Follow Tapestry
We apologize but we do not currently have access to all of the resource material that had been blogged during the workshop.
We are trying to re-acquire the material. What we have so far is:
Session slide sets
- Welcome (Luther Tychonievich)
- Gender and Computing (Debra Richardson)
- Stereotype Threats (Diana Franklin)
- Cooperative Learning (Deborah Trytten)
- CS Teaching Tips (Colleen Lewis)
- Exploring CS (Solomon Russell)
- Technical School Perspective (Emmanuel Onyeador)
- Success Story (Melody Hagaman)
- Success Story (Myra Deister)
- CS Teams Coaching (Shannon Houtrouw)
Commentary
NCWIT Aspirations and Resources
Ruthe Farmer from NCWIT gave so much information. Here's some links to help:
Promising Practices: Pair Programming
Norm Jacobson started by telling us that this technique is research based. It works, and there's research that supports that it works when it is used with students to help them increase their learning outcomes. This is a true pedagogy change for many teachers. As he says: “Two heads are indeed better than one!” Here is his PDF file. Check out his course ICS 21 for assistance. Media Computation is another idea to think about he mentioned. Here's a great link from Emmanuel: Link with video about Pair Programming.
Four success stories
Myra Deister began this talk with what is working for her It's a multiple access project to try different areas to gain interest in the computer science classes.
Melody Hagaman began with no computers science in her district. She used, puppies, CS Ed week, donut secret invitations, turtle races (or dating as it turned out). Through all of these events, she has grown the program and increased female participation greatly.
Shannon Houtrouw began his journey with a Tapestry workshop in Michigan and now has 70 plus students who are almost equal in gender and very multicultural.
Emmanuel Onyeador had only one female student, but now he has over 30% girls in his CS classes, and amazingly, 41% of those are English learners. His female graduation rate: 100%. He even has potlucks that work. He encourages the students to look in the news and be proactively aware of their environment.
Impressive! And the Q & A session was vibrant and lively. If you didn't take something away, you weren't listening for sure.
Promising Practices: Collaborative Learning
Teamwork is important. Deborah normally likes teams of 5 but suggests 4 to 7. She also says don't change teams in mid-semester; however, this isn't a firm rule for different projects within a semester. She allows groups to “fire” non-productive members. She had us think about the group work we did in college and notice that other people have had the same experiences and frustrations with group work. She says calling on people to share enforces accountability. Cooperative Learning has four things: joint goals, mutual rewards, shared resources, and complementary roles. And we had an interactive exercise. Please check out her files on Small Group Learning.