ADE Institute 2023 - Selected To Attend As Active Alumni ADE

 

I'm excited to attend the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute next week. I can't wait to connect with other new and active alumni ADE's and to learn about the new Everyone Can Code activities!

CSTA2023 - Expanding Computer Science Pathways Through TEALS

 

 Are you interested in learning how to expand the number of staff in your school or district who can teach computer science courses and how you can build the confidence and knowledge level of non-CTE licensed staff members so that they feel confident to teach computer science?

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I hope you are able to join me to learn more about the Microsoft TEALS program and how the program pairs computer science volunteers with a teachers to offer support while the teachers are learning to teach computer science. 

I was partnered with a computer science volunteer this past spring and taught an Intro to App Development course as part of our district-wide virtual course program. Twenty-six students from four high schools were enrolled in the class and learned about iOS app development. I was also learning about Swift, Xcode, and iOS app development and had started my own pathway into iOS app development and teaching high school computer science in August 2022.

Session Description

Computer science careers offer the highest entry-level salaries with the lowest level of post-secondary education, and the resulting debt that often accompanies a college degree. How do we open the doors to future career pathways in computer science for students to pursue these careers, personal interests, and passions beyond the capacity of classes taught by CTE-licensed staff? Learn how the TEALS program helped expand our computer science course offerings and provided support for non-CTE licensed teachers through industry computer science expert mentors who supported teachers learning to code while teaching new app development courses with the Apple Develop in Swift curriculum and Xcode. Learn about the TEALS program and how it is helping to expand our computer science course offerings, grow the skills and knowledge of new computer science teachers, and expand our capacity for more equitable access to computer science courses for our students. Find out more about the free Develop in Swift curriculum and resources to get students creating apps instead of just consuming them.

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The Why

Currently there are not enough graduates from colleges and universities with computer science degrees to fill the existing number of open jobs. Computer science careers offer highest entry level salaries with the lowest level of post-secondary education. This is an economic win-win for students in Title I schools and school districts in that it offers students the opportunity to enter a career field that offers more than a living wage without accumulating a mountain of college debt.

To ensure that students are prepared for computer science-related careers, more opportunities for students to learn about computer science during high school need to exist to build students' knowledge and confidence levels.

What Is TEALS?

TEALS, Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, is a Microsoft philanthropy focused on building sustainable computer science programs in high schools. TEALS partners teachers with computer science volunteers who can offer support and guidance while the teacher is learning to teach computer science.

My Pathway Into Computer Science

Just one year ago, I began my own pathway to learning iOS app development and teaching computer science. I attended the AVID Summer Institute and a secondary computer science institute course along with a couple teacher from my district who were going to teach the Intro to App Development course with a TEALS volunteer. 

During the fall semester of 2022, I coached a teacher who was teaching the iOS app development class, worked through the Develop in Swift Explorations curriculum that we were using for the class curriculum, and began coding apps in Xcode myself.

In the spring, I taught a section of the Intro to App Development course on top of my district computer science program manager duties and worked with an awesome TEALS volunteer who helped guide me through the curriculum and provided a support net as I jumped in to start teaching Swift and iOS app development.

Let's Connect

I hope that you can join me to learn more about TEALS, how to expand the number of teachers who can teach computer science courses in your school or district, and to hear about my first-hand experiences with the TEALS program.

Resources:

Microsoft TEALS Program

Develop in Swift Explorations curriculum - Free curriculum available from Apple

CSTA2023 - 10 Steps To Hosting An App Design And Prototype Camp

 

 Are you interested in learning more about how to host an in-person or virtual summer camp or after school club for students to get them excited about coding and computer science? You can host a club or camp focused on app design and app prototyping in 10 easy steps.

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App prototyping is the process of creating a working model of an app. Before spending a lot of time writing the code for an app, you can create a prototype to help you map out the interactivity and features of the app. Essentially creating models of each screen, the features of the app, and demonstrating what happens when you push a button. Does the app go to the camera app, a photo gallery, a data entry tool, or back to the home screen?

I hope you are able to join me to learn more about hosting a summer coding camp or after school club focused on app design and app prototyping as a way to get students excited to learn more about computer science, coding, and app development. You can also integrate smaller pieces of this experience into any content area class to introduce the concept and help students make cross-curricular connections.

In addition to getting students excited about computer science and helping them to be more aware of the app development process, all of the materials that you need to help guide you through the process are completely free from Apple and can be used by anyone, regardless of having any coding experience. Resources are linked below.

Session Description

Learn how to organize and host a summer camp or after-school coding club focused on app design and prototyping. This session will walk participants through a ten-step process for designing a virtual or in-person camp or club that builds student interest in app development. Attendees will discover free resources to help students learn more about app design, UI, and UX, while using the iPad Keynote app to prototype a working model of an app designed to solve a problem or challenge in the student’s own community. No coding experience needed.

Google Slides and PowerPoint users can also follow along.

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Marketing:

Creating a flyer to get information about the camp out to students, staff, and families is a very important step in the process so that everyone knows about the opportunity. Fortunately there are lots of great tools, apps, and applications that you can use to create your flyer.

I used Keynote and shapes from the built-in shapes library to create the flyer shown below.

Layout and Graphic Design Tools:

• Keynote
• PowerPoint
• Google Slides
• Canva
• Google Drawings
• Adobe Spark
• Adobe Express

Creating A Balanced Schedule

Think about how much time you want students to spend on the coding activities each time that you are meeting with students to allow for a balance between time spent on devices and times spent moving, outside, or with family doing screen-free activities.

To Code Or Not

If you want to include coding in your app design and prototyping camp, there are lots of ways to do so even if your students have very little or even no previous coding experience. Swift Playgrounds, a free app available on the iPad, is a great way to learn about the Swift coding language by guiding a character through levels and practicing the code in the guide on the left side to see what happens in the viewer on the right side. Scratch, which is web-based, is another great option for getting students starting with coding.

Recruiting And Enrolling Students

Use whatever networks that you have available to market your camp and attract and sign up students.

Virtual Learning vs. In-Person Instruction

If you are teaching coding in-person in the classroom, you can skip past this step. If you are teaching students in a virtual learning situation, then you may need to choose a video conferencing application to connect with your students and share your screen. Your district probably already has an approved app, but if not, there are several to choose from.

Make Resources Easy To Find And Return To

Use a learning management system (LMS), website, or other content management system to collect resources that you want to distribute or collect from students to allow them to return to materials and resources and continue working on their app prototypes outside of your camp time.

App Ideas:

Where to start? We had students brainstorm ideas of apps that they thought could help solve problems or challenges in their communities or could help to promote opportunities or resources that  people might not know about.

We used the Google Jamboard app. Padlet would be another great resource for this task too. Both of these apps allow students to add sticky notes to a board to share ideas with others. By using a collaborative community board, students who were still struggling to come up with ideas were able to take inspiration from the ideas shared by others.

Learning About App Design:

Apple has an awesome App Design Journal that is a Keynote file that guides students through the four stages of the app design process: brainstorm, plan, prototype, and evaluate. The journal is loaded with helpful information and spaces for students to sketch, write, and record their thoughts as they move through the process.

Creating An App Prototype:

Creating an app prototype is very helpful for developers so that they have an overall blueprint for their app, the number of screens they will need to create, and the interactivity that they will need to include in their coding of the app.

The app prototype allows app developers to provide a working model to their potential target audience to get feedback about interest in the app concept, user interface appeal, and user experience in terms of how easy the app is to figure out and navigate as well as potentially missing features that they should include. By observing users navigate their app, developers can proactively debug potential problems or add wanted new features before spending hundreds of hours coding the app.

Apple provides an iPad app prototype and an iPhone prototype in the App Design Journal that students can use as a model to see how each slide represents a screen in the app and how the buttons control the navigation when the slide show is run rather than just advancing to the next slide.

iPad App Prototype Provided In App Design Journal

Building Interest - Creating A Good Pitch Statement: 

Having a short, attention grabbing app pitch to get potential users interested in your app and convince them why your app stands above competitors is just as important as having great UI and UX.

FlipGrid works really well for students to record both audio pitches and record their screens to demonstrate app functionality. Recordings can be limited to the amount of time that students will have to present their apps to help them to become more fluent through repeated practice. Best of all, students can watch and listen to their own recordings to get an objective sense of how they did and what parts they need more practice on before pitching their app to others.

Celebrating Student Success:

Holding an app showcase provides the opportunity to give students some public recognition of their hard work and to share their app prototype with a panel of knowledgeable judges who can give students some short feedback and tips on how to make their prototypes even better.

Apple provides an App Showcase Guide that can be used by organizers and judges to help guide organizing the showcase and giving feedback to students.

Keep The Interest Going:

Follow up on your camp and the showcase by creating elective computer science courses using the Everyone Can Code and Develop in Swift curriculum available for free from Apple in the Books app to open new doors, pathways, and worlds for your students as they develop their skills and interests in computer science.

Resources:

Apple K-12 Education Teaching Code - Curriculum and resources for teaching code.

Apple Teacher Learning Center - Learn about iPads, apps, Mac computers, applications, and integration ideas. Get started earning your Apple Teacher badges.

App Design Journal - Keynote file students can use to guide them through the app design and app prototyping process.

App Showcase Guide - Tips, suggestions, and steps to hosting an app development or app prototyping showcase.

Google Meet - Video conference application.

Google Jamboard - Internet-based collaborative whiteboard. Great for collaborative brainstorming. Saves in your Google account.

Keynote - Apple presentation app for iPads and Apple computers. Awesome for creating presentations, drawing, animation, video, and layout and design.

PowerSchool Schoology - Learning Management System for hosting courses and groups making it easy for students to find, access, and share materials and learning.