Can I Plan For Next Year Yet?

My school has a couple of weeks left but it’s getting close. My Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles students have taken their AP exam. My own exam for them is next week. My underclassmen have a bit more to do and I still have some topics to teach them. Soon the underclassmen will be starting their semester summative projects. So other than grading my workload is lessening. Not gone but at least I have some time to think. Thank about what?

While things are still fresh in my mind I am starting to plan for next year. This was my first time teaching APCS Principles so I learned a lot about pacing and scheduling. I need to modify my plan for next year. I want to move the explore task into the first semester I think. The Create Task should be earlier in the second semester because it was much too stressful to have it due right at the “drop dead” deadline with the College Board. I’ve got some work to figure out how to make that happen. I’d like to incorporate some small device programming as well. I want to explore the possibility of teaching networking using Micro:bit which can communicate with each other. I need some time to work on that.

My mobile app development course went well using AppInventor but it was also the first year teaching that course with that tool. I’ve got to clean up the pacing for that as well as thinking about more or better projects for students.  If they release a version that supports iPhones I have to borrow my wife’s iPhone and test it out.

My Honors Programming course has gone very well and I am really pleased with pacing and projects. My collection of resources is a mess though so I need to organize that. I’ve already been filtering through duplicated PowerPoint presentations and trying to build the perfect ones. No doubt I will continue to modify each one after every time I use them but at least I will not have to search through to find the current ones. I want to organize all of my resources by topic unit. If I have time, I want to record short videos on most topics as well.

I wrote a reference guide to C# in the middle of the year and gave it to my students. Now I need to fix all the problems that they found and modify explanations based on what confused students this time around.

Our freshmen course is taught by two other teachers so the pacing and much of the rest is determined as a team. It’s in good shape but I still want to look at organizing the materials a little. And we teach Visual Basic there so I am created a reference book for that using as well. That draft needs review and corrections.

It’s going to be a busy summer. And that is not even including attending the CSTA Conference in July. (Hope to see some of you there.)