Welcome to Callysto, teachers. It is time to become digitally empowered!
So you may have heard about Callysto, but are not sure where to start?! Well, we are inviting all grade 5-12 teachers in Canada to try out the new all-in-one teaching and learning platform through Callysto’s newly launched Gallery of Interesting Notebooks. The Gallery showcases a few examples of Callysto’s curriculum-based learning modules or notebooks and demonstrates just how simple and accessible this technology is.
Callysto uses Jupyter, a university-level analytics platform, as a framework for its online, interactive textbook-like program for younger students. The new resource was developed by Cybera and The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) to help dedicated and tech-loving teachers transform their lesson plans, and encourage students to think outside the box, or in this case, outside the traditional textbook. The platform is designed to teach digital literacy and computational thinking, which are defining features of our future, and key ingredients to successful career paths for today’s students. The cost-free tool supports learning with beginner-level coding, interactive data analysis and visualizations, digital math equations, external media pairing, and more.
The Gallery of Interesting Notebooks provides teachers with a preview of Callysto’s many innovative features. You don’t need to register for an account to try out the Gallery; simply access it from any web enabled device, select your preferred subject, and follow the three simple steps listed at the top of the Gallery page. From there, have fun playing and experimenting with the platform’s versatile and powerful computing capabilities! For example, in the Math 7-11 demo notebook, you can use an automatic random number generator to “flip” an infinite number of virtual coins and experiment with probability. The notebook’s interactive widgets allow you to visualize the coin toss experiment from a unique graphic perspective.
In the Science 9 demo notebook, you can collect live, open data from a City of Edmonton water treatment plant’s measurements of water conductivity, chlorine, alkalinity, etc. You can then plot that data in a graph, along with your own experimental data, to compare and analyze the quality of the water samples.
And in the Language Arts demo notebook, you can find and import famous works of literature, such as Macbeth and Hamlet, and run automated analysis to determine their most used words and phrases. You can then plot those results, to give you a unique visual perspective and understanding of these works.
You should find the demo notebooks easy to navigate. Callysto was designed so any teacher, regardless of their technological background, can use the tool to enhance the digital learning experience in his or her classroom, without the need to know how to code. Notebooks are available in a wide variety of curriculum-based subjects. If you wish to further explore other notebooks, you just need to set up a free account on the Callysto platform.
The easiest way to learn how to use Callysto in your classroom is to sign up for a free teacher training workshop. We will be scheduling a number of workshops throughout the summer and into the fall, and will be updating our events page as we add more workshops. If you do not find a suitable location there, please contact us to schedule a workshop in your area or request a group training session. The Callysto team is also continually seeking teacher input on existing notebooks, as well as suggestions for new notebooks. If you have an idea for a specific lesson plan, please contact us. We would love to hear from you!