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December 31, 2005
Did you know? Membership Resources
On the CSTA website, two of the benefits listed for CSTA individual membership are access to:
* free online training courses available through the Sun Academic Initiative, and
* the Career Resource Centre, ACM's source for career articles, job board, and career assessment tools.
Links to both of these resources are available from the CSTA website (left side under Professional Development). Entry into either of the areas may at first seem intimidating, but the effort will be well rewarded.
Whether your exploration in the Career Resource Centre is through the career assessment tools or through the articles available, the investment in time will provide information that should be of use to you and to your students.
This is even more evident for the courses available from the Sun Academic Initiative. When registering, for any of these excellent courses, ranging from "Fundamentals of JAVA" to topics in Distributed Computing Concepts and more, the savings become readily apparent. These lessons are fast-paced, easy to understand, and more than justify the cost of CSTA membership.
Please, avail yourself of these benefits, and let us know how else we can be of service to you, the most important resource of CSTA, our members.
Charmaine Bentley
Membership Chair
Posted by cstephenson at 05:46 PM | Comments (3)
December 26, 2005
My Year in CSTA
Like many, during the holiday season I consider the many things I have to be thankful for. High on my list this year is the CSTA. It is hard to believe the organization is only a year old!
So many exciting things are happening at all levels. Perhaps the most exciting thing to me is the creation of local chapters! What a great chance for local teachers to get to know each other and feel less isolated. I am so pleased for each area that had a person willing to step up and organize a meeting; I hope more chapters will form this year.
Being involved with the CSTA provides many opportunities: to learn about the status of CS education far beyond the local community, to think about best practices in teaching CS, to begin creating the change we want to see in the world. Personally, being on the board has provided numerous opportunities. Most important: the chance to work and become friends with some smart, dedicated, interesting individuals. One truth I have found about participating with this group is the more involved I am willing to be, the more I get out of it. I am so glad I was willing to take the leap to be more than "just a middle school teacher"!
I hope you will think about filling out an application for a position on the Board of Directors or volunteering to help on one of the committees. If you're a computer science teacher or just interested in K-12 computer science education and you aren't a member, why not join now?
Michelle Hutton
Equity Chair
Posted by cstephenson at 12:03 PM | Comments (1)
December 16, 2005
A Big Shout Out to Sun
I have never been much of a hardware geek. I like my computer to do what I want it to do with as little fuss as possible, but beyond that, I probably do not pay as much attention as I should. Sometimes, however, when something especially good happens, even I must acknowledge that hardware is a beautiful thing.
Since the day CSTA was first brought into being by ACM, we have been working on the dream of an online resource that would provide teachers with access to a rich repository of teaching and learning materials for K-12 computer science education.
Toward this end, a small but dedicated committee of volunteers has been collecting resources being developed at JETT (http://jett.acm.org/) and TECS (http://tecs.acm.org/) workshops across the country, developing a classification scheme based upon the Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science, and preparing the existing resources for entry into the repository. This Spring we achieved a major project milestone with the unveiling of our new user interface which was created by students at Villanova University, under the direction of Dr. Lillian Cassel.
The web repository is being built using DSpace, a highy-customizable open source repository facility created at MIT. The CSTA repository utilizes the standard Dublin core metadata so that the material it contains will be harvestable by other major repositories such as the National Science Data Library.
The really big news, however, came just a couple of weeks ago when Sun Microsystems Vice President Greg Papadopoulos (a member of the CSTA Advisory Council) offered to provide the equipment upon which this new repository will reside and all future development will be carried out.
And here is what Sun provided:
Sun Fire V210, 2 x 1.34Ghz UltraSPARC IIIi, 4 x 512MB DIMMS, 2 x 73GB Drive, 4 x 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet, ALOM Remote Manager, Single PCI Slot, 1PSU & Java ES & Solaris 10 pre-installed.
Localized Power Cord Kit North American/Asian
X-Option - Internal DVD-ROM Drive Slimline, for Sun Fire V210 and Sun Fire V240.
1GB Memory Expansion Kit (2*512MB) low-profile DDR PC2100 or faster registered ECC DIMMs for use in Sun Fire V210, Sun Fire V240, Sun Fire V440, Netra 240, Netra 440, Sun Blade 1500 and Sun Blade 2500.
Internal 146GB 10K Ultra 3 SCSI HDD, 3.5" x 1" drive with barrier plate
Solaris 9 CD-ROM media kit (latest release). SPARC Platform Edition.
Thanks to this most generous donation from Sun, the CSTA web repository is closer to being a reality than we expected. Our plan right now is to have it up and running and available to all CSTA members by the summer!
Thank you, Sun, for helping bring us so much closer to our goal!
Chris
Posted by cstephenson at 12:18 PM | Comments (2)
December 05, 2005
Everybody Needs a Little Inspiration
Anyone who does not believe that teaching computer science is a tough job has never faced a row of student faces day after day or tried to keep all of the hardware and software actually functioning. And that does not even begin to address the increasing stress that all teachers are facing. So every once in a while, it is important to reflect upon what matters and why what you do is important.
Today our CSTA Equity Chair, Michelle Hutton, sent me a student course evaluation that she has been keeping since 2002. Here is what the student had to say:
"I've learned not to be afraid of computers. I've learned some of the fundamentals and code of CS. I've learned that learning computer science is a process where you need to learn one thing before you move on to the next. Once you have mastered a concept, creating something you're proud of can be easy & fun."
Even if they do not say it quite so well, my guess is that all of you have students who have felt the same way, and who, if not immediately then some day, have realized the importance and usefullness of what you are trying to teach them.
Chris
Posted by cstephenson at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2005
Letter in Edutopia
My friend Joe Kmoch emailed me this morning to let me know that my Letter to the Editor had been published in one of my favourite magazines... Edutopia, published by the George Lucas Foundation.
Joe also suggested that I post a copy of the letter for you, so here it is.
IT DOESN'T COMPUTE
I am so glad that Todd Oppenheimer ("Tech Made Easy," October 2005) called attention to the fact that too few high schools teach computer science. When we talk about the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education for students, computer science is often completely ignored despite the fact that computing is now necessary for almost every single transaction and interaction in our society.
As a result, though considerable time and money have been spent on increasing and supporting integration of computing tools across the curriculum, computer science has been left to wither and die in many schools, school districts, and states. The result of this shortsightedness is that we continue to fall farther and farther behind on the indicators of high-level computing ability.
For example, U.S. universities no longer dominate in the prestigious ACM International Programming contest. The long-term effect of this problem is that, though we may excel at training students to use the tools that power our world, we are forgetting to train those who will build them, and everyone knows that it is the tool builders, not the tool users, who guarantee our economic future.
For some reason, there is an enormous misconception that there are no jobs in computing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every labor prognostication we have shows that the gap between the highly skilled workers we produce from our schools and the jobs that need filling in our society is growing, not shrinking. It is also probably safe to say that the great scientific breakthroughs of this century (especially in the combinatorial sciences such as bioinformatics) will depend on computing knowledge. We continue to ignore this fact at our peril.
CHRIS STEPHENSON
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
COMPUTER SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Posted by cstephenson at 06:53 PM | Comments (3)