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Tag: certification

Certified CS teachers - 2 flags in NY

I've been running Hunter's teacher certification program now for three years. We started with our Advanced Certificate which allows currently working teachers to earn an additional cert in CS and soon a few masters students joined the pipeline. In three years we've made great progress. Approximately 45 New York City teachers are either state certified to teach CS or are qualified to recieve the certification once they file with the state.
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If you build programs, teachers will come

It's been a month since my last post. In fact it seems that most of the usual CS Ed bloggers are down in frequency this year. For me it's probably been Covid fatigue and the resulting funk but I'm going to see if I can force myself to write more frequently. So, the other day someone was asking about CS certification in NY state on Facebook. One comment caught my eye.
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New York City has Certified CS Teachers

I'm super proud to say that New York City now has state certified Computer Science Teachers!!!!!! It's been a long road - really long if you consider I got started on my CS Ed journey decades ago and there's a long road ahead but we hit a major milestone. I started at Hunter a little over five years ago and creating teacher certification programs was one of the goals. Back then, the state had neither CS certification nor CS standards.
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Physics Teacher Wanted - must NOT know Physics

There were a few posts over on Facebook this weekend about teacher certification. It started with a question - should teacher certification be based on an exam like APCS-A with the teacher correctly answering 85% or greater. A lively discussion followed. There was agreement and disagreement with responses ranging from: good idea it's too hard it's not hard enough There was also a discussion of the importance of content knowledge vs knowing how to teach in general.
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Why Strong K12 Teacher Certification is Important

About a week ago New York State's new regulation creating a K12 CS teacher certification went live. Just the other day I was honored to be interviewed by Matt Flamm of Crain's New York in a follow up piece about it. Having K12 CS teacher certification is big and having quality programs that lead to certification is HUGE. In my view, it's a game changer. Let's Focus on high school, my wheelhouse.
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New York State moving forward with CS Teacher Certification

Last April I woke up early and trekked up to Albany along with a few of my Hunter College colleagues to share our thoughts on K12 Computer Science teacher certification with the Board of Regents. We gave a presentation to the Regents Higher Education Committee and afterwards had a chance to talk with some of the Regents as well as other members of the New York State Department of Education.
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Self Certification - not a good idea

You've probably seen an image like this: It's what you see when you try to access a secure web site but the web site itself certified itself as being secure. When people see this on a professional site it sets off all manner of red flags. We feel much more comfortable when go to a site and we don't see that error. When we see the secure green lock in the url bar indicating that this site is certified through an external trusted source.
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