Looking Back On CSEdWeek 2012

Last week was Computer Science Education week aka CSEdWeek. This was by far the biggest most active CSEdWeek yet. There are over 3,400 pledges to do something to celebrate the week. From official proclamations from mayors like Mayor Bloomberg of New York City to individual schools holding special events to promote the CS programs in their own schools it was local and it was national. It is in the media (though not as much as anyone would like) and it was on the web.

The White House posted about it on it’s blog at Celebrating Computer Science. Big companies like Microsoft (Investing in American Innovation and the Next Generation) and Google (The Common Core Must Include Computer Science) were supporting it with online presence. The CSEdWeek blog was very active. I encourage you to visit it and see some of the posts that were made during the week.

On Twitter the #CSEdWeek hashtag was busy all week long. On Tuesday night a #CSEdWeek Twitter chat was held and in an hour there were over 1,000 Tweets with just that hashtag. And many more related tweets as people had side conversations. It was a lot of fun if you could keep up with all the tweets as they came in. I’d like to see a regular CS Education Twitter chat develop. I think it would be useful. Note that I have a list of computer science educators on Twitter at cs-teachers with over 100 names on it. Always room for more too!

It was a good week for connecting. I found a number of resources that I have since blogged about in the last week – some on Twitter and some via blogs. Found some new people to follow and saw some great activity on CS Education blogs. (Note that I have a list of good CS education blogs at Computer Science Education Blog Roll that I update as I find more blogs to add )

CS ED Week seems to be picking up some momentum. It’s not too soon to start thinking about how you might celebrate it next year. Whether you are a teacher or administrator in a school, a school board member, a CS professional or just someone who cares about our students getting a good education that includes Computer Science there are plenty of things you can do. Hope to see you involved next year.