I woke up to this tweet by Mark Guzdial today:#pro-version-or ed-version.org# An indication that CS Ed in US high schools is about vocational training: 2 (of 5) recommended sessions at the @csteachersorg conference are on Github and Agile. Is @CSforAll a Silicon Valley jobs program? https://t.co/n8ugnmTU84 — Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) May 28, 2020 This led to a lively discussion throughout the day with lots of likes and lots of comments.

When we first went remote I jumped on Zoom. I already new the technology and it most simulated a live class. Basically, it was the best combination if quick, easy, and effective and we were under the gun to get something going and give our students some sense of normalcy and continuity. As we settled in though, it made sense to try some different things. One was the "lab packet.

I was reading Mary Clair Wright's new blog the other day. It's always great to see another teacher sharing publicly online. One line caught my eye in her latest post - <blockquote> Remote instruction is weird, I can’t see them. I have to trust that they will message me with questions. </blockquote> This is a real problem. It's hard enough in a regular class where we can pick up an all sorts of cues and use all sorts formal and informal assessments but when the students are on the other end of a teleconference or even more challenging an email or chat it's even harder.

While tools like Zoom, Slack and others are a tremendous boon as we're forced to do all our teaching remotely the limitations become apparent as we settle in and try to go beyond the basics of an offsite meeting. Today was code review day in my CS1 class. It's a lesson that I enjoy teaching and I think my students get a lot out of it. Today we had to do it remote.

Let's talk about something other than distance learning and COVID-19. You know you've been doing something a long time when you've got legends. Over on my alumni mailing list JonAlf shared a web site showing off what his current students were doing in their computer graphics class. Somewhere in the thread, Con replied: Someone should put up a video of the fabulous and fantastically famous hand animation called FINGER.MDL. It dates from a little before my time, but stories elevated it to legendary status.

I didn't expect to read a Fred Wilson post on teaching online but that's what I found when I visited his blog this morning. Don't get me wrong - I suspect that Fred has the makings of a great teacher, it's just not what I expected to find. There have been many posts about education but I don't recall any about teaching or more specifically the art of teaching. I did find this post though which actually speaks to some of the thoughts today's post got churning.

I organize a monthly professional development session for CS teachers. It's targeted at teachers who are beyond the beginner stage and don't want yet another hello world blinky arduino scratch workshop. Don't get me wrong, given the need for CS teachers we need plenty of beginner workshops but we also need to take teachers to the next level. I refer to my workshops as being for teachers of APCS-A, similar, or beyond.

Continuing from yesterday, what about the article and report on pay and free teacher resources. The report looked at three sources - one pay and two free. They came up with a number of results but I think they largely missed the point. Their bottom line conclusion was that 'Overall, reviewers rate most of the materials as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using”.' They also didn't seem to find that neither the for profit or free sources were universally better.

There was a bit of buzz a couple of months ago when Amazon announced an online marketplace for educational resources. It wasn't a new concept - on the pay side, Teachers Pay Teachers has been around for a while and in terms of free, there are many online resources but they're not necessarily well organized or curated. What was the buzz? Should teachers be charging their peers for class materials or should they be providing them for free.

Every few years the experts give us some new magic bullet, some new teaching fad research based pedagogical technique. Teachers are trained in it, forced to use it - frequently as a one size fits all. If we do, we're good teachers, if we don't we get the dreaded ineffective on our annual ratings. I was reminded of this when reading Mark Guzdial's recent blog post on things he got wrong in Computing Education.