Teaching Impacts of Technology: Relationships

Welcome! Are you interested in teaching about the impacts technology has on our relationships? To learn more about the computation and computing concepts that underlie those technologies? We'll be using a problem-based approach to explore interesting ways to teach concepts of networks and the internet, data and analysis, and even algorithms and data representation. Finally, we'll evaluate, critique and improve/personalize two lesson plans -- one of your choice and one on pixels. Specifically, we'll be looking to improve these lesson plans by increasing the amount of interactive learning time for students.

How has your ability to connect with friends and family changed since social media has become so ubiquitous? What different groups of people are you connected to? Besides looking at the impact of social media on our lives and society, we'll also take a detailed look at the history and development of the Facebook newsfeed algorithm -- learning a bit about software engineering , user experience, and heuristics. From interacting with a Facebook visualization tool we'll be curious to investigate what causes programs to take a long time to run and how computer scientists categorize how long it will take for programs to run.

With so much more knowledge being collected about our physical location, we have new ways we can find friends and support relationships among those "close" to us. We'll look at several apps that leverage this and dive into digital image representations needed to support filters like those found in Snapchat.

This week we'll introduce the Computer Science K-12 Framework and the Computer Science Teachers Association K-12 Computer Science Standards which are starting to frame state K-12 Computer Science standards in the US. We'll guide you in finding and developing a lesson plan for a particular grade band around a resource for learning about the impact of technology on culture. Next we'll learn a bit about further differentiating and defining "active learning" using the ICAP (interactive, constructive, active, passive) learning framework and see how Peer Instruction can be used to scaffold interactive learning experiences.

This week is all about giving you the time and excuse to develop lesson plans you can use (and/or share with colleagues!) We'll be improving lesson plans (including the one you created last week) to increase the amount of "interactive" learning in them. Additionally, we'll try to align these lessons with CSTA standards -- recognizing that these may have been produced before the CSTA standards existed. However, the process of seeing how they fit (or don't fit) with the standards may help give us ideas on how these lessons could be modified.