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.

Last week I talked about using GitHub issues as a mechanism for class communication. I thought it might be helpful to follow up on it and also felt that a video would be better than text. So, here it is, 16 minutes on how you can use GitHub issues for class communication. I don't show examples of everything like @ tagging but I think it shows some of the power of using GitHub and GitHub classroom beyond just a software repo and versioning.

I had a conversation with my principal during my last year at Stuy. She said "whenever the superintendent or high level education people come and ask to see our best teachers I can never bring them to Jim's class." Everyone knows that Jim is the best. I describe him as "the teacher I aspire to be." What's the problem? The problem is that Jim didn't teach the way the powers that be wanted him to teach.

I just read this post by Bethany Crystal - Going off script. Bethany writes that while she normally essentially scripts important presentations, this time she went more off the cuff. It made me think about how I teach and a disturbing trend I've seen in CS education and education in general. I've never strictly used a script for teaching. When I started I did use very detailed lesson plans. Back then I was teaching math.

Never use global variables Never break out of a loop These are two "best practices" that are frequently touted in early CS classes both at the high school and college level. They came up a couple of times yesterday. Once in the Facebook APCS-A teachers group and once on Alfred Thompson's blog. Alfred post was topically on global variables. Actually it was deeper than just global variables. It's also about how students progress - what they can figure out at various stages of progress and how what seems like a good idea early on the path to computer science doesn't seem so great later on.

If you check out Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other blog sites you might get the idea that you're the worst teacher in the world. The internet abounds with people sharing tweets and posts about wonderful lessons they've just taught, witnessed or learned about in professional development. Sure, the teacher forums rife with requests for lesson ideas and resources but the shared material is always aces. It makes sense, people in the community want to share things that worked for them or things they think will work.

I saw a couple of tweets from Sarah Judd this morning: A lot of CS Ed PD assumes you are new to CS. I really want CS Ed PD for people like us that came from a CS background and want to understand the pedagogy for CS in particular better. Do you know of some? — Sarah Judd (@SarahEJudd) June 27, 2018 Yes! I love SIGCSE and CSTA. I just feel like.

Every morning one of the first things I do is quickly glance at my emails and other notifications. I really should wait until I'm more awake but old habits die hard. As some of you know over the past couple of years I've been making a series of videos and related post on using my editor of choice, Emacs. I've done 48 videos, have over 2500 subscribers on YouTube and people seem to find some value from the series.

The most recent NYC CSTA chapter meeting was "How do I assess CS?" I wanted to go but it's been such a crazy month I was just too wiped out. Fortunately, the meetup was recorded. I was able to watch the first half this morning while working out on my stationary trainer which leads me to today's rare Saturday morning blog post. The meetup consisted of two panels. The first was made up of K12 teachers who taught CS.

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.