Posts about pdhttp://cestlaz.github.io/categories/pd.atom2018-09-19T23:47:51ZMike ZamanskyNikolaProfessional Development beyond Scratchhttp://cestlaz.github.io/posts/election-day-pd-2017/2017-11-07T19:08:58-04:002017-11-07T19:08:58-04:00Mike Zamansky<div id="outline-container-orga8963cd" class="outline-2">
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Today was Election Day. One of the few days each year when students
stay home and teachers spend all day attending what is generously
known as professional development.
</p>
<p>
Years ago I was in a room with a few colleagues when my friend Dave -
one of the best math teachers I know said "you know, every time we
have a PD day in NJ and my wife and I have to scramble to take care of
the kids I get a little annoyed but then think I shouldn't get annoyed
since they're spending the day doing all sorts of valuable PD." He
then said "but then I realize that their PD is probably about as
useful as our PD and I get really angry."
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<p>
There you have it. This is not to say that there is no good PD but it
seems that the professional development opportunities provided by our
schools have over the years ranged from useless to insulting with
maybe a small bright spot here and there. Historically it's been worse
for CS teachers because we get lumped in with math teachers and have
to spend the day learning about tools and techniques we'll never use
or discussing curricula we never teach.
</p>
<p>
So, when I spoke to JonAlf about rescuing the Stuy teachers for the
day and hosting them at Hunter, he and the other CS teachers were
pretty excited. It wasn't as though I had the magic PD answer but I
was going to provide a space and we'd figure out together what would
be productive and valuable for them.
</p>
<p>
As it turns out, I've been spending a good amount of time these past
few weeks visiting high schools to talk about Hunter CS and when I was
at Bronx Science the topic of Election Day PD came up and I thought
that it would be nice to get the Bronx Science and Stuy teachers
together. After thinking about it more, I recalled that there were few
good PD opportunities for CS teachers who taught advanced classes as
opposed to all the CS PD floating around these days at more of a
beginner level.
</p>
<p>
I thought that we could change this. In the end, I hosted PD today and
had teachers from Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and the
Manhattan Hunter Science High School in attendance. I invited teachers
from a few more schools but in the end we had those four schools and
seventeen teachers.
</p>
<p>
The original agenda was:
</p>
<ul class="org-ul">
<li>09:00 - 10:00 : Each school describes it's program and courses</li>
<li>10:00 - 11:00 : An intro to Git and GitHub for the classroom</li>
<li>10:00 - 11:45 : Sharing neat lessons</li>
<li>11:45 - 12:00 : Presentation by <a href="http://chicktech.org">ChickTech</a></li>
<li>12:00 - 01:00 : Lunch</li>
<li>01:00 - End : Small group lesson and curriculum work</li>
</ul>
<p>
Oh boy did I mess up on the timing. The description and
discussion of school programs took all morning. It was interesting to
hear how each school's program evolved and how they fit into the
school's culture. Brooklyn Tech, for instance is a school where
students declare majors. This has a big impact on what classes kids
have to take and are able to take. This is very different from Stuy or
Science where kids programs are more open ended or MHSHS which is a
much smaller school and has restrictions related to size. It was also
interesting to note Brooklyn Tech's decision to have every student
take APCS-P. Interesting because Brooklyn Tech is one of the country's
largest high schools and most of them should have done well on the
exam. That gave NYC around 1,400 passing AP scores in one shot. On
the other hand none of the other schools present today offered APCS-P
but did have their own intro CS class that students took prior to
APCS-A.
</p>
<p>
We finished the morning with a visit by Heather from
<a href="http://chicktech.org">ChickTech</a>. ChickTech is a non-profit dedicated to retaining women in
Tech. It works with both girls in K12 and also those in industry. My
hope was to get a conversation started and see if there were some
potential avenues of partnership between the organization and the
schools.
</p>
<p>
After lunch, the group decided that we should do the Git/GitHub
workshop and JonAlf obliged.
</p>
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Overall I think the day was a success.
</p>
<p>
My hope is that today's attendees can form a core group of CS teachers
who teach more advanced courses and we can form something of a support
group for each other.
</p>
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I plan to try to facilitate future meetings and hopefully we'll be
able to attract more teachers to our group.
</p>
<p>
All in all I'm very happy with how the day went.
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</div>Awesome Cs Revisitedhttp://cestlaz.github.io/posts/awesome-cs-revisted/2017-09-21T16:34:36-04:002017-09-21T16:34:36-04:00Mike Zamansky<div id="outline-container-org5392025" class="outline-2">
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Saw this tweet the other day so I though I would try to plug the
<a href="https://github.com/zamansky/awesome-cs-education">Awesome CS Education</a> list I started on GitHub:
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/csteachers?src=hash">#csteachers</a>...didn't I see a list of CS teacher blogs here recently?</p>— Pam Whitlock (@PamWhitlock1) <a href="https://twitter.com/PamWhitlock1/status/910662628757864448">September 21, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<p>
To answer the tweet, the closet thing I know to a list is <a href="https://twitter.com/alfredtwo">Alfred
Thompson</a>'s blog roll which is actually a post he wrote on his blog
in 2012. Unfortunately his list can be hard to find and is somewhat
out of date.
</p>
<p>
The idea of an "awesome" list is publicly hosting a simple site that
is community driven and anyone can suggest additions and edits.
</p>
<p>
I put up a starter <a href="https://github.com/zamansky/awesome-cs-education">here</a> and a few people have contributed but I'd love
to get more people involved. Awesome lists have a number of advantages
over other repositories.
</p>
<ul class="org-ul">
<li>Unlike blog posts, the site is easy to find.</li>
<li>Unlike private mailing lists or Facebook, anyone can see the content.</li>
<li>Anyone can suggest additions (although you need to create a Github
account).</li>
<li>Anyone can download or fork the site.</li>
<li>It's essentially plain text and is easy to edit (just read the
<a href="https://github.com/zamansky/awesome-cs-education/blob/master/contributing.org">contribution guide</a>).</li>
</ul>
<p>
So, there you have it. If you have a blog or resource to share please
submit a pull request. Over time this could be a terrific single
starting point for educators to get to a wealth of resources.
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