd grade classes used the Blue-bots for literacy and math centers. One class even had used Blue-bot to write and draw with markers! Some of our 3rd - 5th grade...

The Hour of Code and Computer Science week are here! Thank you all for your excitement and enthusiasm!  Five of our schools, Forest Hill, Village, Marshall Lane, Capri, and Campbell Middle School have committed to having 100% of their students participate this week! They will be receiving a special 100% banner to hang proudly at their school! Some schools may even have a visit from a special guest later this week! It's not too late to have your class participate! The main website is:  code.org/learn  and additional resources are available at:  https://goo.gl/NzRS5R  Many classes are also planning to have students use the Dash, Sphero, and Blue-bot robots for their Hour of Code! Please post your favorite photo of your class coding on the CUSD Hour of Code Celebration Wall:  http://padlet.com/jgoo/hourofcode  Check back regularly to show your class pictures of students around the district all coding together!

Congratulations to the students, teachers, and administrators of Blackford! They had the largest percentage of students participate in the Cardboard Challenge this year. All of their 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students participated! With many of the TK - 2nd grade teachers participating as well! We really want to celebrate the Blackford teachers for being willing to try something new and truly fostering a culture of creativity and critical thinking. A special thank you to the Blackford teachers, Stacy Enfantino, Christina Rocci, Michelle Giraudo, Shanti Lipari, Tammy Bilbes, Anupama Gupta, May Liu, Nancy Cassell, Aimee Oani, Nancy Lopez, and Emily Salmon! The school received a Campbell Cardboard Challenge certificate to display in the office and the Blackford staff enjoyed well-deserved cardboard carafes of Starbucks Coffee!  Honorable mentions this year: All of the 4th and 5th graders at Lynhaven and Sherman Oaks participated this year! The 5th graders at Forest H...

As part of our STEAM and College and Career programs, all of our 5th grade students are learning about entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and work-readiness skills! Junior Achievement of Northern California has been providing the curriculum and training volunteers from local businesses come into all of our 5th grade classrooms this fall.  Through hands-on classroom activities, this Common Core aligned program provides students with practical information about the our nation’s businesses and careers.  It also introduces the need for entrepreneurial and innovative thinking to meet the requirements of high-growth, high-demand careers.  This partnership is one way that our district is preparing our students for college and career success and to be globally competitive in the workplace. A big thank you to all of our volunteers from Bank of The West, eTrade, Union Bank, NASA, Microsoft, HSBC, PwC, and NetApp! In the spring, all of our 5th graders will go t...

6th grade Rolling Hills teacher, Jill Garcia, had students start preparing for winter! In teams, students created model homes out of cardboard. They then discussed home features, like windows and doors, and how they increased or decreased home insulation. Finally, students used heat lamps and thermometers to measure and record the change in their home's temperature over time. In future lessons, students will be using recycled materials to solve the real-world problem of keeping our homes a comfortable temperature inside. This unit is one of the 12 free middle school engineering units available on: http://www.eie.org/engineering-everywhere/curriculum-units

Calling all 3rd - 6th Grade Campbell USD teachers! Sign up now for this great learning opportunity, just in time for the Hour of Code! http://pd.campbellusd.org

The past two days at the California STEM Symposium have been inspiring and encouraging. Amanda Haughs and I presented at our first statewide conference, sharing our Campbell Union School District STEAM Program. It was a great chance for me to reflect on how far our STEAM program has come. From just attending and seeing what other districts were doing last year, to sharing and teaching others about what we're doing this year. Some of our attendees shared that they really appreciated the variety of resources available on our district STEAM website: campbellusdsteam.weebly.com   I also had the opportunity to connect with many industry partners, like Amy from Autodesk Project Ignite and Amanda from Google CS First. I can't wait to see how we can further work together to provide our students and teachers with high-quality STEAM experiences. One of my favorite quotes from the conference is posted below. It reminded me to continue taking risks and to continue to promote a ri...