COVID-19 Webinar Series: Office Hours

Key Takeaways

okay we know some of you are still shuffling in and kind of getting started here with us today you feel free to interact with us there in the chat box or in the q a during today's webinar so today is going to be office hours this is a teacher geared webinar with our team here from codemonkey so if you can follow us on twitter instagram facebook we also have a facebook group for our code monkey super fans and also on our blog and you can follow us at codemonkeystu and you can also tweet at us today during today's webinar using the hashtag codemonkeywebinar which will be located in the bottom right hand side of the screen and today our panelists are going to hop on and also share with you my name is lena salle and i'm the professional development and sales manager here at code monkey hi i'm amit and i'm a product manager at code monkey hi everybody thank you for joining my name is talia and i'm the head of customer success at code monkey oops all right and today's webinar object objectives excuse me are going to be that we are going to review the teacher's homepage how to give your students access add a co-teacher how to follow your students progress the teacher resources and we will leave some time for you at the end for q and a we also invite you like i mentioned before to ask us questions in the chat box or also ask us questions in the q a box all right so we always like to start off just telling a little bit about code monkey and kind of what it is so codemonkey is a leading program for kids it provides online engaging courses for students to learn how to code in a gamified way it was developed for both schools and teachers in mind as well as standards aligned we are iste csta common core and also aligned with all of the states as well it is a ka coding curriculum really designed to put teachers in the driver's seat while teaching code monkey there is no prior experience needed to teach it as well as there is no prior experience needed to learn all right and from here talia is going to go ahead and uh take over so we are seeing her here in our classrooms dashboards page okay okay now i'm youtube i'm sorry it's okay hi everybody so um we want to give you a short um overview of the platform but mainly uh you know ultimately the the goal here is really leave time for you to ask your questions um we really want to thank you for choosing code monkey during this time we hope you find it helpful and joyful for yourself and for your students some of you might be new to code monkey so we'll go over some of the different features available for you as as a teacher and code monkey and then we'll also get to your questions so feel free to write your questions either in the chat or in the q a box um the team will we'll get to it during the webinar or we'll leave and we'll leave it for the end of the webinar sorry for after the demo so this is my um demo teacher account uh i'm gonna use this and here to the left we have uh the menu navigation so i'm just gonna go through over this quickly basically uh under courses this is where you as the teacher um same as your student can access the courses that are available for you as part of your subscription and you can actually access the courses yourself and play them the courses yourselves and we really recommend you to to do that even before you assign them to your students um and this is basically how your students will see their courses as well but only the courses that you will assign to them we'll see that later um we have here also the teacher resources which with a lot of great resources and we might dive into that a bit later um lesson plans are available for all of our courses and i'm gonna go sorry i'm gonna go to the my classrooms uh page right here and this is where i can see all the classrooms i have as a teacher and as you can see this teacher already has two classrooms in the classrooms list if i want to create a new classroom i click on the create new button upgrade new classroom button i put the name i choose which subscription i'd like to connect it to and i click on create classroom so as a new teacher you would either create a new classroom and connect it to your subscription or you might already have a classroom which is connected to the teacher trial which you've received when you first join code monkey and you might want to upgrade that classroom to a new subscription that has maybe more access to more content or has a longer duration so we call that upgrading your classroom to a new subscription um using that arrow uh this is how you can upgrade it um and choose the subscription you'd like to upgrade it to once you've upgraded the classroom to the new subscription all the students in that classroom will be able to access the content available in that subscription and let's let's dive into can i just hop in super quick um so i'm just following up on that talia did a really great job of showing you that we've been receiving a lot of questions about why you would want to upgrade so that just means that your classroom is attached to a different subscription so in order to get the full benefits from the kovic 19 subscription you'll just need to upgrade it so that just basically means that you're applying the new subscription to your classroom yeah exactly great thanks lina so after i've upgraded my classroom it is now connected to the new subscription and i'm just going to click here on one of the classrooms adventures in coding just so we can see what we call what we call the classroom dashboard right here it has six tabs here on top and i'm just saying here a question from sandra is there a charge for the upgrade so no once you have a subscription it has a number of seats that you can use as part of that subscription so as long as you have available seats um you're able to um upgrade the classroom once you do the upgrade action action it will also show you how many seats you're going to use once you do the upgrade we also have a great how-to video on on the upgrade and we can we can also share it in the in the chat um so i'm back to the classroom dashboard six tabs here on top this dashboard is available for each of your classrooms the first tab i actually want to show you is the students tab and this is where you'll see the list of your students so this classroom already has um 33 students and i want to add new students which is with using this ad students button so we actually have three ways to add new students you can create the student accounts yourself either create a single account so this is great if you have just a few students and you one by one add them to the classroom or by bulk uploading that them using the csv file you just create the file it has great very thorough instructions here you upload the file and the students are populated to your classroom make sure to provide your students with their usernames and password the third way and this might be a very relevant option during these days when students are joining from home is what we call joining using a class code so this is a great option if you know your students are joining from home they can either create their own code monkey accounts and then join the classroom using the class code each classroom has its own unique code so you're going to share that with your students and then they can either create their own accounts and use this class code to join the classroom or they can use one of their already existing accounts such as if they use their google account class link clever so different single sign-on options are available and you know that's great if you don't want your students to have multiple accounts on different platforms so have them use your single single sign-on option um and they will join the classroom using the class code so that's the class code um option uh sorry and as far as the class code option we do have a really great how-to video that you can share with your students on how to join using a class code and this is really important when doing the single sign-on there's been a lot of teachers that have created accounts and then the students add their own so this is how the students will get populated into your classroom yeah great uh we'll make sure to also share that uh link um in the chat um okay i wanna i'm gonna move a bit quick because we have a lot of great questions here um another thing that came up a lot um now that we are providing the subscription during this kobe 19 uh period of time you can have a subscription uh connected to your account as a teacher but you can add your colleagues as co-teachers to the classroom um you go to the students tab tab you go all the way down and you can send an invite to your colleague once they accept the invite they'll see the classroom in their code monkey account and they'll be able to view the classroom just like you can access the students see their progress see the solution and also access the courses themselves last thing before we move to the questions is the courses tab because once you've created your classroom and added students you need to decide which courses you want to assign to your classroom without you assigning the courses they won't be able to access them so we have our coding adventure course so the first part of coding adventure would be assigned by default but all other courses you would need to assign to click assign to class in order to have it assigned to your classroom you can always come back here and unassign so we have here all the courses that are available to you as part of your subscription and you as the teacher can come here and choose which ones to assign let's let's look at a few questions that we have here so one question that we had here was i do not have the option in my trial and the up arrow is grayed out okay so the the up um arrow would be available only once you have an additional subscription so only if you have only one subscription then you don't have a an additional subscription to upgrade your class the classroom too so once you get a new subscription um you'll be able to upgrade it so that you'll see that the the upwards arrow would be not available for you would you be able to show them that on the on the page the upper zero the boxes where they can see the others oh yeah options that they have yeah great idea so i'm going back to the my classrooms page so this is where i see all of my classrooms and you can see here this brown student seats box if i click on view all i can see the different subscriptions that i have as a teacher i mean all the you know the different details such as the available content uh number of seats available how many seats have used so far and the start and end date of the subscription so this is a great place to go to see the status of your subscription and also see how many seats you have available so that's right here in the brown box um another question that we had here is when students join using the class code will they be choosing their user name and password yes they they would be so they have two options they can create their own account by typing in a username choosing a username and a password or they can use one of our single sign-on options um such as google or clever class link office 365 and join using their existing account so both and are we gonna show them how to do that yeah let's go ahead we have another question here regarding um students view so let's quickly show that as well and nick i see your question here i'm going to go ahead and answer this are the courses intended to be at the student's own pace or do we assign not what modules they need to do so um a lot of our um when we've been setting you up with the coveted subscriptions we've been sending you a scope and sequence so traditionally in a traditional online you know traditional class model ideally you would be doing the lesson plans with the students however in this case it's a little bit different you're not necessarily doing live lessons some teachers are able to interact with their students and some are not able to interact with their students um so it kind of we're kind of leaving it up to you however in the progress page you can actually limit the students progress i personally suggest doing that rather than having the students go at their own pace i would limit their progress to say challenge number 30. this also allows me to look at and evaluate the students progress and kind of have an understanding if they are able to really understand the concepts that are presented and if they aren't then i will have them to go in and do the skill mode for that additional enrichment practice um nick you can follow up with me after this and we can kind of talk through that a little bit more if you would like as well right lina can you see my screen now my uh can you see my home page uh yeah it's loading but yes okay great so i just want to show you um how a student student would log in themselves and also answering uh carolyn question to see the students view so i'm gonna click here on login oh sorry actually i'm gonna go to sign up because i'm a new user um who are you i'm gonna choose student and then do you have a classroom code well my teacher already already provided me with the classroom code so i'm gonna click on yes and i have this ready so i'm going to enter the class code which my teacher has provided me with i'm going to click on next and now i need to either choose to sign up using one of the single sign-on options or just enter a username and password i'm going to call myself supercoder okay great so last stop um as a student i can also uh save save this uh the username and the password that i created i can download this so i can have it handy next time i want to join in and clicking on let's play being redirected to my home page i can choose my avatar i want to be a flamingo today and this is my homepage currently this student has joined the trial classroom but as you can see it looks pretty similar to what we've saw before before from the teacher's view under courses this is where the student can access the courses first part of coding adventure is assigned by default but other courses would need to be assigned by the teacher okay i'm going to return to my teachers page okay let's see what other questions we have here so there is another question here if you assign multiple courses how do you or your students determine which courses students can view or start so um if uh talia goes into the courses page here oh not the courses page sorry in the classroom right to the classroom and then we can also show you on the student side also as well so in the classroom dashboard page here under courses so with our banana tales and our coding adventure courses they even if all the coding adventure courses are assigned to my students they actually work linearly through the coding concepts so if a student is starting on challenge number zero in coding adventure they cannot go to 210 and coding adventure part three they have to work linearly through so as they move through the courses will unlock as they go through the same is true with our banana tails course as they work through they can't go from challenge number one to challenge 150 without having done the individual activities in between so even if all the courses are assigned to the students in those courses they have to move linearly through and why that is is because we are trying to build a strong foundation for the students so if i skip and learn about simple loops and move into for loops i won't have that understanding of everything that is needed in between like defining a variable and what an index and array is so there's certain concepts this does not apply for the platformer the frogger or the sprite animation course because each one of those are designed to teach a certain coding concept or not a coding concept certain game mechanics that will help them build and create their own game also it doesn't apply for the hour of code courses or our dodo does math course because each one are designed to be individual great okay and if we're here and we talked about the courses tab this is where you assign the courses let's hop on to the progress tab and this is where you as a teacher and your coaches as well will be able to follow your students progress in all of um the courses that are available for them um and this is like the teacher's best friend best friend because you can always go here to see how your students are doing especially now when you're not meeting them in the classroom you're giving them having them do a few challenges so you can go here and see and this table shows you your students here to the left um these are the challenges we're now in coding adventure part one um i can sort my students either by progress or by name and all of these stars these represent solutions submitted by your students um right here and these numbers on top these represent the challenges themselves so if you can see you can actually click on this and as a teacher you'll be able to access all the solutions for the challenges so that's also a great resources a resource for you you might not always know how to solve a challenge they do get quite quite challenging as you progress in the course and you can just access the three-star solutions for challenges in coding adventure and all the other challenges and you can also share that link with your students um you know if at some point it gets a bit tough and you want to help them um that's that's something that you can also share with them and also at the student solutions you can click on any one of the stars that are located here and you're able to see how many times a student attempted a challenge and you're also to see exactly how they solved it in real time what's really nice about this especially when teaching this remotely is that you can also share this with your students and it is anonymous so it's not like creating a writing sample or cutting the name off the top and the students can still see the kids handwriting you're able to actually share this anonymous solution with your students for that authentic conversation great talia would you be able to show them the how the courses are assigned on the student side how if a course has been assigned how it will show up for them yeah let me let me go to a student account one second and we just want to thank you guys so much for all of your questions that you've been asking this is really a time meant for us to be able to help you during this time hey yeah i have a student uh account open from your okay do you want me to show it sure yeah so i have a student from your adventures in coding classroom and i give you an option to [Music] show your screen if you stop share yeah i'll do that now okay okay so can you see my home page will s right so this is a student that has coding and venture part 1 assigned talia do you remember which courses are assigned did you assign all of them i assigned let's see this adventures in coding classroom so for example the banana tales part 1 and part 2 are unassigned at the moment so the students will see a lock and it will say course locked by teacher so in case students are are interested and curious to hear about it they might ask you about it since they see that it is locked by the teacher yeah you can also click on coding adventure part two this course is assigned but as lena said um is it a signed are you sure oh sorry okay yeah here's a good example so coding adventure is a sign students may start coding um however skill mode will only be unlocked to them once they start playing until they do that they have this message saying complete coding and venture challenge six to unlock and so the same might be to part two if it is assigned but student part one until they do complete it it will be locked and it will say that they need to complete part one in order to unlock part two yeah maybe maybe it's also a good opportunity to to mention skill mode um which are additional practice challenges that open up as students progress um in the in quoting adventure so if you have these students who progress quickly you want to give them some extra practice to practice the coding concepts that they've learned you can refer them to the skill mode challenges they have as you can see it looks quite similar to coding adventure just with a black uh background and we have this monkey uh we call gordo um in the corner with the sweatsuit um for training and practice okay and i just shared a link with all of you in the chat box here we did do a tour of courses explaining about each one of our courses and a little bit more detailed information about that so i just showed that in the chat box or on our kovid19 page where you found the information for this webinar is also located all of the webinars that we have done this far so i would recommend checking those out as well and we have a question here by doug can you assign courses by student as well as by class well doug currently uh courses are assigned per classroom uh but what we do see sometimes uh teachers might create an additional classroom because you can create as many classrooms as you'd like and you can actually move over let's say the more advanced students to a second classroom and then assign the courses a bit differently to those students so that's a option to use would you want to show them how to move a student okay let's see me share my screen okay so i'm going to go to my classrooms and i'm going to go to class 1 because i have a few students there and i want to move one of the students to another classroom so all those actions that have to do with students either editing their you can edit their username you can change reset their password and you can move them over you do that from the students list in the classroom dashboard so just by locating the student i want to move clicking on move and then just choosing the classroom i want to move the student to if the classroom the new classroom is connected to a different subscription i get here a little notice letting me know that this student will take up a seat in the new subscription so i'm going to move the students to adventures in coding if i had more classrooms i could choose here and now the student has successfully been moved to their new classroom okay great question and i hope i hope that provides a solution for that that need see we have any other questions okay i think we can also uh show you guys our teacher resources um we have some great materials here let me go over some of these so first here teaching with code monkey this is uh practical training and some useful explanations and tips relating to part one of coding adventure it's about 75 minutes long so you can take that course right here a few videos you can access it when it's convenient for you right here and down here below we have the lesson plans for all of our courses as you can see all the way down so check these out they're right here these are pdfs that you can just show or decide to print under how to videos this is where you can view the different uh actions that we've shown you here and more really short how-to uh tutorials on the different actions in your platform for you as a teacher how to create a classroom how to add students using a class code we mentioned that so you can also share that with parents how to assign courses all the different how-to videos are here we have here some hour of code notes for our hour of code activities available for you here and under classroom resources you can access certificates uh really great q certificates for the different courses that you can hand out to your students once they've completed a course along with our media kit with access to a lot of great graphics and some classroom course posters hopefully soon this will be relevant you can hang this in your classroom so all of these are available under teacher resources we have your question emmy do you know how to answer this yeah talia i was gonna jump in so okay i have a question about google classroom and i i believe danielle had asked me before about uh had asked us about um assigning um assigning uh from codemonkey to google classroom assigning work to students and i answered that we are working on a google classroom integration at this moment hopefully that's something that you guys will be able to use in about three weeks uh and once it is ready we will update you all by mail uh so look out for uh for an update from us so her question is how will how will students be able to uh move i guess uh if you have them logging in with google classroom uh will that affect them um so i would just like to suggest that when we do have google classroom integration we'll be happy if you could just contact us to see how we can uh move the students with all their progress to the new google classroom and we will probably have to do that on a case-to-case basis so if you just contact us contact us support we can share the email now and we'll be happy to help you all right i'm just typing great and then i am just going to answer this question here from janie so where can i find state objectives correlated to code monkey activity so we do have all of our objective or all of the standards listed in the lesson plans but talia can also show you where those are located on the courses page um and then we also ha so we'll show you that why she's getting that loaded i'll answer another question here um victoria asked this question i just translated it sorry victoria my um spanish speaker um but the question was what does archive to classroom mean and do i release the seats oh okay i was going to have you answer that sorry go ahead go ahead okay so what does archival classroom mean that means that basically the when you archive a classroom it will go from being an active classroom in your classroom dashboard to being archived so what that means that you'll no longer see it there all of the student details and information will still be kept there but it will no longer be an active classroom correct right right so that that's correct so um once you archive it it's also we can also look at it is that as a way to organize your classrooms list because hopefully as you continue with us you might have more classrooms continue in the second year so more classrooms so you want to organize that classroom list and archive classrooms that are no longer relevant so by clicking on that archive button we can show you that again um that's how you can just remove them from the classrooms um list you're not deleting them they are in your archive you can at any point uh go there to restore them um once you archive a student or a classroom um this doesn't release their seats um so if the students already played um during the year then you archive them it doesn't release their seats you do have an option to delete a student account if the student hasn't made any progress um in the game so that is available for you and of course on you know special cases if there's a need if something if there was a duplicate or a mistake uh we you have our support email here so feel free to contact us um on our support our support and we'll help lina am i looking at the right place yes you're in the right place so on our codemonkey.com backslash courses here down here at the bottom of our footer there is a place under curriculum where it has standards so if you click on the standards document you'll be able to see or the link it will pull up all of the common core standards that are there however if you need a more thorough layout of the concepts specific to your state if you can either contact us at info codemonkey.com or preferably if you can contact the person who set you up with your subscription um we can give you that customized standards alignment document for you that you need for the courses it's pretty hefty document as very very detailed with all of the standards and things like that so if you need that we're happy to provide that for you as well great oh sorry yeah there was this question i know amin answered this but i thought it would be a good answer a good question for everybody if i assign code monkey junior and beaver achiever will it prompt students to start with code monkey junior before beaver achiever or will it be up to them so once all the courses are available to the students let's say i unlock every single course unless you guide them where to start they really have the ability to kind of go wherever they want so i always suggest keeping it pretty locked down so if you want them to start with code monkey junior first i would unassign all of the other courses and only leave code monkey junior as the option otherwise the kids you know what they do and same with us i just want to click everywhere and explore everything because they all have fun graphics and images and so i just want to go where i want to go right and i see two more questions here regarding the the archive um so just to clarify the way the student seats work so once you've added the student to a classroom they tech take up a seat in the classroom the seat is theirs it's a person's personal season you can't transfer it so when when you archive the student um you can either archive a specific student um through the student list or or just archive a whole classroom um through the classrooms list um no the student seats are not released so you cannot reuse them again if there's any um a special case here just feel free to to contact us and danielle is asking um once we archive but the student's progress email or info will continue for the next year for them to log in for the new year and new class correct so let me tell you that once you archive a student or a classroom um it's not like deleting they're here as you can see we have here an archive section uh once you click on it you'll see if you have any archive classrooms or students you'll see them here they're not deleted at any time you can restore them from the archive um we um and and then if they're restored and are part of a classroom with an active subscription um they'll be able to continue their progress their progress is saved um and they'll be able to continue their progress um next year we had another question this was in spanish so i apologize i just had to also translate it as well so i had said how many levels are there for code monkey junior i have very small students four to six um so the levels amit would you able to answer how many levels are on kovanki junior sorry how many challenges uh-huh yeah uh i believe we have 35 challenges at the moment for code monkey junior okay sorry okay i won't i won't go in yeah we lose track um but yeah as well code monkey junior also has um more a shorter teacher guide to it um also available for you um right here in the teacher resources so you know even before having your your kiddos uh accessing this uh it would be you know you should check this out as well would you want to pull up a lesson plan so we can kind of see what the lesson plan looks like yeah good idea oh andrea thank you so much for answering that your nurse thirty-one good you're on top of it you're one of our one of our panelists so um you know let me let me give you also a control here and you can show around the lesson plan okay great so all of our lesson plans are set up in a similar fashion why can't i do it okay good sorry this is a little delay when you're doing the remote control so um you're able to see the lessons here and so when you get to a lesson each lesson has basically a summary of the lesson itself and then it gets into the objectives that are presented and the components which are what concepts the students are kind of working on throughout those throughout that lesson plan you see the standards that are there for csta and then every lesson plan starts out with an intro which is an unplugged activity something to introduce the students the concept that's working then the part two is the play time and the last part is debrief and so this is all laid out here for you obviously a lot of teachers are foregoing unplugged activities we did do a webinar with our teacher ambassadors last week on how to do unplugged activities offline so i would still challenge you to try to bring those unplugged activities as much as you can into with your students they really need that extra movement um there's lots of opportunity with that like creating a video or having them share it or something like that but that's how all of our lesson plans are set up for you so those are there for you also as a guide to kind of help you during this time as well and to introduce you if you're not sure about the concepts as well right uh we i think we're almost okay i think we have a question here you can't even see how to pay okay so laura regarding your question regarding purchasing a subscription or purchasing additional seats um it would be best to contact us um in the support email and our sales team would reach out to you quickly to to help with that okay amitlina is there anything else you want to bring up before we end today's session um i don't think so i just would say oh i would uh could you show the help center oh great idea great idea um so i'm back in the teacher's platform here and down here below you'll be able to access our help center we're adding we continue to add here different help articles on the different topics getting started for teachers so if you're new to code monkey it really shows you the first steps of things we've talked here and more so different articles with graphics with videos really trying to make the process clear for you and if anything's missing you can just write us here and it reaches our support so we're always happy to help and you know add more content to our help center and i would just suggest that if you can't find something maybe in the how-to videos or something like that almost all of the information that we'll probably share with you will link you back here to the getting started um and to the help center they have there's videos attached there's directions um just a really good way for you to kind of go through that step by step on on your side um i know that lots of you have been reaching out to us and just like you you know there's thousands of teachers reaching out to us for subscription so we're doing our best to answer you and we appreciate all of your patience that you've had with us along the way but if you can't find something i'd suggest checking out the help center first um and then obviously we're helping happy to guide you through the process as well great um a question here i'd just like to quickly answer about unplugged activities uh so nick asked how many unplugged activities do you have a large portion of my students do not have home internet access making it hard to do online classes i do have a need of paper activities so um i just wanted to mention that during this uh these times we do understand uh teachers needs and more different types of activities that don't require a teacher being in front of a classroom right so we are working right now on trying to compile a few different activities you could do with your students either like in in this remote situation or without internet access so i'm happy you asked this question because um it definitely sure we need to provide some of these things so we don't have any at the moment but hopefully in the upcoming weeks we we can share them in the teacher resources and just to kind of follow up on that note we did do a webinar nick with our teacher ambassadors last week on unplugged activities and they have been working diligently on a lot of unplugged activities that kind of kind of help you with that um so we're happy to share those resources with you too um talia do you mind showing all of the teachers where they can find past webinars right yeah sure and then while she's kind of working on that um just wanted to say that you know we thank you guys so much for joining us during this time um someone had to ask if we will provide some sort of certificate for this session we will be providing a feedback form at the end of this and so if you're looking for a certificate you can just email us at info codemonkey.com and we're happy to provide you with a professional development learning because we know you all beat that during this time as well that never stops right definitely definitely and we really appreciate also your questions and your feedback we take a lot from that and really appreciate you joining us today i just posted in the chat a link um so you can access past webinars we also have here some student gear webinars that you can check out and maybe share with your students as well and thank you very much for your feedback throughout this webinar um lena um yep do you want to go back to the slide deck [Laughter] okay yeah we talked about um the different webinars that are available and uh we also posted um the the link in the chat um we also posted um how you can access us either at info at codemonkey.com or support cloudmonkey.com uh somebody from the team will get back to you thank you very much and thank you guys so much for joining us during this time remember you can always reach out to us at infos at codemonkey.com or you can reach out to the person that has set you up with your subscription for any information regarding professional development or pedagogy or any of those things that kind of you're stuck on or anything like that and as always we want to thank you so much for joining us and to follow us on all of our um social media channels at codemonkeysu and remember to write code catch bananas and save the world see you guys next time bye you