I’m fortunate to be a member of an excellent Professional Learning Community (PLC) focused on the computer science pathway at my school. We are given an hour each week to develop formative assessments, analyze data, reflect on our instructional practices, and improve our students’ experience in our classes. One of the essential standards for all ..read more

This summer’s reading was a balance of school-related and personal books. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport Cal Newport’s writing were recommended to me by a friend. After reading some of his blog posts, this seemed like a good book with which to start. It was a quick ..read more

For the past two years, our AP Computer Science A (APCSA) students have completed the Tetris Lab at the end of the Object Oriented Design (OOD) unit. The initial idea and structure for the lab was forked from Stanford Tetris Project from Stanford’s CS108 by Nick Parlante, which I found as it was a SIGCSE ..read more

I’m teaching a new class this year in which students complete a lot of activities. Each activity has an associated Google document that provides scaffolding. Students need to reference these activity documents throughout the unit as well as use them as a resource for summative performance evaluations at the end of the unit. My approach ..read more

One of the units during the fall semester in my Software Engineering class focuses on technology, society, and ethics. The big idea is that “Students will research, analyze, discuss, and present contemporary issues at the intersection of technology, society, and ethics”. The guiding question is “How does technology affect change from the critical context of ..read more

I haven’t published my summer reading list in a few years. This summer, for some reason, I seemed to have more time for reading. Most of my reading centered on potential new books for the Technology, Society, and Ethics book study unit in my Software Engineering class where students analyze these texts through a lens ..read more

The audience for this post is a bit more specialized than usual. This post is for teachers who will be engaged in remote learning, use macOS, and have similar requirements for streaming and recording online lessons as I. [Updated 12aug2020: I decided to purchase Loopback. It made the audio configuration so much easier. I’ve updated ..read more

This year, perhaps more than any in the past, it will be important for me to get to know my students as quickly as possible. At the start of each year, I administer a survey to facilitate this process. Many of the questions that I ask are from start-of-year surveys shared by John Burk and ..read more

I’ve been meaning to update my post from 2018 – Physical Representations of Variables, Objects, and References in APCSA with how it has evolved the past two years. The impetus to finally do so is due to attending Colleen Lewis and Hannah McDowell’s CSTA 2020 session, “AP CS A: Physical Models of Java Memory”. Colleen has ..read more

This summer’s reading was a balance of school-related and personal books. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport Cal Newport’s writing were recommended to me by a friend. After reading some of his blog posts, this seemed like a good book with which to start. It was a quick read and mostly reinforced my understanding of the importance of “deep work”. Last year, when we had block scheduling during, and I was isolated during these blocks, I found that I got a ton of stuff done. While it will be more challenging this school year, I’m hoping to continue to find t ..read more