Welcome To Back to School Night

1. Welcome To Back to School Night

2. Who is Mr. DeCoste? • Hold A bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies and English • Hold a Master’s Degree in Educational Technology • I have been teaching for 15 years • Train teachers all over the state in reading instruction • Teach students and teachers how to use technology

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes Failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. _ J.K. Rowlings

4. Common Core Standards • Students are not reading and being taught using complex text • Over 60% of in coming college students are not prepared for college level work • Many workers cannot read essential documents related to their jobs • In mathematics, we teach many things in a year, but do not teach to mastery • Traditional math instruction did a very poor job of teaching concepts and applications • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5ktLyHDjL4

5. Text Complexity Changes With The Common Core Standards

6. What Makes A Good Reader Good and Why is That Important? • Accuracy + Fluency + Vocabulary + Topic knowledge = Good Reader • Accuracy = 90% or above • Fluency= at least 80 words per minute • Vocabulary= 88,000 word types by graduation (Most of these words are learned by context.) • Topic knowledge= knowledge about many subjects and text structures

8. Why is it Important to be a Good Reader? • Research shows good readers have higher cognitive abilities • Good readers are strong critical thinkers and problem solvers • Reading helps develop mental stamina and perseverance • Good readers have a vast amount of topic knowledge • A person with a Bachelor’s degree earns approximately $18,000 more per year than a person with a high school diploma

9. Our Children’s Future • 70% of the jobs our children will hold have not even been invented yet. • These yet to be invented jobs will require strong problem solving and critical thinking skills in addition to strong technology skills • Our children will have up to ten career changes in their lives • These changes will require our children to have a huge knowledge base about many topics • These changes require mental stamina and perseverance

10. Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. _ Chinese Proverb

11. The Reasons for Learning Coding in School The reason why coding should be learned is that many people now rely on computers and other sorts of technology. We can all have successful jobs, companies , and we can even make our own educational games and websites. It can make you think just like reading does.

12. Why Coding is Educational In My Opinion First of all, to be a computer programmer and to learn how to write code you need to know lots of math like multiplication, division, addition and subtraction. You also need to understand concepts like binary, variables, functions, and conditionals Also, coding is mostly breaking down complicated problems into less complicated things (decomposition).

13. The World on Coding In America about one million of the best jobs go unfilled each year because only one in ten schools teach students how to code. No matter what job you want to have, ask about coding in your school or learn online at code.org

14. "It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with just facts... it is to teach them to think and always to think for themselves."-Robert Hutchins

15. What I Want You to Expect From Me • Help my child become a good problem solver and critical thinker • Provide my child with the education and technological skills they will need to be successful in the 21st Century • Help my child become a kind, caring, and responsible independent adult. • Mr. DeCoste’s philosophy: A strong mind, a strong body, and a strong heart make a strong person.

16. Our Future • Our children are going to be the ones in power when we retire