Something a little different from my usual Azure Centric posts today.

As an employee of BT Plc I would like to draw peoples attention to a fantastic scheme delivered by volunteers from both BT and Computing at School as well as being supported by the British Computing Society.

If you know a teacher then please pass them on this article!

Barefoot Computing

I am proud to volunteer for this fantastic initiative and before the pandemic struck am pleased to have been able to deliver sessions to local primary schools in my area.

The idea behind the initiative is to help Key Stage 1 and 2 Primary teachers introduce and learn how Computational thinking skills and vocabulary can be introduced to children in order to provide them with a good understanding of how to go about problem solving and the methods used. I am sure these children will be filling the known skills gaps into the future, being a volunteer of these scheme truly does make me feel proud to be able to equip teachers with fantastic resources so that they can pass this knowledge onto the children!

Another great thing about the resources is that you can sign up and use them at home with your own children!

I really can’t stress enough how important I personally feel a scheme like this is to building the skills for tomorrow in all our kids.

As a father to 3 (now in high school) and having delivered a number of these sessions I can and have used the materials and language with my own children and really do believe that it has helped them with their daily school work.

Barefoot for the Early Years

An announcement on the internal BT intranet this week informed me that Barefoot have now expanded their learning materials for early years education.

More details can be found here: https://www.barefootcomputing.org/earlyyears

New educational resources for 4-5-year-olds now available to use at home and in the classroom

​As part of BT’s Skills for Tomorrow programme, Barefoot Computing has launched a new range of free activities and lesson plans based on computational thinking for children aged 4-5.

The resources have been created for both the classroom and at home to help teachers and parents/carers equip children with skills to make the most of life in a digital world.

Since 2014 Barefoot has trained more than 85,600 teachers and reached almost three-million children in the UK. The launch of these new resources, aimed at early years pupils will broaden Barefoot’s reach – bringing benefit to even more children.   

Know a primary or early years teacher? 

Simply share the Barefoot link with them. It’s all they need to get started and soon, their pupils will debugging, tinkering and persevering. Also, for a limited time only – teachers who download the new early years’ resources can receive a free computational thinking poster for their class and be entered into a weekly prize draw if they request a training workshop. 

To find the new early years home learning activities visit Skills for Tomorrow. You’ll also find plenty more home learning activities and educational games for children aged 5-11 to explore. All of Barefoot’s home learning activities are easy for parents and carers to use, with no prior subject knowledge needed. Whether you are breaking codes hidden in poetry together or your child is exploring algorithms in our ‘Sorting it out’ game, Barefoot’s home learning activities will keep everyone entertained and learning!  

100DaysOfCloud Overview

My Main ReadMe Page is all set up with a bit about me!

The guys at 100DaysofCloud have set up the GitHub repo to be cloned and also have a great repo containing ideas and areas to collaborate on: https://github.com/100DaysOfCloud/100DaysOfCloudIdeas

My Github Journey tracker can be found here: https://github.com/jonnychipz/100DaysOfCloud

Please Watch/Star my repo and feel free to comment of contribute to anything I push! I really look forward to hearing from anyone who is going to jump on the journey around the same time as me! Lets see where I get to in 100 days!

I would encourage others to jump on this journey, I’m not sure that I will be able to commit every day for 100 days, but as long as I can complete 100 days that will be great!