Professional Development

January 26 - All Chapter Meeting Annoucement

CSTA NNJ will be hosting this month's CSTANJ virtual meeting. We will have a discussion about the newly forming CSTA-NJ, a short presentation on cseducators.stackexchange.com, and a representative from Phidgets Education.

Here is the agenda including the link. I hope you can join us!

CSTA N NJ Meeting

January 26, 7pm - 8:15 pm

  • Welcome Remarks

  • Overview of plans to run CSTA chapters in NJ

  • Bylaw Committee reports back

  • A short introduction to cseducators.stackexchange.com

  • Lucas Pacentrilli to present about Phidgets Education (www.phidgets.com/education)

Birds of a Feather

BoF - Online Assessment (and Cheating) - Monday, 8/31/2020

CSTANJ-Remote Assessments.mp4


BoF Discussion ~ APCSP - remote and changes - Wednesday 8/26 7:00

Fran Trees and Adam Swift will be facilitating the discussion, and sharing some of their knowledge about the changes to the APCSP test, but the purpose of the BoF is for open discussion, so please bring your questions and ideas.

BoF Discussion ~ APCSP - remote and changes video

cstanj-AP CSP Changes.mp4

The link to a previously recorded summary of the AP CSP changes made by Fran Trees

APCSP-CHANGES.mp4

AP CSP changes Presentation Document

AP CS Principles - changes.pdf


BoF Disscussion ~ Jamboard, Edpuzzle and Peardeck

Hosted by Frances Trees

Short Presentations on:

Jamboard (Suzanne S),

EDPuzzle (Rachel K) - Click for EDPuzzle tutorial

PearDeck (Ken K).

CSTANJ-Jamboard-Edpuzzle-Peardeck-20200824.mp4

Panel Discussion on Distance Learning

Please checkout these resources from the national CSTA site.

Standards for CS Teachers includes a self-reflection tool and roadmap for professional learning: this looks like a great tool to assess our own professional development. There is also a PD guidance section for state and school leaders, School of Education at universities, and PD providers.

Quality PD Opportunities page includes a listing of PD providers that have been reviewed by a CSTA community using pre-established criteria and process explained on this page. You can drill down by grade band, format or cost.

Reports and publications contains resources such as the Guide to Inclusive CS Education which you might find useful.

There are many, many other resources on the national CSTA site available free of charge.

Helpful CS Info

Code.org - Guidance for modifying some of the teaching practices used in CS for alternative teaching environments (such as think-pair-share, pair programming, etc). The suggestions apply regardless of the curriculum in use: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g8loG0Lj1LLg3yAiKPIn82vXyaMTznRkIjQsIzt_LoM/edit

2020 Aspirations in Computing Educator Award Virtual Event

CodeHS has a free curriculum in Python, including an online Arduino course with Python. With the free version, you just can't get the teacher tools. This is what I plan to use for the first few weeks in my Advanced Topics class (cybersecurity, Arduino, Python, Java, Javascript,..).

Also, CMU CS Academy is a free Python Curriculum, but it might be a little too slow for an Advanced Topics course. I am using CMU for my first half of Intro to CS. We like it a lot, especially in remote learning.

If you are looking for more of a self paced tutorial, a number of my students used https://www.learnpython.org/ or CodeAcademy (parts are free) in Advanced Topics to teach themselves.