with the ongoing remote learning in both districts. You'll see some of the usual suspects such as Scratch, AppInventor, and HummingBird Robotics, plus some newer areas (for the middle school level) such as Data Science. Linked hereis last year's summer PD offerings, organized by grade level. Thanks for your kind words and interest in the project! We truly believe that the initial work spent in building relationships with the administrative team was a critical piece in the successes we have had and what kept us moving steadily along during the rocky days of the pandemic. They have teacher leaders that they too meet with monthly to keep communication flowing. We now meet with the administrative team monthly to communicate, plan and stay connected in the work going forward. These foundational structures let administrators see and be involved in the vision building, planning and implementation process. This team analyzed the vision for their pathway and wrote a vision statement, completed an analysis of their current CS program using the SCRIPT rubric and then set both long and short term goals. Each district then completed the CSforALL SCRIPT training where they formed a team which included a district and school administrator, CS teacher, Regular Ed teacher as well as other key stakeholders, such as counselor or media specialist. We also took administrators and teacher leaders to Pittsburgh, so they could see South Fayette and view the pathway they have built and start visualizing what that might look like in their district/school. We started by meeting with each district's school and district level administrators in their own schools to explain the grant and begin building relationships, not just email communication. Gaining administrator support has been a critical point in our implementation process. I'm Traci, the On Site Director for the TAN grant. Feel free to ask any other questions you might have! However, each of our participants had positive feedback and all said they planned to implement what they learned into their classrooms. The App Inventor course was more difficult than it would have been in person since the instructor couldn't look at the participants device or code and it was more time consuming to assess. (Material kits were delivered to the teachers prior to the Institute.) One of the hardest parts of the virtual format was troubleshooting in the sessions that required teachers to write code. This prevented participants from sitting behind a screen all day and kept the workshop hands on. They had time to work on their own to complete the work and then came back together later in the day. Our teachers would attend a session with their instructor each morning where they learned a concept and were given an assignment or challenge. The biggest pro is that even during a pandemic we were able to offer high level courses to the teachers through the use of Google Classroom and Zoom. As the On Site Director for our grant I can see both pros and cons of remote PD. Thanks for viewing our video and commenting. Through focus groups with the PD instructional team and survey responses from the KY teacher workshop participants, the poster will report on the pedagogical implications of offering teacher PD exclusively online and what the ramifications have been for Pikeville and Floyd County children with the return to school in the Fall of 2020. Of course, the RPP faced new challenges with COVID-19-most notably, the need to offer these summer workshops remotely, and adjusting the objectives and research questions accordingly. The second component of the presentation focuses on the development of a series of summer workshops for Kentucky Appalachia K-8 instructors to learn the basics of CS and CT and how to integrate these skills and concepts into existing K-8 coursework. It focuses on the RPP’s origin in leveraging the districts’ existing relationship with Pennsylvania’s South Fayette School District, which has developed one of the nation’s leading programs for teacher professional development (PD) in K-12 computing. First, it reports on the genesis and development of the RPP itself. Economically devastated by the departure of the coal industry, these communities are committed to developing high-quality computing curricula for all students, beginning in their earliest years. This video reports on the first year-and-a-half of a three-year NSF-funded Research Practitioner Partnership (RPP) to develop a K-8 pipeline for computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) education within two rural school districts in Eastern Kentucky : Pikeville Independent School District and Floyd County Schools. ( see original presentation & discussion) Tough as Nails, Nimble Fingers: Developing a K-8 Coding Pathway for Kentucky.
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