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.

This past weekend was Catskillsconf - my favorite event of the year. I spent the weekend up in Ulster County with a bunch of my students. some great friends old and new, and Devorah. It was a great weekend but I was mostly offline. As a result I missed a rather heated discussion in the CS Ed Facebook groups. The debate was over whether or not Strong AP CSP exam results are indicative of a good curriculum or good professional development (PD).

The big push at last year's CSTA conference was the release of the new CSTA K12 standards. It seemed that every other session was pushing them in one way or another. I've been meaning to share my thoughts about them or, more specifically, learning standards in general for a while but with announcement about federal funding for CS coming from the White House last week I thought it was time.

I read this piece earlier today on Nancy Bailey's blog. TL;DR (although it really isn't too long so you should read it) - it's on Laurene Powell Jobs, her efforts to "reform" education and why she's misguided as are most of the well to do non-educators working hard to change and in many cases privatize public education. Laura posts a nice list of simple, common sense ways to improve education.

Now that I'm back from vacation and summer's winding down I thought I'd start getting back to more classroom related posts. I still have a few summer topics I want to write about – standards and side projects in particular but I'm also looking forward to talking more about the classroom since, after all, at my core, I'm a teacher. When I saw this article in my inbox this morning I thought I'd talk about it.

Yesterday Mark Guzdial blogged about a NY Times piece discussing Silicon Valleys influence on education through Code.org. Mark questioned the validity of the piece. If you don't read Mark's blog and you're in CS Ed you probably should. I tried to leave a comment on Mark's blog - not about the NY Times article but rather my thoughts on why I think it's important that we remain wary and vigilant to industry and outsiders influence and impact on CS education and on education in general.

For anyone involved in K12 CS education, the past few years have been a wild ride. When I first tried to make inroads in the DOE decades ago I couldn't get through the door. Now, CS Education is everyone's darling. It's really amazing. It's been a combination of grass roots efforts by teachers, non profit education efforts such as TEALS, advocacy of groups like Code.org and amazing individuals like Fred Wilson who has probably done more to move the needle of CS Ed in NY than any other 10 people combined.

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.

Is it easier to take CS people and teach them to teach or is it easier to take teachers and teach them CS? The question gets batted around from time to time. This time via twitter: Some think it's easier to teach a teacher to teach CS than to teach a CS pro to teach. @alfredtwo is not one of them https://t.co/QCUP8d8llZ — Diane Levitt (@diane_levitt) July 3, 2017 Agreed.

Back in February, I shared my thoughts on losing CS teachers to the tech industy. TL;DR - I don't think it will be a CS Ed problem. That said, I do think that it will be hard to find good CS teachers but the reason is because it will get harder and harder to find good teachers in general. There are plenty of reasons why it's harder to become a career teacher but I don't want to talk about those today.