Myra’s First Two Days Back at School

I am looking forward to my two first days of school.
The first day I return is a work day for teachers. I enjoy listening to all of the news that is presented that day such as the new babies and new marriages that have occurred. My principal is now using PowerPoint so he can incorporate the pictures of all of the events, as well as new staff members. We will then move on to meetings. I haven’t figured out why it is referred to as a work day because I never seem to have time to work in my classrooms.
What I consider my second first day of school is the first day of student attendance. I am also looking forward to this day. I am planning on using Alice/Media Computation in my A.P. Computer Science A class this year and I am excited. The enrollment is down this year, the first time since I have been teaching this class, so I am hopeful that using this curriculum will help boost enrollment and student understanding.
Last year I had used a CMS in my computer classes and I want to continue using a CMS this year. However, I am running into some snags. I used Angel CMS last year which was offered free through the county office of education. This year, I recently discovered that they plan on charging which will cost about $180. With the budget crisis in California, I know my school won’t be able to pay for it. I had hoped to set up a Moodle server, but the school server I was going to use has been loaned to our district office. With the first day of school a little over 2 weeks away, I am not sure what I am going to do yet, but I am sure I will figure something out.
I have several new strategies I want to use with my Trigonometry classes. I attended a session at NECC that incorporated technology into a Trigonometry class. I plan to use some of those ideas this year to make trig more visual using Flash and Geometer’s Sketchpad. In addition, during the Alice/Media computation workshop, Steve Cooper demonstrated an Alice project that would be perfect for my trig class. It involved planets, ellipses and parameters. This will be a great way to introduce parameters to my students. They never seem to understand why a parameter is needed. Another piece of technology that I want to try with my trig students is blogs. I read about using a blog on Mr. Higgins’ Blog in a math class. He has a different student post their class notes each day for other students to review. I would like to try that this year.
I hope that I can apply all of the ideas I plan to this year. I know they will benefit my students.
Myra Deister
CSTA Board Member

Dreaming of a New School Year

It is hard to believe that it is already time to turn our minds to the new school year.
For some, there is almost enough time left to do all of the projects we promised to do around the house. For others, it is a mad dash to get everything ready for the students. This is especially true for those hardy souls who have been working all summer to set up new servers and labs or get the old equipment ready to take one more year of student “love”.
Where ever you are along this spectrum, it is likely that you are meeting the new school with both joy and trepidation and that you have dreams of your own that will come into fruition or die as this year moves through its paces.
The new school year can always be a fresh start, a new beginning, a chance for us to grow together with our students.
So tell us. What do do you wish this year to be for you and your students?
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

New Journal From SIGCT

ISTE’s Special Interest Group for Computer Teachers (SIGCT) has announced the rebirth of its journal, which is aimed at enhancing precollege computing instruction. JCT is a K-12 oriented online periodical where the emphasis is on teaching about computing.
The name for the publication was formerly the Journal for Computer Science Education. Starting with the spring 2008 issue, the title was changed to the Journal for Computing Teachers (JCT), which is more indicative of the scope of SIGCT and JCT. Besides the name change, the previous practice of posting papers as they became available was replaced with several issues a year containing multiple papers and other materials of interest. A third change is that JCT is now available to everyone. Previously you had to be an ISTE member in order to access the publication. Now everyone has direct access to JCT. This change will dramatically increase the size of the readership.
Submission topics include but are not limited to:
* Academic and research articles relating to the teaching of computing in K-12 education
* Pedagogical articles describing and explaining the rationale for some teaching practice, approach, or lesson
* Theoretical articles explaining or arguing particular principles or models of learning, teaching, curriculum development, content perspective-taking, etc.
* Explanatory articles providing teachers with professional development information (e.g., understanding hardware and software, conceptual understanding, etc.)
* Reports concerning computing (e.g., curriculum and policy recommendations)
Submissions are either editor reviewed or peer reviewed. The author decides which one. In the “editor reviewed” process, articles are reviewed by the editor. In the “peer-reviewed” portion of the journal, manuscripts are acknowledged by the editor upon receipt and, after a preliminary review to judge their appropriateness for JCT, are sent to at least two members of the Editorial Review Board. Following the completion of the review process, the editor contacts the author(s) to accept the paper for publication, to accept the paper conditional on the completion of any recommended revisions, or to reject it.
For additional information about the journal and submission guidelines for authors, go to http://www.iste.org/JCT. Potential authors do not have to be members of ISTE or SIGCT to publish in JCT. The submission deadline for the fall 2008 issue is September 1, 2008.
Also, members for the Editorial Review Board for the Journal for Computing Teachers are sought. Your name would be included in the list of members of the Editorial Review Board. The quality of JCT’s peer review process is reliant upon the efforts of qualified professionals.
For further information on submitting papers and/or the Editorial Review Board, contact:
John Thompson, PhD
Editor, Journal for Computing Teachers
thompsjt@buffalostate.edu

Making K-12 Outreach Really Count

In the face of the continuing computer science enrollment crisis more and more universities and colleges are doing outreach to middle and high schools. Post-secondary institutions know that in order to get more students into their classes they have to reach out to K-12 teachers and students, but how much value do they really place on the work of the faculty and staff who are running their outreach programs?
Last Thursday and Friday CSTA and SIGCSE co-hosted a workshop for colleges and universities who are doing or thinking of doing what we call “roadshows.” These institutions are sending faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate) into middle and high schools to do presentations about computer science, informatics, and information technology. Their goal is to provide students with information about computing as a discipline and a career option and to provide special encouragement to students who are traditionally under-represented in the discipline.
The workshop, hosted by Google at their Mountain View campus, was, to put it bluntly, amazing. Faculty and staff from 36 institutions (large and small) came from across the country to share their expertise and resources. Some of the participants were from schools with long-standing, high-quality outreach programs (such as Carnegie Mellon, Indiana University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and some were just starting out. The workshop addressed key issues for the “newbies” as well as the concerns of more mature programs with regard to maintaining and sustaining outreach programs over time.
But, as is often the case with these kinds of workshops, some of the most enlightening discussions took place outside the regularly-scheduled events. For me, the most engaging centered on the question of how much value universities really place on this kind of outreach work.
As we were transitioning from one session to another, I happened to comment on two very different experiences I had had regarding the letter of support we required from the participants’ Deans or Department Chairs. One Dean called me personally to say that, although her institution had virtually no money to support the outreach program, she saw it as exceedingly valuable and wanted to make sure that the applicant from her school would be able to attend. She made it very clear how much she respected and valued both the work being done and the person doing it. Another Dean sent me a letter that was so grudging in its support, I wondered how his faculty member actually managed to keep the program alive. Both of these faculty members were selected to participate in the workshop.
My off-the cuff story started the ball rolling and many of the participants noted that although their institutions want and need them to do outreach, they really don’t value it in all the ways that count for university faculty. As one participant noted “It doesn’t count for tenure, it doesn’t help you publish technical articles, it doesn’t count for service work, and it doesn’t bring in the big money grants. And the rest of the faculty do not respect the work that we are doing.”
When you consider that many of these outreach programs are scraping by on soft money or even no money, it is simply amazing that they are managing to do the work they do. College and university computer science and informatics programs need to move into this century. They need to realize that these kinds of outreach programs are critical to addressing the enrollment crisis and they need to recognize the folks who are doing it in the concrete ways that really count.

Finding CS Teachers

I had an interesting email conversation with Carrie Toth from Insight Schools about the difficulties of finding computer science teachers, a challenge we share for different reasons.
CSTA membership has grown very quickly, from 0 members in 2005 to over 5300 members today but we know that there are still many teachers we would like to reach and we simply cannot find them. We can use market data companies (and we do) but we know they are only touching the surface of our community as well.
The situation is made worse by the fact that CSTA is often called upon for research and the one question we just cannot answer with any certainty is “How many CS teachers are there in U.S. high schools anyway?”.
For people like Carrie, the situation is just as frustrating. She has a number of computer science teaching jobs available and no way to advertise and fill them.
There are a number of reasons this problem exists. I think one of the primary difficulties is that, because there is no certification for computer science teachers in many states, no one keeps track of them at the state level or nationally. And until someone does, they remain invisible to the system as a whole.
Setting up some kind of careers board may seem like a potential solution but there are several issues (cost, liability, and verification just to mention a few) that make it prohibitive for associations to get into the job posting business. We have thought about it, but there is just no evidence that it would be of sufficient value to the majority of our members to make it worthwhile.
In the short term, the best we can say is, if you are a certified teacher looking for an online computer science teaching position with a virtual school, you can complete the Insight Schools application at:
https://edzapp.com/applicant/loginprivate.aspx?origincode=22748
or contact Carrie at
teachers@insightschools.net
And if you are not yet a CSTA member, contact me at:
cstephenson@csta.acm.org
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director, CSTA

CSTA Survey Prize Winner

The CSTA Membership Satisfaction Survey has now been completed and CSTA is delighted to announce that Ken Gittins is the winner of our member raffle prize.
According to CSTA President Robb Cutler, the Membership Satisfaction Survey is a key element in the association’s strategy to ensure that it continues to expand its membership benefits in a way that best serves the needs and interests of its members.”We depend upon our members to tell us what is working for them and what they need, and the survey is one of the most effective ways of collecting this information”, said Cutler.
As an incentive for members to participate in the online survey, CSTA randomly selected one member who completed the survey to receive the raffle prize. This year’s prize, a Flip Video Camera, has been won by Ken Gittins, a teacher in Highlands Ranch, CO.
Cutler says the results of the survey will be used by the CSTA Board of Directors and staff to determine how to improve existing member benefits and what new benefits will be developed in the next two years.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

Two New Resources for Information Sharing

ACM’s SIGCSE conference is always a great place to meet people doing interesting projects and creating new resources that may be of interest to teachers and students. Over the last year, CSTA has been building up a collection of podcasts featuring people and project we think will be of interest to our members.
Here are two new addition to our podcast collection that you can check out at:
http://csta.acm.org/Resources/sub/Podcasts.html
The CSTA Web Curriculum Repository
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 7 min.
Interview Location: ACM Sigcse 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Joe Kmoch, Milwaukee Public Schools
The CSTA Web Repository is a dream come true for busy CS teachers. To promote the sharing of resources among members of the community, CSTA developed a searchable database of K-12 CS instructional materials, lesson plans, and other resources that have never before been collected in one place for use by all CS teachers.
While anyone may browse the repository by curriculum classification or search by keyword, title, author, or publication date, only CSTA members may download the actual resources.
Teachers who wish to contribute original materials, for which they have the copyright, are encouraged to submit.
In our visit, Joe Kmoch describes what you’ll find in the Repository, how to get to it, and how to contribute your own teaching materials. Be sure to visit the CSTA Web Repository to jump-start your next teaching lesson and please consider sharing your good ideas with your colleagues at http://csta.acm.org/WebRepository/WebRepository.html.
The Computing Educators Oral History Project with Vicki Almstrum
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 10:30 min.
Interview Location: ACM Sigcse 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Vicki Almstrum, University of Texas at Austin:
Vicki and her colleagues are venturing into uncharted waters and the result of their work has the potential to impact an entire generation of young women curious about how their life might unfold as a computer scientist. The Computing Educators Oral History Project is a growing collection of audio interviews with women computing educators. “This endeavor will eventually create a body of narratives to serve as role models to attract students, in particular women, to computing; it will also serve to preserve the history of the female pioneers in computing education.”
In our visit Vicki describes the impetus for the project and explores ways that teachers might use the interviews to create teaching opportunities for retaining and supporting individuals at all stages of the pipeline. The interviews are available at www.ceohp.org.
Pat Phillips,
Editor, CSTA Voice

Cool New Podcasts for Teachers and Students

Over 1000 computer science educators gathered recently in Portland Oregon for the 2008 ACM Sigcse conference, giving us a chance to interview more people thinking and doing interesting things for our CSTA Snipits podcast collection
The 39th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education provided a wide selection of technical sessions and opportunities for teachers to network and to learn. The topics ranged from innovative strategies for increasing classroom diversity to hands-on techniques with applications and curriculum. I love the excitement of SIGCSE, the opportunities to catch up with friends, and the discovery of new and innovative teaching strategies. I managed to catch up with a few presenters and participants who I thought you would value hearing from.
Check out our growing CSTA Snips podcast collection and listen in on these new conversations about teaching and computer science at:
http://csta.acm.org/Resources/sub/Podcasts.html
Using Mario Brothers to Teach Inheritance Concepts with Terrence Mason and Bruce Johnston
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 8 min.
Interview Location: ACM Sigcse 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Terrence Mason and Bruce Johnston, University of Wisconsin-Stout
Bruce and Terry have a goal in their CS1 course to reduce the “excitement deficit” found in many beginning computer science courses. In our visit they describe how they use a familiar computer game to teach inheritance concepts and to reduce that deficit. The project worked so well that students were heard cheering at their own programming successes. Now that’s something to look into!
While inheritance is generally a difficult concept for beginning students to master, it remains an important CS concept to teach for the utility and power it brings to CS. The familiarity of the game functionality enables students to more easily comprehend the topic, identify objects, and construct the inheritance hierarchy. More information is available at http://www.cfkeep.org/html/snapshot.php?id=27944194178976
Teaching Students about Electronic Privacy with Flo Appel
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 9 min.
Interview Location: ACM Sigcse 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Florence Appel, Saint Xavier University
Why is it most important for educators to teach about privacy issues? How do educators teach these concepts? How do we get our students to value their privacy? And how do we teach them to balance their privacy and security with convenience? As I listened to Flo, I found myself thinking that her words were valuable not only for me professionally, but also personally, as I deal with these modern-world issues. She describes how public spaces including the internet impact students, invade privacy, and ultimately, impact personal security. Recommended resources for parents, teachers, and students are available at the Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gov/kidzprivacy/).
Pat Philips
CSTA Podmeister

The End of the AP CS AB Exam

By now, many of you have heard of the College Board’s decision to discontinue the AP Computer Science AB exam after next year (the A exam will not be affected). We are just as surprised as you are by the announcement and know that the news will come as a disappointment to many computer science teachers. We do hope, however, that this decision will provide us with an opportunity to strengthen high school computer science education.
The College Board has said that it will be “focus[ing] their efforts on improving and supporting the AP Computer Science A program, which will be enhanced during the next five years to better represent a full-year, entry-level college computer science sequence.”
To that end, they have formed a “AP Computer Science Course and Exam Review Commission responsible for developing and enacting comprehensive research among colleges, universities, and secondary schools to identify how best to keep the AP course and exam current and reflective of the ever-changing discipline of computer science.”
CSTA is well-represented on this commission and will do its best to meet these goals.
While we don’t know what the future will hold for the AP curriculum, we now have a seat at the table and we’ll keep you posted as we move forward.
In the meantime, given that we are soon only going to have a single AP CS exam, what do you think that exam should cover? In other words, what are the essential concepts that the course must include?
Let us know what you think!
Robb Cutler
CSTA President

Staff Development: 25 Tools for Education

While Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day is not purely about computer science education, I feel very strongly that good educational practices span disciplines and so it is one of the RSS feeds that Google reader automatically retrieves for me daily.
Jane recently blogged about a professional development program that she created, centered around her top 25 e-learning tools. I highly recommend going to the site and working through the activities for any of the tools you are unfamiliar with. Some of them, like Firefox, are things you probably already use, but Jane highlights some of the extra functionality of the browser as well as some useful extensions.
The tools are divided into categories including: Keep Yourself Up to Date, Manage Your Own Productivity, Set Up a Blog, Website and/or Wiki, Share Content with Others, Build Content and Share it with Others, Bring People Together, and Develop and Manage Courses.
To start a little discussion here please tell us what your favorite e-learning tool is (whether or not Jane agrees)? I use many of the things on her list and I think Google Reader has drastically improved my ability to find new and useful things as well as be aware of what is going on today in education. I used to have to go to 20-25 web pages first thing in the morning to see what the latest headlines were, who posted something new on blogs I read, and forget about trying to find new research as its published. Now with Google Reader, I go to one place and get EVERYTHING. It is separated by the feed (where it came from) so I can pick and choose what I want to read when I have time. It truly has changed the way I interact with the Internet on a daily basis.
No matter how small or how large leave a comment and share your favorite e-learning tool here.
Leigh Ann Sudol
CSTA Communications Chair