COVID-19 Webinar Series: Getting Started with CodeMonkey - How To Set Up Your Classroom

Key Takeaways

okay I wouldn't say first of all welcome to everyone that's joining us today for this really important and hopefully you'll find helpful webinar that it's going to help guide you through these you know very unusual times so just wanted to start by thanking everyone that's joining us thank you I know you're probably at home with pets and spouses and kids so no worries if it gets a little hectic my own dog is here if you hear him barking that's because there's a skateboarder down the street but he's really a nice dog so anyway today's webinar is just going to be getting started with Co monkey and giving you all the confidence or to set up your classroom and hit the ground running during this unusual remote learning time that we find ourselves you before we move on too far I want to point out that if you can follow those pleas across all of our social media channels at code monkey st you our twitter handle we also have our instagram and facebook as well as our blog which you can follow this my name is mark Dozier I work at code monkey with customer success and support I've been with a company for about seven months or so joining me today is analyst we also have Talia who's our head of customer success and Zoe who's our marketing manager they're both joining us from Israel they're also here today to help us with some of your question that that may come up so if you have any questions and you'd like to drop them in our chat box they'll be more than happy to help okay so doing the today's webinar we're going to be looking at what is code lucky all about I will walk you through the teachers home page we'll talk about how to give your students access how to add co-teachers will show you how to create a new classroom or if you already have a class from units from even if it's from a trial I'll show you how to upgraded to an existing one then we'll talk about how to follow your students progress we'll get into the two approaches that you may be finding yourself dealing with whether that self pace or administrating code monkey in a structured way I'll show you some of the teacher resources and then of course at the end we'll save some time for Q&A all right so what is code and lucky as you can see there it's made with teachers schools and teachers in mind I taught myself for 15 years I was a technology director and I use code lucky those last two years so that's part that I appreciate it the most you see that it's stand into line so that's the part that a lot of stakeholders appreciate the most and then as a teacher you'll see here that there's no prior coding experience needed to teach so perhaps that's what you take away from the most as well okay so let's just go ahead get started like all right you got the subscription and where do we begin so after logging in you'll notice it's at the left side here you'll see this main menu where you can navigate between the courses there's some teacher resources there's a classroom dashboard I'm going to start with our courses will briefly here so this is course this is where you as a teacher can access the courses themselves you can also think of this as your personal page so there's no need to set up a separate demo account or teacher account from your classroom this automatic that this is automatically done when your subscription is created we usually recommend that tutors also play the course and unlike your students you are able to skip between the challenges now in tomorrow's webinar what we'll do is we'll review all the available courses and which page level each is suited for but today we'll just sort of show you that where to find them and that they are available for you oh by the way all the courses to have lesson plans that will show you where to locate those at the end of the webinar alright so for those of you that are new to code monkey the first thing you want to do is create a classroom so from that left side panel there upper left side I clicked on my classrooms you see here I already have a demo class of class number one once you create these student accounts as part of the classroom then your students are able to join and play now you can either create a new classroom what's underneath here just click on the button give my class with a name like Period three that I create that classroom or perhaps already have a code monkey classroom setup and what I could do in this case I have expire but my teachers found I was loving it there were seeds and horses what I could do is up create an existing trial by coming over here to the actions part and there's an upward arrow called upgrade subscription I click on that it's going to show me the students that are going to move with this subscription in this case I want all for my students to move continue and then I need to choose the subscription that I want to upgrade to and again for the purposes of this demo I only have one other subscription and that is the public remote learning so I'll click on that and I will click on upgrade and just to make sure that I'm sure that I'm sure that I'm sure I will click on confirm upgrade and so now you see perhaps you notice that this change from teacher trial to the remote learning subscription that we're talking about today all right so I'm gonna click on the class last one that I have and this will be what we refer to as our classroom dashboard and you'll notice there are six tabs up top but to really get started we need to focus on the students tab this is where I can manage a student list so currently I have looks like I have four students enrolled in this class and I'm gonna walk you guys through the steps to adding additional students or to create it from scratch of course just adding students at all so what I'll do here is underneath that last student on the roster click on the add students button here you see I have three ways I could do it create a single account so this would be something that I would do if I had us I was working with a small group of students four five six seven in that case I could create a username and password send that information on to the parents or the students another option would be the bulk upload of students so this is where I would create a CSV file with a larger list of students and again I wouldn't need to share those passwords with the parents or the students and then this third option here is share the class code given the situation that you guys are in with the remote learning this might be the most optimal way of having the students join the classroom let you create so I'll show you that okay so here in the in the box here I see my class code as to f 7h e and so this is the code that I would share with students and then have them input this code to join my classroom so what I'll do now is I'll actually demo what it looks like from the student point of view okay so the kids who come to code monkey comm they're gonna click on sign up now who are you a student do you have a classroom code yes my teacher just shared it with me and this is where I enter that code I know I don't have a super awesome memory I just have it written down somewhere else so you have 7h E and then I click on next okay so this is a point where the students going to create a username and a password again this might be where you want to guide those parents to help the younger students do that I believe we will share a document with you that sort of is geared toward parents that you could provide to the parents look for that in our chat box but in this case I'm just going to make myself a username or supersede password and at this point I'll go ahead and click on sign up and you see here I can download a copy of this information which I could have to refer to later which is very important because Sara my teacher won't be around to help me remember my password so I'll go ahead and click on let's play and then as student you choose your avatar and then join the classroom that you're basically yeah I'm already a part of that classroom but now I just sort of click an avatar save it and then get started on whatever my teacher has assigned for me speaking of we're gonna head back so we've got the classroom set up we've got students in our classroom and what we can do now is move to our second step which is assign the courses so this is where I decide which courses each classroom is going to have access to to do that again back over to the left click on courses you actually let me back up a step here so I'm gonna go back to my classrooms click on the classroom so but I want to point out though I made a mistake there but I will assign those classrooms from within the classroom dashboard so it's one of those six tabs that we talked about so next to the students tab I have the courses and at this point this is where I can assign class so if it's grayed out and it's already been assigned but anything with a green button I can go I click on assign I changed my mind I toggle it back to unassigned and this is where I give the assignments to the CDs I just keep in mind coding of intro part 1 is assigned by default so anything else would need to be assigned by you and if you don't assign it well it will happen it's on the student end they will be blocked from accessing the course okay moving back staying within the classroom dashboard I will head over to the progress tab aka probably your new best friend mark can I jump in absolutely sorry I just I just want I want you to show maybe let's also show them that the option to add a co-teacher from the students tab absolutely thank you all right so back over and the students tab here perhaps you notice earlier when I was showing the stupider below the roster you have the option to add a co-teacher and one of the reasons that you may want to look into adding a co-teacher is because you have a code monkey subscription only only one teacher can be actually connected to that account so once you create classrooms then you're able to add colleagues as Co teachers so I know in some schools they're several or multiple users that are looking to implement code monkey but as far as from a school-wide perspective one person has seen as the admin of that account and then that person can branch off and biko teachers now if you're a co-teacher what do you have access to honestly basically the same thing as a main teacher you wouldn't be able to move students around but as a co teacher you can add students to the classroom you can see their progress you can also assign courses as we talked about and so on so basically all the other abilities that you would have over the classroom and then once you once a co teacher is added to a classroom that classroom will show up and the code monkey or the co-teachers code monkey cop you all right so now what I'll do now is we'll head over to back over to the progress tab Thank You Talia by the way sure okay so in this progress cab which I described is your best friend this is a kind of be like your main page that you focus on I'm gonna start over on the left side and I see my student list then going across the top horizontally I have these green numbers and what these green numbers represent are the numbers of the challenges for the purposes of today you see that we are in coding adventure part 1 but you can also move between the courses using this drop-down menu down here so you can just navigate between the courses that you have assigned now underneath the numbers and next to the students you see stars here and the stars are basically our grading system and the way this works is that first star which is the pink star that's gonna be given if the challenge was completed so it's a bare minimum you completed the challenge you grab the video pink star that second star is going to be given so the second star will be the blue stars the second star is going to be given if the user applied a specific coding concept that was specific to that challenge so we were working on loops and you use the loop to solve a challenge that's how you get the second star and to achieve that third star you do those other things which you also write code that is short and to the point perhaps you notice here in our list of challenges that some of them are highlighted in yellow with a sort of yellow circle and these represent our assessment challenges so these are going to be the challenges that are in contrast to our story mode challenges which have pre-built code these have no pre-built code whatsoever so students are going to need to basically start from scratch using what they learn from the regular challenges or what we call the story love challenges now as a teacher if you need access to the solutions to the challenges and this goes for any course that we offer what you would do is just click on the green number so in this case if I click on number eight I'm given a solution to that challenge so it's kind of your cheat sheet there it's also going to point out regarding the stars and the scoring that if you see that within a classroom that a lot of students are getting a pink star on one of the challenges that may be a way to sort of go back and see what needs to be reinforced so just keep an eye on that I also want to point out up here we have what's called super dense and so this is a button where you can basically turn on and off super hints and we'll get into that in just a little bit I just want to point out that that is a feature that is available as well okay so in this next section we want to sort of get into what are going to be the probably two most prominent approaches to remote learning and how to incorporate code monkey into remote learning that's going to be self paced versus a structured way out administrating the lessons so we know that teachers are out there using these different methods to communicate and teach these students again it's a very hectic time so there is no one right way and from our experience conversations and communications with teachers over the years we know that people are making it work either either way but what I do want to do is to sort of show you how you make the most of each approach so we'll start with the self-paced approach so this is going to be for those of you that are going to just let your students independently just progress within a course or maybe some of you are like hey I'm gonna let my students choose which course they like to play so here's just a few things that I want to make sure that you're familiar with before you set them along their way I just again make sure that you assign those courses so it shows you that that's done from the classroom dashboard just if you don't assign the courses and the kids are self-paced what they'll do is they'll have a wall and they won't be able to move on and so you assign the course itself in addition to assigning in the courses again I pointed out those super hints and just to give you a little insight about these super heads these are also I said the dashboard might be your best friend progress tab but this also might be your best friend considering you're not in the classroom with the students so you think of super hands as extra guidance for the students it's going to enable them to progress independently as they go through the coding adventure challenges now the super hands can either be like a helpful tip or in some cases the actual solution to the challenge super hints are going to appear after student attempts to solve a challenge a few times or after a certain amount of time has passed since they started the challenge and what will happen is a lightbulb will appear next of goryeo which is going to be in the lower left hand corner and by clicking on that the student will be able to view the super hand now as a teacher again you can decide whether to turn these heads on or off per classroom and this is done from the progress tab however it is turned on by default now what do you do if you know you got super heads but they're still stuck they're still getting stuck what are some of the other ways that you can approach this and what we would suggest is one thing you can do is have them review the previous challenges and then what you want to do is emphasize to them to read those instructions either from that challenge if they're stuck on or from those previous challenges and again they can always go backwards and look at their previous solutions and the way the courses are designed it's sort of a scaffolding way of learning so if I'm stuck on 21 the best way to help is maybe going back 20 of 19 or 18 you can also get the parents involved and I think this is where that we talked about that letter this is me maybe where you make sure the parents are aware that it's okay to help them because in a normal environment you would be there helping out or their classmates would be there helping them as well and then of course if you're getting them in a sort of not if you're not being inundated with requests for help don't forget as a teacher you do have those solutions available to you from the progress tab okay so there might be a group of you who are actually meeting online regularly with their students and/or you're giving them assignments so what you could do is you can actually use the structured lessons or the structured lesson approach with code monkey and then I'm going to again go through some of the tools that you can do with that once again we're starting with making sure you assign the courses but in addition to that there's a couple of other options that you would have when you want to sort of control the pacing of your classroom so one of those is this limit progress button so within each course you can control your students progress by limiting it to a pace that you prefer and again I can do this by course and I can also do this by class so I can take that first period class and say okay guys let's let's just do 20 challenges per day okay so I type in 20 I click on save and that's going to limit the students until I change that number or I turn this off so I can change the number or I could return it to free play if that's what I decided to do and then in addition to limiting using the limit progress cutting we also have lessons so perhaps you notice one of our tabs is actually the next tab is lessons we'll go ahead and leave so this is what our lessons page looks like and you'll see that this is going to be a great feature that you can use in the classroom when you're using our lesson plans for coding adventure so if you're actually facing their students for an online lesson I would definitely check out this feature and there's also a great tutorial you can find all right I want to quickly mention another tab that's here in a classroom dashboard and that's our gradebook so you'll see here that those stars from our gradebook are going to be converted into values and I can change the values here in the settings so currently I'm showing eights and nines perhaps and tens but I could turn those numbers and to letters I can turn those into percentages if I need to you moving back over to the left side menu I do want to point out some really helpful to to resources so the samaya yep hi again we received a request to show again uh what we call the teachers cheat sheet the Oxus solutions can you show that again absolutely so going back to my classrooms and I'll choose the class in this case I only have one okay so here in the progress tab again for the solutions I can click on any of these numbers and this is true of any of our courses so again I'm only showing you coding adventure part 1 but any of course that you assign and so for example if I click on challenge 7 encoding integer part 1 this will give me a possible three star solution for that challenge thank you thanks for the question all right so we were beginning to talk about those teacher resources and this is something that you will probably find yourself leaning on a lot and you sort of get into the basics at the beginning of code monkey so you have access to our teaching with commitment to a course care and this course is going to provide you with practical training useful explanations and just some general tips relating to part one including adventure the course itself is about 75 minutes long but it's a lot of teachers have given us feedback that this has been a real huge help for them also on this same page you'll see that I wasn't making it up there are lesson plans available for every each and every course that we have busting plants galore [Music] so they got in this alone also you'll find on this page our teacher resources page some how-to guides so you're looking at the top here we have a beginner's guide to code monkey there's a video guide my favorite the video tutorials I like to see it more than I like to read it and you see our library and by the way this library is forever expanding so always going to look out for more and then our last tab over here are these classroom resources and here's where you can find certificates that can be shared posters there's other fund materials you can share with your students coloring pages for maybe some of the younger users as well and then lastly I will point out in addition to these resources you can always head over to our Help Center that's to be accessed from the bottom left side of the menu here give you a brief look at that real quick so and we're always adding more help articles that you can search for yourself or if you find that your answer your question is not that answered through any of these articles here you can always just contact our support all right so just to kind of go back and take a look at the ground that we've covered or hopefully covered it well we talked about what code monkey was and how it's sort of a resource for K through eight showed you the teachers home page how to create a classroom then add students at code teachers to that classroom we also talked about upgrading an existing or upgrading another classroom into this remote learning subscription to make sure that the students have all that access all the courses we shows you the progress page where you can not only follow their progress but you can access the solutions for yourself you can also access the solutions to the access to solutions that the students have submitted we talked a little bit about self-paced versus structured and then which tools you would use which buttons you would click to sort of make them most of whichever approach you decided and then we showed you the teacher resources page which is where you'll find a lot of things that we did not cover here today or even similar things did cover always a lot of resources in our that can sort of guide you through this so with all those being done we will now open it up to your questions as promised oh I also should point out tomorrow we will also have webinars available tomorrow will be more teacher code words alright let me back up there tomorrow be more geared toward the courses themselves we'll get into which one and which courses apply it to which age groups and we'll talk more about sort of teaching the courses themselves all right now we'll back up to the Q&A session so if there are any questions in the chat we'll take a look at those mark can you see the question from vasila in the Q&A box I'm just blowing up there okay so the question is please tell us about adding bulk students from the spreadsheet okay that's a great question I can actually go back so this was option two when they came to add an adding students you okay so again I start with that add students button and then we have to bulk upload now with the bulk upload you basically need a two column CSV file column one you're gonna have student display names you'll see some of the rules and conventions that we require there here on this screen and the column two is gonna have the passwords so there's no headings or titles I'm just going to use column a will be student names or student display names and then column B will be our passwords and then you can also download our example file but once you do that you can upload the file so I have like say 30 students I have 30 usernames and 30 passwords click upload and then again to protect student privacy because it says here usually we recommend that you do not use their actual names so for example nickname or first name dot last initial you okay can you review again we have another question for Karen can you review again how students access their account could ever buy them with our own unique code or is it a class code okay it's a great question so let me get back again it would be just to answer this second part of that it is a class code so students are going to use the class code that's generated let's show you okay so if I go back here Oh what so the classical can actually found in a couple of ways and I just retaught myself that so here under the my classrooms dashboard I see here on the actions that I have a classroom class code of two f 7h e but perhaps you'll also notice that from within the classroom dashboard so this is specific to classroom one under the students tab there's also the classroom code is there as well now again if I'm a student who does not have coding lucky account what I would do and let me head back over there and so let's just go sign up down okay so okay it's starting from the beginning when I click on student do you have a classroom code yes I do and then what I would do is type in that classroom code that was given to me so here I'll just join us another student and again this is where the student or the student with the help of their parents could create a username and a password and then sign up for the class you okay the other follow-up question to that was how are their password generated tell you to do you mind stepping in on that one yeah I think I mean uh right so if if you as a teacher decided to create your student with their accounts and you might you might want to do that for the younger ones then you have two options as Mark showed you you could just create an individual students account so that's great if you have just a few and we also have the bulk upload which just using a CSV file and it's really it's quite straightforward once you click on that option option you'll see some great detailed instructions on how to do that but we'll provide in the CSV file student display names and the passwords and the system will create for you the students usernames which they will use to log in to code monkey just because usernames on code monkey are unique so the system would create them for you you'll get the list and you'll be able to share it with your students so once you create their accounts you'll be the one who will create their passwords by the way as you can see from the screen that mark is showing now at any points you can come here and just reset the password by clicking on the reset password or just changing it to a different password but of course if your students join themselves either by creating their own account or by using using the let's say their Google account clever class link so using a single sign-on then of course that's the the way that they will log in they won't need to put any password and of course that's that those are passwords that are private they won't show also for the teacher I hope that explanation helped that's a great explanation thank you are there any other outstanding questions yes you'll be a few of you had some questions and we said that we'll get back to you after the webinar so promise that we'll do that [Music] okay well with that being said again I do want to tell everyone how much we appreciate you taking time out today and trying to bring code monkey to their students and again any questions that you feel we're not addressed here today you can always reach out to us at support or using the Help Center articles that being said I hope everyone has a great rest of their day stay healthy and stay safe guys talk to you soon goodbye