Access to quality professional development is critical to build educator capacity to ensure students are graduating with the skills needed for workplace success. Governments around the world continue to struggle to find scalable, quality professional development that is mapped to an international framework...

Teachers across the U.S. today are receiving handwritten cards, crayon drawings, flowers, and other heart-felt symbols of appreciation in celebration of the teacher appreciation day, May 7th, 2013. My words of appreciation for teachers may not compare to these personal mementos teachers are receiving...

The other day I was looking through the analytics for this blog to see what sort of searches people were doing that let them here. Mostly I was seeing things I expected to see but one stuck out. Someone had searched for the string “ i am scared of programming .” I suspect that the searcher was not afraid...

I’ve long had mixed feelings about recursion . (I’ve written about recursion several times in this blog.) In one post, Recursion Early, Recursion Late , I wrote about the suggestion that recursion be dropped from a first programming or computer science course. In another post I asked if it should be...

A number of years ago after being laid off from a job developing software I went into teaching. I taught a year in a pair of elementary schools and then spent 8 years teaching high school computer science. It was awesome. One day I want to get back into the classroom full-time. Over the years I have...

Years ago I was sitting the the front of church and via a fluke of acoustics I heard a little girl in the back of the church tell someone “Stop laughing! It’s Sunday!” Apparently she thought that because Sunday, especially at church, was serious business it should not be fun or happy. Not quite my view...

How often have you heard a teacher say something to the effect that their job is not to entertain? My guess is pretty often. I know I have heard it a lot. Teachers jobs are to educate. What bothers me though is that learning should be fun! I just love to learn. That is why I read, why I attend conferences...

The big news for me yesterday was at Finalists Announced for Round 1 of the Microsoft Partners in Learning 2012 US Forum . I attended this event as a judge last year and learned an incredible amount from these amazing teachers. This first round announced 44 teachers representing 32 projects from across...

And fun as well. Recently a co-worker sent me a link to some videos that were done by the Houston Independent School District about the pilot program they are running in several elementary schools. These schools are using video games involving the Kinect Sensor to help teach. And not just physical education...

The SIGCSE mailing list has been having a very active discussion of plagiarism in computer science classes of late. These discussions seem to recur with disappointing regularity. If not in the SIGCSE list they show up on the APCS mailing list. These discussions tend to follow some very predictable paths...

Or perhaps how young should you try? And to top if off, why do you want to start them so young in the first place? I received the following from a teacher friend of mine the other day and it has had me thinking ever since. Can you please tell me why anyone thinks it is a good idea for 6th grades...

I was reading through a couple of blog posts by Garth Flint earlier today. I’ve been using some of my vacation time to catch up on blog reading and had put off reading some of Garth’s posts until I had time to do it right. Garth is one of those people who uses his blog for self examination and the working...

Getting kids interested in social studies can be a project. As I remember it, in grade school, social studies came right after lunch, which meant that I was more interested in putting my head on my desk than in learning what the indigenous peoples of ...read more

I am in a somewhat unique situation with two kids in college and two kids in preschool/kindergarten. This large age gap sometimes makes us feel like we are raising two separate families and my husband and I joke that the good news here is we can correct ...read more