CodeMonkey Office Hours for Teachers || Nov 11th 2020

Key Takeaways

alrighty welcome everybody to today's webinar we are going to go ahead and get started here Al righty so thank you again for joining us if you can um please if you haven't already done so tell us in the chat where you're joining from joining us from and what grade levels you teach that would be great all righty well welcome to Code Monkey office hours open question session for teachers The Code Monkey Team wants to personally thank you for joining us for our webinar today our goal today is to make sure that you are covered for teaching Cod monkey with your students this session is based around questions that we have recently received from our teachers and we will also answer your questions during today's webinar so please make sure to put those in the Q&A box as they come up we also know that some of you are using um code monkey with your students during distance learning and you might be looking to learn more about how to use the platform in a remote environment so feel free to ask those questions as well we will go over today a few of our main features mainly the ones that we've been getting a lot of questions on and that we feel would be the most helpful for you but as always we love to hear any questions from you so let's go ahead and get started where we are going to write code catch bananas and save the world so we're going to go ahead and get started by introducing today's panelist hi everybody um I'm Talia I'm the head of customer success at Code Monkey um and I'll be here to show you a few of our features and um answer some of your questions throughout the webinar great thank you Talia and my name is Lena s and I'm the PD and sales manager and we'll be also leading and facilitating today's webinar hi everyone I'm Molly I'm working out of Salt Lake City Utah and I am on the sales team I will be helping out with this webinar and answering the Q&A questions and questions that come up in chat so please send any of those through so that we can make sure that we get them addressed great thank you Molly oops didn't mean to get through there um we also want to mention um to please follow us on Twitter Instagram and Facebook at codemonkey Stu and today during the webinar you can also tweet at us using the hashtag Cod monkey webinar and we'll do our best to get to any live tweets during today's webinar so let's go ahead and get ready to write code catch bananas and save the world today's webinar objectives are we're going to go over the classrooms and students access to the platform how to add co-teachers limiting progress the lesson feature Gradebook and proficiency report and of course we will leave time for Q&A at the end of today's beginning session you can also access our series of teacher and student geared webinars at codem monkey.com weinar so feel free to join us there too if you missed anything um we will be having our hour of code webinar this year December 2 December 2nd 2020 uh we are also going to be announcing some really fun other webinars that we have coming up with our Founders from Cod monkey so we're we're excited to share that with you and with your students so we hope that you will be able to join us you can find that also registration for that on our webinars page oh all right sorry Talia do you want to take it away yeah okay um okay so I'm gonna go over a few a few things that you saw in the objectives um I want to do a quick demo of some of the features um and uh you can feel free to leave your com questions in the Q&A box or in the chat and we'll get to it during um the demo or in the Q&A session um so we really want to make it um Dynamic um session where we just take your questions and we answer them throughout the demo so um I'm going to share my screen now and um I'm going to do the first uh a few basic basic things um I'm gonna log in first to my um teacher account um using the Google um using uh my Google account um basically I'm I'm using Google because I want to show you after how you can import your Google classrooms onto Code Monkey so it's a sort of new integration that we have um but in order to access that in order to be able to import your Google classroom you need to make sure that you sign in um through your um Google account which you use for your Google classrooms so basically the first thing I do is um I need to create a classrooms because that's where I add my students and that's how my students can start accessing Code Monkey um so the first thing I would do is uh create a new classroom by um clicking on create new classroom and giving uh my classroom a name and just making sure it's connected to uh my either my active subscription or if I'm just using a trial then to my trial but you need to choose a subscription um and I'm creating a classroom um and then and then the next thing that you would do is um add students so you can just follow this popup message here or you can also just click on the classroom but I'll just take I'll just let it take me um directly to the classroom dashboard um where I can add my students so I just want to show um quickly the the three methods we have for adding students I saw somebody asking about clever so this will be uh relevant also for you um but the first two ways are for you as a teacher to create accounts for your students so you can either create a single account um or if you already have all your group um you can use a CSV file and just um upload the CSV file and the system will create all the accounts for you and these two methods are actually uh really great for the younger students who you want to create their accounts for them um and um and also if they're accessing Cod Mony from home um you can also after you created their accounts you can provide them with um two ways for easier um access so I'm going to going to actually show you that now quickly I'll just go to a classroom where I already have students and we have two ways to provide easier access for your students um the first one being the um login cards so that's something that you can um either print out or send to your students um I'll show you that so that's the login cards it has the students username and password um so you know if they tend to forget their password that's something great to give them um and the other way um to provide your students with easy access is using the classroom login URL um this is great because def it means less typing for your students all they need to do is locate their username click on it and um enter their password and they're in so instead of going to codem monkey.com um they would just go to this URL so you can share it somewhere um maybe through Google classrooms um and they click on the URL they locate their username click enter their password and they are in their account um so those are the two first ways to add um to create students and have them access their account the other way is by sharing um a class code so for students who are joining from home or perhaps older students um we recommend using this meth method um and um basically for your students who are using any single sign on options um Google for example for example clever class link um this will be the way that they will join their classroom it's actually um quite an easy um an easy thing um they would copy this um they you can share with them this code um and they'll go to the Cod monkey signup page and they can use the code to code to enter their classroom um if we'll have time I can show you that process after um another nice thing that we have um is um what we call the classroom signup page basically this is a URL that already has the classroom code in it so um you can share this with your students and then they'll automatically be directed to a sign up page that once they sign up they will be in their class classroom um so they won't need to enter the code themselves so this URL already has the code in it so that's great for having your students join your classroom um that's the method of um joining the the the classroom using the classroom code um I do want to show you also how you can import your Google classrooms and again that's only if you've used your Google account um to log to code monkey and um again clicking on create new classroom and you can see I have this option right here import from Google um and uh basically um if if if this is your first time um using it you might need to um authorize Code Monkey um to get access to your um Google classrooms um and now once I've chosen this option all I need to do is choose the classroom I want to import so I'm going to choose my Monday class and um I'm going to choose to connect it to my subscription and now I'm importing my classroom and I can only import classrooms that I have on my Google classrooms that I am a teacher on so um you might have and we've been getting these questions you might have a colleague who is also um sharing your subscription and also wants to import their Google Classroom so they would actually need to add you as a teacher um onto their Google classroom for you to be able to import um the classroom so that's just something I wanted to point out and um great so I imported my classroom and basically I imported all the students that were in my roster on Google Classroom I imported them to my classroom as well so um basically now all they need to do is login um to code monkey and I'll show you that just a second um I want to show you another uh nice thing is that um let's see our roster right here right so I have here two students um and basically and basically any changes that I wanted want to do in my roster say I want to remove a student or maybe I want to change the classroom name so you need to make these changes from Google classrooms and then you can sync use the sync classroom button here on the top and it will automatically update your classroom on Code Monkey just as it appears on Google Classroom um we have a question here um from Raquel what if we want to import a classroom that already used the trial can we save their progress and continue so that's a great question um um first of all I'll start by saying that students progress is always saved to their account so even if they move classroom or they move uh between subscriptions their um progress is always always saved so no need to worry about that and I'll show you in just a second um how you can move your classroom from your trial um to a new subscription so if you already imported that classroom that they're already on code mon key you might have purchased a subscription and you want those students to enjoy the subscription so you'll just move the the classroom to your new subscription and I'll show you that um in a few minutes um and I just want to show you now the the student side okay so I'm back in the codem monkey.com page and I want to log in to Cod monkey I'm a student in the Monday classroom um and this is basically what you would need to tell your students they would go to the login page um also click on the Google uh button uh basically they need to choose their Google account um and they are in their classroom first thing they need to do once they enter their Cod monkey account is choose an avatar um but they are in their classroom and they can already start accessing the courses you have assigned um to them so that's the students part and what they would need to do once you've imported the classroom onto Code Monkey okay another thing I wanted to show you and I'm going back to my adventures and coding classroom which is a regular Code Monkey classroom that was created on Code Monkey as you can see students have usernames um um I want to show you another thing that um some of our teachers have been asking if they want to add other teachers to the classroom they can do that you can add your colleagues as co-teachers to your classrooms um and that's something that you might do um sometimes you would be the one creating the classroom but you have different teachers um who need access to these classrooms once you add the teachers um through the co- teers part um um um part here um they'll get an invite they'll accept the invite they'll log in to code monkey and they'll see the classroom um on their my classrooms list they can then access the courses um and they can basically um see the classroom dashboard manage the student accounts and see their progress um so they basically can do anything that you can do um just over the classroom that they are um co- teers on so that's something that you can do for any of the classrooms and as well for the Google classrooms um Google classrooms is um also you're able to um import teachers um you would be able to import teachers that are also teachers on your classroom but on Google Classroom site so make sure you first added um the teacher as a teacher on Google classroom and then the drop-down menu will allow you to choose just from the teachers that have are already defined as teachers from Google classrooms um basically and then you click on import and then the teacher can log in to Code Monkey through Google and already see the classroom okay so um I want to move on to a to a two features that I'd like to sort of give a spotlight on today um and this is from a survey that we've recently sent out um we've found that um some users are not so familiar with these features um but the ones who are familiar with it find it very useful and helpful so um these are great features especially if you're running a structured lesson um or giving assignments using Code Monkey either uh meeting students face to face or in a remote environment so I want to talk about uh limiting students Pro press so sort of controlling their Pace um and also we'll talk about the lessons feature right here so um limiting progress is available for you within a course so first thing you do after you've added your students would be to assign the relevant courses to your students so I always recommend before starting the class going here making sure you have the right courses assigned um coding Adventure part one as well as our hour of code courses are um assigned by default so if you don't want them assigned you can unassign them um but just visit this tab the courses tab to make sure you have everything organized for your lesson um the next thing is the progress tab so this is um basically um a great place to go to see how your oh it's less it's less uh let's go to the this classroom and has more students in it more progress much more colorful um and this is where you can go to see how your students um are doing in each of our courses so that's available for you for each of the courses and I'm in coding Adventure part one um and I have my students just playing uh but but let's say I want to uh keep them at the same Pace I don't want them to go just through the challenges without my guidance um so you are able to limit their progress by clicking on the limit progress buttons um and let's say I want them only to play the first five challenges so I'm going to put here five and you'll see that everything beyond that will be grayed out basically once they finish the first Les the the first five challenges they'll get a message that the teacher has locked the rest of the challenges um at any point you can can either come back here to change um and limit their progress um to a different challenge or just return them to free play um and of course you can also limit the progress based on um the last lesson taught which I'll show you in just a moment what lesson feature is so now I'm going to go back to free play oh okay okay so I'm clicking here on the lessons Tab and this is um currently only available for coding Adventure um so if you're teaching coding adventure and if you are using our lesson plans then this feature will allow you to easily conduct your lesson um each number here represents a lesson plan um and you can just click on the number to um see that the page is divided according to the lesson plan structure um so it's all laid out for you to teach it out with your classroom you can also access the individual lesson plan um right here oh sorry I'm yeah okay I'm in lesson two that's okay so you can um access the individual uh lesson plan um if you want to review it before the class which we usually recommend and and basically um you also have your shortcuts for the challenges that that the students will uh review throughout this lesson um as well as shortcuts to the reference cards and character review so this really um has it all laid out for you and ready for you to to use and to teach uh once you're done you can even Mark the lesson is complete um and then next time you come back here you can already know um where you last left and now that you need to continue to lesson number three so if you choose to use lessons this way um that's great it helps you run your lesson if you're using our lesson plans or you can go even further um and use our lesson mode and lesson mode is a great distinct um it's great way to um use lessons and have um a part where you're teaching and the part where the students are playing so it Prov prevents your student from going too far ahead um or being distracted uh basically um using um lessons um once you enter lesson mode your students will go into into lesson mode meaning they won't be able to um access any of the courses until you decide that it's time to assign the challenges and have them placed so until then you can go through the introduction explain what you're about to do and when you're ready assign the challenges and have the students um start playing once you're done um you might want to end playtime um go into debriefing um and then when you're finished with with your lesson you can click here you'll also have it marked in green so you know where you stopped um and um you know where to come back next time that you're using um Cod monkey with your students uh we also have here a short tutorial on lessons so feel free to uh refer to this uh tutorial if you want any additional explanations and how to use this feature and um I think I think that's that's it for lessons let's see if we had here any questions oh um before we'll continue I I did want to show the part of um how to move a classroom between subscriptions I'm going to go back to the classrooms page and we have here a classroom that is connected to an old subscription but you can also um see this as a classroom that is connected to a to a trial um which now I want to move to my new subscription and um we have this upgrade button right here which allows me to move classrooms between subscriptions so once I move the classroom all the students in the classroom move also to the new subscription so um um this popup message kind of gives me a review if I need to remove some of the students before upgrading the the classroom I'm able to do that um but basically I want to continue with these four students um next thing I need to do is to choose the subscription I want to move the classroom to um and click on upgrade and now as you can see the classroom is already part of my new subscription all the progress that the students made is kept um all they need to do is log in and they continue from where they last um stopped okay Lena do you want to continue MH hold on one moment all righty thank you Talia for that part and now we're gonna go ahead and get into a couple of the new features here right let just reshare my screen here all right so some things that I wanted to cover that are newer to interesting okay you should be able to see my screen T can you see my my classrooms page yeah okay good just want to make sure okay so something that is newer to um The Code Monkey platform and something I just wanted to discuss was was if I go into my own teacher classroom here um in each of the classrooms page there's a new feature that we recently added and that is the proficiency table and so when you go into the grade book within your classroom you will see here at the top you can see by course or by proficiency so in the proficiency table you will be able to see all of your students that are listed within that classroom and then you're able to see the coding concept steps that are covered throughout all the courses in coding Adventure you will also be able to see what level your students are at within those coding Concepts so we can see um where our students are proficiency wise based on the concepts of which they're working and so those will fill in as a student's progress progresses and then one more thing I would like to show you here is on our courses page I know Talia was showing you the courses and things like that but we just recently um added these banners to the top of each of the courses and they tell you what language each of the courses are um so if they're block based or text based coding and then what level it is for students so that's just something good to note as far as you know you're not sure which courses to start with your students there's that there for you so you have a reference point as well okay okay sorry okay great um I I did want to also um show the part of um logging in as a student to a to a classroom using the class code um because that's that's also always a part that um I talk about but I never show and I think uh I think I I should show that part um let me also share my screen again okay and and basically the first thing I need to do is of course share the the class code um with my students and where do I find the class code where I where I I showed you um the first place um is um when I click to add new students I have here the I have there the class code method but you can always find your classroom codes um right here um or by clicking on the classroom from the classroom dashboard I can also locate it from the students tab right so it's also right here and I'll copy that for for now I'm also when I click on ADD student I also have the class code here and and at any point if you want the class code is unique for your classroom and you can at any point click here to generate a new class code um if you feel like the students have been passing around the code now we' we've encountered that as well and you have students who you don't are not part in of your classroom joining your classroom just create a new code for your classroom um so I'm going to go now um and uh join the classroom let just log out okay so basically from Code Monkey the first thing I would do I'm a new student I want to join my classroom and click on the sign up and um I'll choose student I'm going I'm going to be asked if I have a classroom code yes I have a class code now I need to enter the class code will I copy the class code from before great and now the next step would be to create create my account um if I'm using any of these single sign on I can just choose them and use them um for my code monkey account I think it's great we see many users um teachers students using that just list passwords to remember um but for now I'm going to actually uh create um my own username and password I might add a few characters to it okay so last St before um I'm also getting this uh reminder I can download a copy of my username and password because I tend to forget my passwords um but um let's start and great again choosing my avatar a new I have my my new account I'm in my account is you can see I'm in um the courses page where I can already start the courses that are assigned um to my classroom so that was the process of joining a classroom using the class code um your students can create their own accounts either by creating their own username and password or by using any of the single sign on options if your user if your students are using clever um they can also either go through the clever single sign on or you can add Cod monkey to your clever portal and have them click um on Code Monkey through the clever portal or class link um that's available also there and then just something to note here on this page um recently added to the platform itself as well is you'll see the courses on top that are assigned by the teacher so the students will still have access to the courses only see the courses that are assigned to them um even though all of the coding Adventure courses are assigned that still works in the same way that it worked before the students do have to work through the courses in order to have access to them and then all of the courses that are within the subscription but are not available to them will now be listed below right so they don't need to scroll down to find um the the course they have it here on top um okay let's see um let's maybe Lena let's go back to the question slide because we had a few questions that um um you've sent us uh before the webinar so uh we have time to cover those as well in the in in our slides yep great okay so we have a couple of questions that have been asked beforehand so we want to make sure that we're also honoring your time as much as um honor your time and your question so what order should my course should my students be completing the courses and so I'm just going to go ahead and show you where you can find that at so on the codem monkey.com page right here you're able to find um our basically essential scope here your sales rep or somebody that has worked with you on your account can also share with you a customized scope and sequence but your the courses will be listed here so we have them listed from our kindergarten grade level all the way up to our 9th grade grade level and based on the Block based moving to text based coding there so um just dependent oops definitely recommend that students in grades three through eight start working on text based coding it's great to introduce them with the block based coding um coding Adventure is in coffee script so that's a shorter version of JavaScript and python coffee Java and then um moving right along to Banana Tales is our full python course so it's more of an intermediate course so the it's good for the students to have a background knowledge and some coding before they attempt the python itself so that's a great question um the next one is how do I know which standards Code Monkey is aligned to so I'll show you where you can find that those are all listed within the lesson plans themselves or at the bottom of the codem monkey.com web page here I just scroll down to the footer and you can click on standards and there you can find the standards for each one of the courses themselves so you can click on the course and then you're able to find the standards here we have the csta standards listed here um we also have some common core standards if you're looking for something more customized standards based on your state you can also re out reach out to Talia or anyone of a member of our sales team and we're happy to provide that those resources for you as well and then another place that you can find them is in our lesson plan so the lesson plans are located under the teaching resources in the teaching with Code Monkey page and when you click on the lesson plans themselves they will pop up within the lessons we do have a specific slide sorry I went too fast there um related to the standards that are here these are also the csta standards so you can find them on the bottom of the footer of the page or you can find them within the lesson plans themselves as well so another great question um upgrade how does this work should I use this instead of renaming the classroom so I know that Talia just mentioned on about that but I'll also talk about this as well so she mentioned switching from an expired subscription to a new subscription there is no need to recreate student accounts or to recreate that classroom all you would do is is you would click on here I am in the my classrooms page the class you would like to upgrade essentially means to move to the new subscription so when you click on that upgrade button it will ask you if you're basically sure and you would like to continue so if I would then I choose the specific subscription that I would like this classroom attached to and then I would click on upgrade and now I would see the classroom attached here if you are a co- teer you the main teacher on the account will need to do that for you but that is how you up great the subscription okay so that is um just some of the questions that we were ask prior there's a question here in the Q&A we've already used the free trial through our District's clever platform we need to know how to continue with our subscription we want to access it through clever so I understand Rock Hill I believe that you have been working with Molly so she'll be able to follow up with you um after today's webinar regarding that you can feel free also as well if you guys have a question um we are a pretty small group here so if you would like to hop on and ask us a question we're also here for that as well oh if you would like to ask a question we'll just have to unmute you so you can raise your hand and then that way I can know to unmute you as well all right very quiet group but we're happy that you have joined us for today's webinar all right so once again I'll just mention um that we covered the classrooms and student access how to add co- teers um limiting progress the lesson feature Gradebook and proficiency and we did some time for Q&A I do just want to show you just one more thing under the teacher resources before we get moving something that I think a lot of teachers just are not aware that it's there um so under the teaching with coding Code Monkey we do have this um teaching with coding Adventure certification it's like our certification course it will go over all of the concepts that are covered within coding Adventure itself so when you go here it'll talk about the platform um and it'll walk you through that then we also have the teacher tools and then it'll walk you through um just quick short videos about what each of these concepts are so if you're not sure about the concepts you can come here and work through this course itself another way to find those resources are by visiting our webinars page which you can do within this teaching with Code Monkey there is also an additional place that you can go and that's into our help center in The Help Center is where you'll find all of the resources that we've shared with you today about how to do your account um getting started the classroom dashboard Within These resources themselves there is typically a video that's attached or screenshots and then text to walk you through what to do so if you're ever unsure always check out The Help Center um but something else that's within the help center is if I click on COD if I type in coding Adventure spelling that correctly there um when I type in coding Adventure you're able to see the coding Concepts that are here what I love most about this resource is that it will tell you where you will see these specific challenges and then it will give you a walk through about what a simple Loop is um what a variable is and it gives you an example um with an animated screenshot about what each of the concepts cover so this is another way to refer to something if you're kind of stuck you're not sure exactly where to um find that resource or maybe you're not sure about the concept and what it exactly means that's another way and then one more place I would like mention is within the teacher block so if you go up to the upper um right hand side of the screen the three lines and you click on blog you are able to see all of our blogs that we are writing our teacher ambassadors are also sharing articles as well but a really good place to find some unplugged activities for remote learning are going to be if you type in unplugged within the blog page itself and we have created quite a bit of activities how to explain algorithms with your kids and exactly what that means in a um unplugged manner so just to give you a few more resources with that in-person at home type of learning there's no reason students can't get moving either using flip Grid or um doing vocabulary work with a jam board where each student is working through what exactly an algorithm means and how they can break that down so those are just some different resources um as well to utilize within the teacher resources themselves and then um the solutions I know Talia had mentioned this but I'll also mention this again in the solutions tab within the teacher resources you can find all of the Three Star Solutions to all of our courses that's also located in the progress page but would like you guys to know that they are in two different places and then in the classroom resources we have all of the student certificates located here and then in the media kit is where you can find all the fun cute Graphics that you can share within your Google classroom or having the kids when they're working on Jam board have the resources that they can use as well all right so it sounds like we don't have any more open questions no raised hands so nobody's ready to hop on the mic and share questions with us for today um so I just want to mention one more time that our um hour of code webinar is December 2nd that will be how to set up your classroom for hour of code we'll also announce our new hour of code course and then during the week we'll have some webinars um student facing webinars with our Founders and so we'll be announcing that soon um just giving you guys a heads up that that's on its way and as always we want to to remind you that if you have any questions regarding um you know not sure about your accounts or just different things regarding support please reach out to us to support codem monkey.com or on the help center which you can find located on the Le hand side of your screen in that in the menu there um or you can go to the three lines and also find The Help Center there or go directly here you can always find um up-to-date information on our Twitter and our Facebook and our Instagram at C Mony Stu