RAPID: Facilitating a CS-10K Community of Practice Testbed

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of California at Berkeley proposes to support an emerging online Community of Practice (CoP) for the CS10K Project. CS 10K is a transformational initiative to engage, prepare, and train 10,000 high school teachers to teach two new computing courses: Exploring Computer Science and CS Principles. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding a number of projects that are developing models of professional development (PD) for these courses and as many as 500 teachers will have taken some form of this PD by the Fall of 2012. Many of those teachers will begin teaching these courses this fall, but will find themselves somewhat isolated as the only Computer Science teachers in their schools. To better support them and provide an ongoing learning community for them, an online CoP is being developed that will serve as a testbed for future CoP development. This proposal aims to create and oversee a Technical Working Group (TWG) that assist with the content and operation of the initial testbed CoP as it is refined and eventually grows into a tool to support all computing teachers. The work will maximize the impact of CoP effort by (1) engaging the leaders of the current NSF-funded CS 10K PD in contributing content and seeding online interactions, (2) providing feedback and suggestions to the developers of the CoP, and (3) responding in real-time to the data that is being collected on how the CoP is being used and how it serving or not serving the needs of the teachers.