versation to describe the educational
sites they use and like (and why). A useful site created for teachers by a well-meaning community with few teachers
using it is a serious concern.
Leverage real-world CoPs for the
vCoP. vCoPs are created from connections and interactions in the real
world. These should be leveraged.
Schools and districts are offering programs such as Exploring Computer
Science (ECS) and Computer Science
Principles (CSP); see http://www.ex-
ploringcs.org/ for more details about
ECS, and http://www.csprinciples.org/
for more details about CSP). Workshops, teacher professional development activities and meetings should
foster a sense of community at the local level. Relationships forged through
in-person interactions between mentors and teachers, as well as among
teachers who are peers, must grow
and branch out in the vCoP. Interactions with the vCoP should be embedded into face-to-face professional
development activities such as curriculum design. Online discussions for
additional inputs from the broader
community can create spaces for local discussion groups that form and
grow online. The vCoP portal should
provide a means for local communities to connect to other groups in the
vCoP-at-large.
Produce a toolkit to assist teachers.
Teachers need a toolkit to help get
computing courses created at their
schools. Such a toolkit should include
materials that target school administrators (principals, superintendents,
school boards, IT directors, and so
forth), guidance counselors, students
(and their parents), and the community. A toolkit can provide information
Scaling interventions
and innovation
nationally, and
ultimately worldwide,
is an enormous
undertaking.
gatschool.org.uk/), supported through
the British Computer Society, as an example.b Likewise, the Israeli Ministry
of Education is working toward these
same goals.
There is hope that computer-based
support for CoPs will help. In 2012,
NSF awarded a grant to the American
Institutes for Research (AIR) to create a Web portal to support a vCoP
around NSF-funded projects toward
building a community of 10,000 teachers (see http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/
showAward?AWD_ID=1256310 for details). AIR’s Web portal (http://cs10k-
community.org) has yet to realize its
potential, but the experiment continues. A well-designed website can support and nurture a vCoP if the affor-dances of technology are leveraged for
interactivity, participation, and learning; the idea is to replace the coffee pot
and water cooler as the site of informal
but crucial diffusion of knowledge.
1
The Web portal should:
˲facilitate easy sharing, search,
and retrieval of relevant knowledge
and resources,
˲ help connect people and provide
easy-to-use tools for collaboration, especially around curriculum design,
˲ leverage social tools and data visualization techniques to highlight popular content as well as address burning
issues and questions; provide members visibility into the relevant activities and projects, and avenues for active participation,
˲ support curation of content and
facilitation of the many activities the
vCoP supports,
˲ afford low barriers to sign-up and
participation, and provide materials to
help newcomers to get started, and
˲ incorporate features to allow busy
educators to keep up with—and participate in—ongoing discussions and
activity on the site.
The Stanford workshop identified a
number of needs:
Get more input from the K– 12 teachers.
CoPs should not be created top-down,
but bottom-up. Of 60 workshop at-tendees, only three were K– 12 teachers. K– 12 teachers may not know what
they want, but they must be in the con-
b NSFComputing Education for the 21st Century (CE21); http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/
nsf12609/ nsf12609.htm.
tion.a NSF has been concerned both
about the sustainability of projects after initial funding as well as the cumulative effects of project successes and
failures on other CS10K projects. Mentoring and support are needed, especially for newcomers to the job. Many
of these issues have been explored
by the CSTA through advocacy and
setting of standards and by helping
teachers create local CSTA chapters (in
the U.S. and Canada) and getting computer science to count as an important
part of high school education. CSTA’s
efforts in North America are mirrored
in many other countries attempting to
address issues of teacher preparation
and support: see the Computing at
School project ( http://www.computin-
a Simon Humphrey interview in which
he describes teacher-support initiatives CAS; see http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tsRzcAddWyU#6m58s.
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