Tuesday, July 14, 2020

CSTA Online Conference 2020–Day Two

The first thing I did this morning was to prepare for my presentation. I may have made some last minute changes to my presentation deck.

The first thing I attended was a Birds of a Feather session called White Teachers as Anti-Racist Allies. I listened closely. Living in New Hampshire were we don’t have a lot of people of color it is easy to fall into the idea that race is not an issue. But of course I have been teaching in a school with more than the average number of people of color for the area so I know better. This BoF gave me some things to think about.

I couldn’t focus on anything after the BoF. In all honesty I couldn’t get my mind off of getting myself set for you presentation. This tends to happen to be at in-person conferences as well. I probably missed something valuable but hopefully I can watch recordings later.

If you are interested, my presentation slides can be downloaded from Techniques for Teaching Programming. Someone else will have to review that session. Please be kind.

After lunch was a keynote by Dr. Ruha Benjamin called Keynote: 2020 Vision: Re-imagining the Default Settings of Technology and Society She focused on the intersection of technology and bias. Really thought provoking. She shared a really interesting video called "Racial Sensitivity" from Better Off Ted Recommended. How does data and algorithm incorporate bias?

After the keynote I started with Our Code From Miles Away: CS via Distance Learning, which according to to the slides was going to be about Pear Deck and FlipGrid. The main presenter had some issues with time zone coordination which is more a problem with online conferences than in-person ones. Anyway, I left early and moved to Machine Learning in the High School Classroom. It was well done but jumping in 20 minutes late means I missed some important context. I look forward to viewing the recording from the beginning And reading through the website I linked in the session title.. Not much else I can say about this one I am afraid.

Next up was Git and GitHub: How to Use It, How to Teach It, which was of course about Git and GitHub. This was a very fast paced session by a pair of experts. I learned a lot from this one.

I dropped into Nifty Assignments for my last session of the day.

The archive of CSTA Nifty Assignments is here. Check them out!

So the virtual conference is over. For me there were a lot of great sessions. If you were there, what sessions did you like? Let me know which ones I should look for when the recordings are ready.

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