High School Computer Science Belongs on the Web
I spent a good chunk of time this summer working on my high school computer science program’s website. I did it partly because I love tinkering with web stuff, partly to work on WordPress skills going but mostly because I think it’s critical to my teaching practice.
Ordering my goals for the site helped me figure out how to organize things. Here’s what I came up with:
- Provide access to learning materials and assignments to current students (replace textbooks)
- Empower students to interact with the content and each other
- Allow parents to easily monitor their students’ learning and deadlines
- Highlight student successes
- Advertise to prospective students
- Communicate with Seattle’s computing community
- Provide access to materials for other teachers to use
When I visited schools in the area before committing to teaching, I was appalled to see a lot of old textbooks. Sadly, public school budgets tend to only allow for new books every five to ten years which in a changing field like computer science is not always appropriate. I decided that my courses would have to operate without conventional textbooks so that I wouldn’t feel chained to obsolete materials. This makes a lot of teachers look at me as though I were crazy, but I find it freeing. There are several free textbooks I pull readings from but mostly I rely on content made available by college computer science instructors. I mix and match to meet the needs and interests of my students and they know to always look at the online calendar for their class to find out what we’re doing.
The biggest changes I made in the site’s organization involved making advertising more upfront. I hope it can now serve as a communication tool with prospective students and the Seattle-area computing community. I’m particularly happy with the ‘beyond the classroom‘ section which will allow me to highlight interesting internships, college classes, competitions, etc students are involved in.
Overall, students have responded very positively to having a mostly paper-free experience in my classes (I surveyed them about it). As computer science instructors, I feel we have a responsibility to model effective leveraging of computing tools. What better way than by establishing a web presence for our programs?
RSS
LinkedIn
Facebook
I agree on many fronts (as you know). Starting out to teach in high school, I am also going for course materials totally online.
There is one more benefit I would add to your list, which I have found to be the case in past teaching: having a convenient online archive of your teaching portfolio. Years later, it is always nice to be able to just point people to a URL for a record of how you taught.
It takes more work to do all of this, but once you set a mechanism inlace, it’s a whole lot less work for each subsequent course.
Good point! I hadn’t thought of that aspect (probably because I haven’t had the opportunity to reap the benefits!)
I am doing this out of necessity. My intro to computing class meets only once per week, so I am putting short lectures on YouTube so that I can use the class time to interact with the students instead of lecturing. We are also using a mid-week web conference during which students can share their screens so I can see their code and what kind of mistakes they are making.