Monthly Archives: November 2013

Online Presentation Strategies

AP Computer Science, Distance-learning, Teaching

ONLINE PRESENTATION STRATEGIES

by Richard White

2013-11-27

I blame it on the fact that I’m teaching a new course.

As I’m teaching AP Computer Science, and developing curriculum, assignments, and lessons for that class, and trying to figure out what works—and what doesn’t—there are lots of mid-course adjustments that I make. Not every assignment needs to be perfect, perhaps, but if I don’t get done addressing all the concerns in that one lesson, it’s hard to have very high expectations for the work that students will do that evening.

And in an AP course, time needs to be used wisely. I can’t afford to be expanding units when there’s a certain amount of material that must be covered by the end of the year.

Fortunately I’ve been able to leverage YouTube and GoToMeeting videoconferencing software to take up some of the slack while I get my act together. A 3-minute follow-up to a lesson, emailed to students, can help to proactively clear up a lot of confusion. Likewise, being available for online office hours, during which students can share their screens with me and we can debug their programs… that’s invaluable.

And although I’ve usually worked on the computer in the past, with a voiceover that describes what I’m doing, it’s often useful to “do a Khan” (as in Sal Khan, of Khan Academy), and just write some stuff out. I don’t have any evidence to back me up here, but my gut says that there’s an enormous cognitive benefit to developing things progressively, and by hand.

Here’s an example of a combination of drawing and computer analysis, done not for the AP Comp Sci class but in preparation for an Hour of Code unit that I’ll be using with some students. See what you think:

Do you see any advantage to demonstrating things in long form, as opposed to doing voiceovers with slides or computer displays?

More on the Hour of Code in a future post…

Differentiated Instruction in AP Computer Science

AP Computer Science

DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION in AP COMPUTER SCIENCE

by Richard White

2011-11-15

We’ve just completed the first quarter of the school year, and I’m loving (and for the moment surviving) the opportunity to teach a new course: AP Computer Science.

I actually began my teaching career in 1986 as the instructor of a computer programming class, first using BASIC, and then Pascal, on IBM XTs–the original beige PC. This was well before you crazy kids had access to the InterWebs, but we loved our computing machines just the same.

So it’s funny, and fun, to be teaching Computer Science again, and it’s exciting to be participating in that daily experiment we call “teaching,” in which the instructor hypothesizes about what might be an effective tool or strategy for working with a class, tries it out, and then goes home to clean up the mess of those experiments that–wonderfully or tragically–failed.

I’m finding out that my students this year have a wider range of abilities than I’m used to seeing in the AP Physics class I teach. The possible reasons for that wide range don’t really matter; I’m there to teach the students who are in the class, meet them all wherever they are, and see what I can do to help guide them in learning the subject.

How do you actually do that, though? How, practically, do I proved instruction and lessons for a classroom full of students, some of whom are going home and programming their own Blackjack programs just for fun, while others are having profound difficulties applying concepts that they appeared to have understood well just the day before?

The act of providing these varying levels of support in a single class has earned the buzzphrase differentiated instruction, and here’s what I’ve developed for a typical lesson:

  1. a whiteboard-based overview
  2. whiteboard based pseudocode
  3. freestyle coding for advanced students
  4. template-based support for intermediate students
  5. solution-based support for students who need more support

Wanna see it in action? Here’s a 7-minute documentary-style rundown, complete with footage of the kids hard at work.