I am in Cincinnati this week for the AP Reading.  While checking my Facebook feeds, I find the post from my husband.  “Just me and the kids now. I am an AP Widower. :)” .  It has been happening every year for the past 4 years now.  I feel a little guilty leaving my family for 11 days.  My children are young, 5, 6 and 8.  It is summer vacation, and I really love the time that we spend on these lazy days of summer, playing by the pool.  But the truth is this is probably the most important staff development I participate in all year… plus, we have a lot of fun! 

Being an AP Reader is an experience that every AP teacher should take advantage of at least once, no matter what the subject.  During this week, I will gain valuable insight as to how the free response questions are graded, and so much more. Over the past 4 years of being an AP Reader, I’ve been able to return to my classroom and directly apply the knowledge that has been gained. It has made me a better AP teacher.

As AP Computer Science A teachers, we are often teaching in a bubble; being the only teacher at our schools who are teaching CS.  So, to spend an entire week with about 150 other excellent computer science teachers at the high school and college level has infinite potential for staff development.  Need a new lab? Want to try a new Java product, but not sure about it? Interested in piloting the new CS Principles course? Host a computing competition? Increase the diversity in your classroom? There is an endless list of ideas and collaborative relationships that take place at the AP Reading.

This year, I have been invited as a Table Leader, which means spending an additional 2 days at the reading, but I am sure the benefits that I will gain this year, will only enhance my teaching that much more.  So, my apologizes to my family.  I will miss you terribly while I’m gone.  I know day 6 will be the worst, but I will be home soon. Energized and ready to make my class even better next year.

 What did you learn this year at the AP Reading?

Crystal

I’ve had the extreme privilege to spend the last three days with some amazing teachers who are trying to expand their teaching skills and include computer science. I was a co-presenter with Kyle Justice at the GA Tech Getting Started with Java workshop.  Some of these teachers are not even planning to teach a computing class in the fall, but they recognize there is a need for CS teachers, and are beginning to prepare themselves. Others will be teaching AP Computer Science for the first time in the fall, or will be teaching CS Principles or Beginning Programming.  All of these teachers worked hard and have earned my respect.

After attending University of Chicago's Professional Development Design Studio, I really had a better idea of what teachers in our workshops needed, and what would make these experiences more beneficial.  I did not implement all that I learned nor all that I wanted to, but it was a start and moving in the right direction. 

My professional development included the following elements:

·         modeling how I teach my students
·         make what I do obvious to the teachers.  For example, I shared stories with them and examples of how I can connect the material and make it meaningful for students.  Also, pointing out pitfalls for students and discussing how I help them work through these obstacles.
·         teach pedagogy as well as programming
·         provide them with resources and provide them time to work and explore
·         engagement!! Teachers were asked to share if statements that they wrote in pairs.  We were able to examine the benefits of the different versions, all while reinforcing that they were all correct and acceptable solutions.
·         show and share – teachers worked on projects, extended them, and then shared what they did, so that we could all benefit from their work

 

These teachers were all very engaged.  They made my job easy and enjoyable. Every time I circulated to the back of the room, they were all working on what was assigned.  This has not always been the case at my staff development trainings.  Often you usually have participants who are checking their email or surfing the internet when they should be paying attention or working on an assignment. I was really impressed! 

Topics covered:

My approach to my beginning programming class has been to provide students with the same material, but in a variety of products. This allows them to see material multiple times with lots of practice to gain mastery. I start my year with a little Lightbot 2.0, maybe a week.  Then we move to Alice and media computation, Exploring Wonderland: Java Programming using Alice and Media Computation by Dann, Cooper and Ericson .  Sometimes, I will add a unit of Greenfoot too.  This is basically how we conducted the workshop.  We spent 1 day in Alice, 1 day in Greenfoot, a day using the Turtle class and then the final day will be working with Pictures. The topics that we cover include: Classes, object, method writing, return types, parameters, proper identifiers, conditionals, if statements, a little exposure to for loops, and a LOT of fun!  We also were sure to leave time to discuss the major issues: CS Principles, AP reading, recruitment, modified schedules, CS 10K Community , and anything else that came up along the way.

My favorite part of these workshops is that I just made a dozen or so new friends and strengthened several relationships with teachers in my county. Some of them will choose to travel this path with me, and I look forward to working with them as they develop a program at their school.  And it is my greatest hope that I will have inspired those who aren’t planning to teach CS next year, to look into teaching it in the future.  Computer Science does make you special and all of them are now computer programmers!

Best of luck group! Thanks for spending a few days with me. 

Crystal

My husband was asked to speak for Career Day at our boys’ school.  He is a software engineer, and would be fulfilling their career strand in the area of STEM. He was told that he would need to be there to present between 9 and 10:30.  WHAT? An hour and a half on Computer Programming? Surely, we will need to incorporate some activities into this presentation. Because of our testing schedule at the high school, I would be free during this time, and offered to come and help him with the activities.  Much to our relief, we found out that there would be three 20 minute presentations, but by this time, I was fully committed and we were excited about sharing Computer Programming.  Our age group was 4th graders, and we spent a week planning what we could squeeze in to our now very condensed time frame.

Every student was either dressed up, or wearing a sign stating what they wanted to do for a career. Students were dressed up as doctors, veterinarians, rock stars, police officers, and some software engineers. As students came into the room, I would ask them what they were dressed up as today.  The first student I asked said, “brain surgeon”.  My reply was, so you are going to be a computer programmer? He was understandably confused, and restated that he was going to be a brain surgeon.  But I know a brain surgeon.  One of my former programming students did an undergraduate degree in computer science and then went on to medical school to be a brain surgeon.  So, yes, brain surgeons can be computer programmers. As a matter of fact, more and more careers require the use of computer programs.  This was our primary message. You can do what it is you want to do, but you will probably need computer programming to do it better and more successfully.

After everyone had settled down, we asked students if they knew what a computer programmer was, and many of them had a pretty good idea. We followed this up with the video from code.org.  We asked students to write down on post-it notes the different careers that they saw and heard being mentioned that will require you to know computer programming. Once the video was over, we had the students share them, and stick them to the board.  It really opened their eyes as they saw programming being used in hospitals, farms, music industry, new media, recreation, etc. They really began to see that computer programming is truly for everyone.

Students developed a list of attributes that made a good computer programmer.  Their list included determination, creativity, math skills, (all 4th grade teachers loved where the code.org video stated they needed to know their multiplication tables), and collaboration. When asked what does a computer programmer look like? They said, "like my mom, my grandpa, like me".  Success!!

We wrapped up our presentation by showing a video about scratch.  Each student was given the web address where they could go and with parent permission, download scratch and become a computer programmer tonight! The students were very excited. 

Our three sessions flew by, and we left feeling that we had begun to transform the image of computer programming. We were able to empower these 4th graders to try something new, to create their own games or skits, to think creatively, and to view computer programming as something that they CAN do.  I'm looking forward to the influx of computer programming students 5 years from now.

I am glad we had the opportunity to share computer science with these young students.
Crystal Furman

Last night, we hosted our first annual Technology Fair.  With so many other departments showcasing their students' work, it just makes sense for the Business and Technology department to do the same thing. Our students are doing amazing work every year. However, we do not always allow others the privilege of sharing in their good work.  To this end, is there any wonder why people are confused about what computer science is? Or whether what we are doing in our business and technology classes is worthwhile? The latter question was answered loudly and clearly last night... YES what we are doing in computing in the modern world, computer applications, engineering, fashion marketing, video broadcasting, entrepreneurship and computer science is worthwhile... and AMAZING!

Goals
Our primary goal for last night's event was to showcase student work. I'm all about getting the most out of events though, and I wanted this to be a major public relations event; a recruitment event; and a showcase event. I wanted parents, students, and siblings to walk away feeling glad that they are in our cluster, proud to be in our classes, and eager to sign up. Mission accomplished: We had several elementary aged students exclaiming, "I love this place", "I can't wait to come here".  They were happy and engaged with several fun, and age appropriate activities. Parents were amazed with their kids, thanking us for showing them what they've been up to, and students were very proud to be there.  They loved showing their robots, projects and games to others.

Showcasing Student Work
Each teacher was given an area of our media center to display student work.  It was up to them to decide HOW the work would be presented.  Computers were utilized for student created games and websites.  We utilized display boards to showcase fashion marketing projects, and picture collages. Our Computing in the Modern World students had several Lego robots; some programmed to follow a line, others doing spin art. Students who competed in the Science Fair and the GA Tech Alice competitions received special recognition for their work. Our video broadcasting students did a compilation of their best episodes this school year and had this loop on the large screens in our media center. In engineering we had bridge demonstrations, drawings, model rockets, and mouse trap cars. Our robotics team was present with Vex robotics demonstrations.

Something for Everyone
Because recruitment is always in the back of my mind, each teacher was tasked with having an activity that was appropriate for elementary and middle aged students. The kids had a blast!


Elementary and preschool students decoding pictures.






Activities included:
~Lego Spin Art - Students created very colorful pictures using Lego robots.
~Flowchart hop-scotch - Using a coin to flip and a dice to roll, navigate through a if statement flowchart and complete the tasks along the way. So if the coin is heads the path might have them hop on one foot, but if it is tails, they would do a jumping jack. After these activities (after the if statement concluded) they might say "Howdy".
~Picture Decoding - An activity from CS Unplugged, students are given sequences of numbers to represent lengths of black and white pixels.
~Dress Your baseball player - Children created their own baseball teams uniform.
~Robotics demonstrations - Some were allowed to drive our VEX robots.
~Games - Everyone was able to tryout our games.

Next year, we plan to have a completion card for students to get a stamp for each activity, and then a prize once they've filled up their card.  We will also work with the teachers at our cluster schools to give students incentives for attending. For example, at my child's school in order to get an E in music you need to do something extra, for example they can play a piano piece for  their class, and in PE they can belong to a PE club, such as running club. So,  maybe they can get credit in an area for attending and participating in the Tech  Fair.

Ideas for Next Year
In addition to the changes to improve the involvement of younger folks, we are looking at how else we can improve our Tech Fair. One big area that we can easily improve is  planning.  The idea of a Tech Fair didn't come until a few months ago, so  we did not have a lot of time to plan and bring everything together.  With  advanced notice, we will be on our school calendar, and our teachers will be  able to begin compiling student work much earlier. Student could be asked to put  together a portfolio of their work to put on display, and this would take a lot of the preparation off the shoulders on the teachers who spent hours pulling the  projects all together.

We are also looking at the possibility of holding a cluster wide Tech Fair, to include work from our 2 middle schools and 4 elementary schools.  This would increase the awareness in our community as well as draw a lot more students to our event.

What Have You  Done?
Please share with us your experiences with your own Tech Fair, or how you have showcased your student work. We would love to hear your ideas and benefit from your successes.

Yours in
Computing!
Crystal

If your school is anything like my school, May is a CRAZY month.  It is full of testing.  End of Course Tests, AP Tests, post tests, final exams.... We even have a special calendar for the month of May to help us coordinate these tests while trying to squeeze in instruction and review.

For many of the days between now and the end of school, we are on a block schedule, meeting with 3 classes each day.  But we are a 7 period a day school usually, so we have had to include days like today to be sure that we are meeting with all our classes the same number of minutes every week. Today's schedule goes something like this: 1, 2, 3 periods meet for 20 minutes, 5 meets for 2 hours, and has lunch, 4 and then 6 periods, are normal and then students go back to 5th. Our LSTC who created the schedule is simply amazing and AWESOME. I applaud her for creating a schedule that ensures that our instruction time is preserved at a time when tests are ruling!  It isn't pretty, but she has taken our testing lemons, and has made palatable lemonaide.  :)

So, where does that leave my AP Computer Science A students who are finished with their AP exam? Some days we will meet for 2 hours, some days not at all.  Students who take other AP exams will not be in class.  How do you get ANYTHING meaningful and productive accomplished with such a crazy schedule and only a week and 1/2 before final exams start?

When I taught AP Computer Science A in NY, our situation was a little different.  First of all, the school year wasn't over until the end of June, so we had about 6 weeks between the AP exam and the end of the year.  And our school was very small, we only offered 4 AP classes, so the students weren't out taking tests for 2 weeks. Post AP was an issue as it related to motivation, but it was easier to deal with, because we did have a large chunk of time that allowed us to do further study into AB level topics, or to complete a LARGE project together.

Solution: Post-Ap Projects
My students are starting their post-ap projects today. Our final exams are broken up into 2 pieces; objective and performance.  Each part is worth 10% of the student's average.  The post-ap project will count as my students' performance exam.  So it is a BIG deal!

Students were provided with an outline of this project at the beginning of 2nd semester so that they could begin thinking about what they wanted to do. I also encouraged them to start working through the coursera self-study for Computer Science 101 to help them review early material taught in our course.  Some students choose to compete in the STEM Modeling Challenge, which began in January. These early starters have been keeping logs of their progress throughout these projects.

Since not all students' schedules will be the same over the next 8 days, the Post-AP project will be more of an independent study, with each student keeping a daily log of their progress. The goal is for them to apply and learn something with the little time we have left, and their documentation is evidence of their use of time.  The emphasis is not on completing a large project, but on applying their knowledge and learning something new.

Students are allowed to work alone or in small groups, but each person is responsible for their own log.  Students are presented with the following options: finch robots, Alice, Scratch, Greenfoot, Python, coursera course, android cell phones or another project that the student proposes for approval.

Every year, students email me about how beneficial the post-AP project has been for them once they are in college. Those who study Python, now know another language.  They are the experts in their college classrooms and making A's.  This project definitely gives these last few days purpose. 

What are you doing with your students after the AP exam?

Enjoy!
Crystal

Recently, I sought out approval to offer 6 online review sessions for AP Computer Science students across our county.  Working in conjunction with Stephanie Arrington from Parkview HS and other AP CS teachers throughout the county, we were able to advertise these session and prepare hour long review sessions over a period of 3 weeks. We can not wait for the AP scores to come in so that we can see how these sessions have benefited students. 

The process started with a proposal that was sent to our county department chair. The proposal included the use of Blackboard collaborate to offer review on the following topic: Array, ArrayList, 2D Array; Object Oriented Programming; Recursion and Loop Tracing; GridWorld Parts 1- 3; GridWorld Part 4; and Testing Tips and Free Response.  We were granted permission to move forward. 

Advertising was handled through the classroom teacher and posted on our county Technical Education webpage.  We encouraged teachers to attend sessions with their students, because this lends an element of credibility to the sessions.  In addition, we encouraged teachers to give students an incentive for attending. Each teacher was provided with a link to a registration survey for students to complete.  Students were asked for their name, school, teacher, email and which session they would be willing to attend.  A week before the session started, students were emailed the link and reminded to attend.  Teachers also posted the information on their webpages. As students began to register, I encouraged school rivalry, by sending emails out thanking those teachers who have gotten their students to register.  This seemed to work very well. In the end 218 students and their teachers registered for these sessions. 

Stephanie and I planned lessons together that included about 5 multiple choice warm up questions, instruction and a free response. We took turns presenting the sessions and running all the behind the scene tasks. While one person presented the other person, started the recordings, took attendance - once at the start and once at the end, and most importantly answered student questions that were entered into the chat window.  Along the way, they would flag the presenter when clarification was needed. 

During the session, another one of our stellar teachers, Karen Curtis of Collins Hill, created an assignment for students who were watching the recordings. These were distributed to teachers so that students could watch the sessions, answer the questions and prove that the session was viewed.  The questions ranged from content, to tips that were provided during the session, and even mistakes that the presenters made.... students truly had to watch the recording to answer the questions.

What struck me most about doing these sessions, was how enthusiastic both the students and teachers were at attending them.  If the students' teacher was not in attendance, students remarked, "where is _________ tonight".  They really appreciated their teachers taking time in the evening to spend with them. All the teachers pitched in to answer questions and to help keep the students on track.  On one occasion when Mrs. Curtis was unable to attend, Ray Parsons from Gwinnett School of Math, Science and Technology filled in for her.  I am so impressed with our teachers and their dedication.  I feel blessed that I have the privilege to work with such awesome people. 


Challenges

We did have some challenges implementing these sessions. And will make improvements for next year. 

One challenge / blessing was the sheer number of students who attended. The first several sessions we had over 100 students.  About mid way through, the attendance tapered off to about 70.  When there were 100 students, it made managing the session very difficult.  We had to establish some norms for how they behaved in the session. 

• We removed their ability to draw on the whiteboard.
• We encouraged them to be sure their conversations were school appropriate and reminded them that these sessions were recorded. 
• We had to remind students to not have side conversations during the session, because this made keeping up with questions very difficult.  The chat window in collaborate scrolls each time a student enters a post, so it is very hard to scroll up and see what someone has posted. 
• We utilized the polling so that students were not entered answers into the chat. 
• Instructed them to use the emoticons that were next to their name vs. posting smile faces into the chat box. 

All in all, students behaved themselves very well without too much redirection.

Drop in Attendance


We did see a decline in attendance over time.  Some of this could be attributed to a lack of email reminders and activities at local schools. This is a busy time of year for schools with award banquets, prom, etc.  After the first few sessions, we didn't send emails every time because there were so many email addresses that it made using web mail very difficult.  At first we didn't realize how vital these emails were, because the link didn't change from week to week. But not all students realized that they could use the same link, and so they didn't attend. We will be sure to send email reminders prior to each session. We could also utilize remind101 to have students sign up to receive text reminders. This service would allow us to schedule reminders  ahead of time, to be sent the day of the review. Many of our students are more apt to pay attention to a text then they are to look at email. 

Incentives for Students

Each teacher handled this incentive in their own way. Several required students to attend and complete an assignment that was graded. Sessions were recorded, so if a student couldn't attend, they were still able to get credit by watching the recording and turning in the assignment. Others gave drop grades or extra credit for attendance. 

Follow up
We will be sending students a follow up survey about these review sessions.  We would like to know what they liked? What they thought was most helpful? What they would like to see more of? What they didn't like? What they thought we could cut out? We are also curious to see if the number of session and topics were appropriate.  Would students like more sessions? Or fewer? What additional topics would they like to see offered? 

Conclusion
This was a huge success! Beyond anything I expected. We have about 400 students enrolled in AP CS A across our county and we had 1/4 of them attending on a regular basis. I mark this in the success column. The students and teachers were great.  And best of all the sessions were free to them!

We will DEFINITELY be looking at offering these again next year.  In the mean time, teachers are planning to utilize the recordings in their classrooms. 

Click here for recordings.

Crystal L. Furman