I have a student in my Programming 1 course who is doing phenomenally well. So well in fact, that I struggle at times to find ways to challenge and engage him up to his fullest potential. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to find things above and beyond for him to do, but haven't really found anything that really worked and engaged him.
At least until now.
I was showing our new Web Design teacher some resources they could use to help prepare for the class next semester, and one of the resources I showed them was Lynda.com. Our district provides all teachers and students access to this amazing library of resources and tutorials. As I was showing all the great things that Lynda.com provided, I realized that I was failing to use this great resource with my students. Especially some of my advanced students that really want to do and learn more.
Today, the student that I sometimes struggle to find advanced work for, is learning to do statistical analysis of data from a website through python. The best part is that his learning today, while advanced and challenging, is supported through tutorial and file resources.
I was so happy with his work today, I took some time to really dig through all that Lynda.com has to offer. I was impressed with the wide range of topics that were covered by the site. There were courses on Accounting, Marketing, Business, Architecture, Interior Design, Education, and many more.
I would urge all SD203 teachers to, at a minimum, sign in and check out some of the great resources you or your students may be missing out on.
Below are a couple of screen shots I took from the site.
This year, my colleagues and I are focusing our efforts on addressing the gender gap that exists in our programming classes in our school. Our curriculum consists of Programming 1, Programming 2 (each a semester course) and AP Computer Science (2 semesters).
THE DATA
Before developing a plan for how we would attempt to address this issue, we looked at our enrollments over the past four years. The numbers confirmed to us some positive things, and gave us some data so that we can evaluate if our efforts are paying off.
Without going into great detail, here is a brief view of our enrollment numbers over the past four years.
THE PLAN
We know that this will not be an easy, or immediate change we can affect. However, over the course of the last year we began to make plans for how we could start to close this gender gap in our programming courses. Here is an overview of some of the things we have done, and are planning to do in the future.
Room Remodel
Our first step was to redesign the programming room to be a more collaborative and inviting space. This was a major change and the work was completed over the summer. We removed the old "rows" of computers that students used to sit in and created team pods of 4. We painted the walls to soften the room up. We purchased new comfortable chairs for each computer and four new couches for collaboration. We installed a white board the size of one of the walls, and repositioned the two projectors to provide large presentation areas on the white board so that there would not be a "bad" seat in the room during instruction. We added a new teaching station, closer to the center of the room. We purchased a class set of I-PADS with keyboards, to both increase learning opportunities and opportunity for collaboration.
We still have a few items left to check off of our list before we consider this project complete. We will be printing and hanging examples of student created Turtle Art, Fractal Trees, Media Computation Collages, and other visual examples from class and hanging them in frames around the room. We are designing some large visual pieces that will visually reinforce that all students can succeed in the class to hang on our windows and walls.
Here is a look at our room before, and its progress to date:
BEFORE
AFTER
Curriculum Changes
We also began making curriculum changes. Changes in both how we teach, and what types of activities we do.
We looked at ways we could increase student collaboration in our instruction.This included an increase in use of strategies like Pair Programming, Peer Instruction, and Team Discussions. The goal is to create more opportunities for our females to collaborate and work as a member of a team.
We also evaluated our activities to see if they were biased or skewed in anyway against our female programmers. Many of our activities were good, but some needed to be updated. Here are a couple examples of what I mean.
In the programming 2 class, the final capstone project had been that students made a 2D video game. While many students enjoyed the activity, there was no opportunity for choice to explore something else. The programming 2 capstone project is now a menu of choices that students can select from, including 2D video games, Turtle Art, Media Computation, GUI programs, or I-PAD apps. The idea is that now our female programmers have something to choose from that better represents their interests. Indeed, this seems to hold as a positive change, as most of my female students chose something that was not a game last semester.
In Our AP Computer Science Course the students do a unit with the LEGO MINDSTORMS. Their final activity with these used to be a "Sumo" battle of sorts in which one team had to push the other team out of the circle. Now, instead of a combative battle, the students work together as a team to solve a series of problems, like getting out of a box that has only one opening. This increases the collaboration of the team and is a better way of engaging our girls in problem solving.
Outreach
We are planning several ways to reach out to female students during the year to attract them to our courses. Last year we did a Code Week where we set up in our cafeteria and showed off some the student created work and activities that students have done in our courses. This year we will do something similar, but also with other classes in our department hoping to draw a wider variety of students over.
We will also be airing a promotional video throughout the semester across our schools growing video communication system. The video below will air in our cafeterias and building hallways throughout the semester to let our females know that they have an opportunity to be great in our programming courses. The video can be seen below:
Personal Invitation
One of the new things we will be trying this year, and that we believe could be very powerful, is to send out personal invitations to some of the freshman female students we believe could benefit from, and have success, in our courses. We are going to identify freshmen females in a variety of math and science courses who's teachers feel they have an aptitude for continuing on in their fields or show early signs of success in the class. We are going to write personal invitations to these ladies to come visit us and learn how computer science can benefit them in their future pursuits and to personally tell them that we believe they will have success in our computer science course if they are willing to give it a try.
Moving Forward
Moving forward we will continue to evaluate the success of our initiatives, and to plan other ways in which we can address the lack of female students in our programming classes. I'll share in the future what does and does not work for us in the hopes that others might be able to implement change in their area and continue to help our young female students become a bigger part of our community.
In Programming 1 we start by introducing students to what programming is. We start this process by using "Alice", a visual drag and drop program that lets students focus on the principle's of programming in a way that let's them explore without having to worry about the details of code syntax.
Early in this process, we start by teaching the students how to simply use the Alice program and make it do simple things like add objects and methods to their program. After the students have completed a simple formative lab in which they demonstrate they can accomplish simple things in the program, we assign the students the Personal World Lab to let them explore the program.
This assignment is formative in nature, and is intended to let the students explore, learn, and share amongst their peers the things they find out. In essence, the students are asked to use Alice to program the scene of a world in which two people interact. One of the characters has to be a representation of the student. They are asked to share information about their personalities and their interests in the scene they are creating.
Students get so involved with trying to make "their" scene the best it can be, they both deeply explore the program and what programming can do, as well as sharing a lot of information about themselves. We learn so much more about our students by letting them explore and share, then by just engaging them in discussion. It is by far one of my favorite assignments of the year.
Below are some sample scenes that students have programmed for you to explore:
As my third year of teaching Programming 1 and Programming 2 gets started, I continue to focus on ways I can improve my use of formative assessment to identify how well the students are understanding the concepts as we progress through them. While, we are currently only into our second week of school, I am focused on continuing to grow my use of the tech tools Socrative and Infuse Learning to help me this year with this process.
I recently read an article through the @nbea twitter account about formative assessment ideas. The article likened formative assessment to a chef who is constantly tasting the food they make as they make it. Constantly checking to see if everything is just right, and if it is not, making minor (or major) adjustments to correct the problems. From this perspective, summative assessment is likened to the chef serving the food to a customer for their final approval.
As a husband and father of 2 who does most of the cooking at home, I related to this example. I found myself asking how I could, like a chef, constantly check to see if everything is just right in my classroom.
I have used Socrative before in my classroom, but never Infuse Learning. My goal is to use these tools to better track my students learning during daily lessons. I currently use a variety of formative assessment tools, like exit quizzes through Canvas, practice assignments, and classroom discussions. However, I am specifically looking for ways to track student learning during the initial teaching of a new concept, during the students initial knowledge acquisition stages. I think these two tech tools can help me accomplish this and will help my students learn better.
My initial thoughts on the use of these tools for this purpose are very promising. I like Socrative and the simplicity that is built in. I especially like that I can have the students type a short answer question and then narrow the results down and rebroadcast the smaller set as a multiple choice question for the class. It gives me the ability to both initially engage all students as thinkers, and then focus their thought and team discussions (collaboration) in a more focused direction.
While I do like Socrative's possibilities in the short answer and multiple choice catagories, I am thoroughly impressed with Infuse Learning's option of a sort and order question. When used in the right way, this allows students to problem solve and think through a variety of questions and then apply their answer to some data set that must be sorted. For my class today, it was identifying the smallest unit of computer measurement and sorting through the largest unit of measurement. When the students had a chance to answer the question themselves, I was able to see a very interesting thing in the data provided to me by the tool in the very moment it was happening. In all of my classes, there was a 50/50 split on what the students thought was a correct sort. This immediate data, let me have the students collaborate in groups to try and narrow in on the correct answer. In all classes, the teams were able to discuss, teach, and work through misunderstandings and problems to come up with the correct results. I could not have been happier. Even in the class that did not come to a perfect outcome, it gave us the opportunity to work through the problem as a class to identify why the correct sort was correct (below).
At the end of both days of class using these tools, I walked away feeling good as an educator and empowerment for my students. It is a good day in class when I can lead my students to solve the problem and get to the right answer without ever actually having to tell them "the answer". In my mind, this is formative assessment. Knowing that my students know the concept, without ever actually having to ask them if they do.
My colleague, Geoff Schmit, teaches the AP Computer Science Course in our school, and shared a very insightful post about his thoughts on how his class is about more than just programming. (You can view the post here) In it he shared how he engages his students to "read, think, write and debate issues at the intersection of technology, society and ethics." He shared his assignments with the hopes that other CS teachers would find them useful.
For this reason, I thought it might be helpful to share how I help get students prepared for this type of writing and thinking. It is always a pleasure to see that the learning activities I do in my introductory programming classes (programming 1 & 2) prepare the students for learning activities that they will encounter in latter sections of computer science.
We share in the idea that computer science courses are about more than just programming. So in programming 1 I engage students in near daily discussion boards that get the students to think about the concepts they are learning in class and share those thoughts in writing. These writing assignments are less about composing long detailed pieces of writing, but rather, to get the students to practice focusing on facts and providing evidence to support them. They are short and very regular, so the students get a lot of practice with this.
In programming 2, students move from short regular writings, to a little bit longer writings, in which they have to reflect on a reading or video that we will do together in class. This both helps them get practice with technical writings, and introduces them to some of the technological and ethical situations that exist. Many times the concepts are new to the students, and they really have to think about their view on what the reading or video presented.
In the same hopes of my colleague, I will share the programming 2 writing assignments, with the hopes that these may help other CS teachers.
Current Event Articles (2)
During the course of the semester you must submit 2 current event
articles. The articles can come from any reputable news source or
magazine. The content of the article may be anything computing related,
but at least 1 of your articles must be internet related.
Article Directions:
Find an appropriate article.
In your paper, create a heading that identifies the following information:
The article source
The article title
The article author
The date the article was written/published
A link to find the digital copy of the article (note if you do not
have a link to a digital copy, you will have to post/paste a copy of the
actual article. I can help you with this if necessary.
Section 1 (this section can be as long as you need it to be): Summary of Article
Write an objective summary of the article
You must be sure to include all of these items about the article i. Who, what, when, where, why and how
You should not answer these in list format, rather these are things to keep in mind when writing your summary section
Section 2 (this section can be as long as you need it to be): Reflection on Article
This is the section that you should provide your own thought and
opinion in to. Be sure to explain why you selected the article, what
your thoughts on the article were, and if necessary, whether you agree
or disagree with the author. Part of your reflection should also be
about how the content in the article affects society as a whole, or if
necessary, how you think it will affect society. Be thorough and
detailed with support about this section. Students who reflect with
something like “This technology sounds cool.” will not score well.
Technology Research Assignment
You must pick one aspect of technology and
research it and its impact on society thoroughly. You may write this
research paper in one of two different ways.
You may identify an aspect of technology and simply present its
impact on society and give both the pro's and con's for or against the
technology.
EXAMPLE - Cell Phones and Cancer: Cell phones are a common
technology in our lives, but they may be linked to cancer. (then i would
present both the good and bad of cell phone use and present research
that proved or disproved a connection between cancer)
Identify an aspect of technology by asking a question and using your research to argue for or against the question to answer it.
EXAMPLE - Cell Phones and Cancer: Are cell phones causing cancer?
(Then I would write my paper by choosing a side based on my research to
argue that the research proved they were or weren't causing cancer.)
Your research must be written in MLA style format with citations
at the end. You must include a minimum of two different sources for
your research. I expect this paper to be a minimum of 5 paragraphs but
it does not have to be a lot longer. (about a 1 1/2 to 2 pages) You must
get your topic approved before you begin research.
Hackers Wanted Video Reflection
Based
on the information you viewed in the Documentary "Hackers Wanted",
write a 2 paragraph reflection that argues for or against "Gray Hat"
hackers.
Algorithms Video Reflection
Kevin
Slavin (In his TED Talk on Algorithms) argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and
increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this video he shows how
these complex computer programs determine espionage tactics, stock
prices, movie scripts, and architecture. Slavin also warns that we are
writing code we can't understand with implications we can't control.
For your video reflection, please respond to only one of the following two prompts:
Option A:
Give some specific examples of how you believe computer
algorithms affect your daily life. Be sure to explain why and how you
think these algorithms affect your life, and whether you believe that
they are positively or negatively affecting your life.
Option B:
Assume that Slavin is correct, that the world is
becoming increasingly controlled by algorithms. Do you believe this is a
positive or negative thing? If you believe it is positive, be sure to
provide specific examples of why it is good, and how it can benefit
society. If you believe this is a negative thing, give specific examples
that explain why and give some ideas of how you believe it could be
changed.
Full Text: http://home.comcast.net/~jeffreyhunt/cu/edt6030/week_7/Lightle-Using%20Social%20Media.pdf
The article “Using Social Media to Build an Online
Professional Learning Network of Middle Level Educators” (Lightle, 2010) discusses how the advancement of social
media tools have made it possible to engage with professionals and build online
educational networks around shared interests. The article points out that prior
to this point in time, web pages didn’t allow conversations to evolve. (p. 49)
Rather, they were only places one sided communication took place. Authors
posted content and viewers could read the content. Now, educators can have
rich, robust conversations about their interests online with other educators.
Lightle argues “the conversations that used to happen in the hallways or
teachers’ lounges or at conferences are now happening all the time on the Web”.
(p. 49)
The
article “Innovative Professional Development: Expanding Your Professional
Learning Network” (Perez, 2012) looks at why
educators need a robust professional learning network (PLN). PLN’s involve
sharing work related ideas with a network of colleagues via various forms of
communications for the betterment of one’s professional practice. (p. 20) Perez
argues that educators need a robust PLN for a variety of reasons including:
access to the thinking of colleagues, access to timely information, the ability
to post questions and get responses, collaboration with colleagues, and to
communicate about events. Perez even offers a wide range of social media tools
that can be used to grow one’s PLN.
In this
day of digital collaboration, it is important that educators not confine their
professional development to only the thoughts of those inside their building.
It is easier than ever to collaborate with educators who share similar
interests, experiences, and insight all over the world. Social media tools give
educators that ability without making it difficult to do so. Lightle highlights
a couple reasons why educators may be tentative to jump on board and begin
collaborating using social media which includes not wanting to sound
unprofessional, fear of technical expertise, and a lack of time. It is
important to diffuse these fears in educators as the benefits of an extensive
PLN far outweigh any of the negatives. As Lightle points out “the more
conversations you can have about your work, the more you can develop your
specific professional interest”. (p. 49) Indeed, social media makes it possible
to have many more conversations than one could have in the teachers’ lounge.
References
Lightle, K. (2010, November/December). Using Social
Media to Build an Online Professional Learning Network of Middle Level
Educators. Knowledge Quest, 39(2), pp. 48-53.
Perez, L. (2012, January/February). Innovative
Professional Development: Expanding Your Professional Learning Network. Knowledge
Quest, 40(3), pp. 20-22.
Full Text: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blended-learnings-impact-on-teacher-development/
In his 2011 blog post “Blended Learning’s impact on Teacher
Development”(Hernandez, 2011) Alex Hernandez identifies
six main areas that he believes teachers will need professional development to
prepare for blended learning. The areas he believes that will be important when
training teachers of the future include responding to real time data, targeting
instruction, building culture and relationships, enhancing the curriculum,
designing learning paths, and deconstructing the role of the teacher. He identifies core competencies that teachers
will need to be competent blended learning instructors.
His six areas are essentially what teachers will need to
know to be able to transition from teaching whole class instruction, to be able
to analyze individual data to most effectively teach each and every student of
a classroom. He states that the old benchmark of getting student data every 6-9
weeks supplemented by individual teacher feedback will no longer suffice in the
era of blended learning. Instead, he implies, the new norm will be click by
click feedback to the instructor to provide real time feedback of student
needs. It will be imperative for teachers to know how to interpret data and
make decisions on how to best support each individual student.
A 2010 article, “Needs of elementary and middle school
teachers developing online courses for a virtual school” (Oliver, Kellog, Townsend, & Brady, 2010)came to similar
conclusions regarding what teachers need to be blended learning educators. The
article cited two primary things that teachers needed to transition from
regular educators to blended learning educators. They included strong guidance
from leadership, and more importantly, a high level of teacher development. The
type of professional development in the article shared many similarities with
Hernandez’s article. Both articles are founded on the belief that teachers need
to be able to design, and teach to students with real time data, and teach to
the individual learning the content. Blended learning lends itself to being a
very good way to accomplish many instructional goals and both articles identify
ways to best develop teachers that can accomplish those goals.
References
Hernandez, A. (2011, July 11). Blog.
Retrieved from Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation:
http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blended-learnings-impact-on-teacher-development/
Oliver, K., Kellog, S., Townsend, L., & Brady,
K. (2010). Needs of Elementary and Middle School Teachers Developing Online
Courses for a Virtual School. Distance Education, 31(1), 55-75.
The topic of this week’s module looked at which methods
of professional development have the most impact on student learning. The
article “Teaching Teachers: Professional Development to Improve Student
Achievement” (Hill & Cohen, 2005) cited three main ways
that teachers can significantly improve student learning through professional
development. They include focusing on how students learn a particular subject
matter, instructional practices that are specifically related to the subject
matter and how students understand it, and strengthening teachers’ knowledge of
specific subject matter content.
While Hill and Cohen find three clear ways to help
teacher development, it must be noted that the article is from 2005, nearly 10
years ago. A second, more recent article, "What Research Tells Us: Common Characteristics of Professional Learning that Leads to Student Achievement"(Blank, 2013) also explored the
relationship between professional development and student achievement. Blank identified
16 significant studies, of more than 400 hundred published professional
development studies ((Blank, 2013, p. 52), that scientifically
proved that student learning had achieved gains because of professional
development. The article came to some significant, data driven solutions, which
suggest that the type of professional development given, does have impact on
student learning.
Both articles come to two very similar conclusions on
teacher development.The first is that
professional development must focus on a way for teachers to directly apply
what they learn to their teaching.According to Hill and Cohen (2005), “Research shows that professional development
leads to better instructions and improved student learning when it connects to
the curriculum materials that teachers use. (p. 2)
The second conclusion is “that the more time teachers spend on professional
development, the more significantly they change their practices”. (Hill & Cohen, 2005, p. 2) Blank agrees by
saying that teachers need both “More time for professional learning”(p. 52) and “Longer duration
of professional learning”(p. 52).
Both articles agree that in order to move student learning,
teachers need professional development that is focused on the content that they
teach, and that they need more of that type of professional development than
they are currently receiving.
Works Cited
Blank, R. (2013, Feb). What Research Tells Us: Common
Characteristics of Professional Learning that Leads to Student Achievement. Journal
of Staff Development, 34(1), 50-53.
Hill, H., & Cohen, D.
(2005). Teaching Teachers: Professional Development to Improve Student
Achievement. Research Points, 3(1), 1-4.
