Last year I wrote about repl.it, an online IDE that supports multiple languages. At the time it had some rudimentary classroom support and since I started using it, repl.it has become better and better. I used it last year with my class because I had to start the year in a lab where I couldn't easily install my own software. I'll continue to use repl.it - mostly for it's ability to schedule publish and manage assignments but when possible, I like having my students work locally.

People sometimes accuse me of being an elitist CS snob that I feel that CS teachers have to have advanced CS degrees. It's not that at all. Rather, I feel that CS teachers are smart and capable. Circumstances frequently result in a teacher in front of a CS class with limited content and pedagogical content knowledge. It's not ideal but it's reality. Of course I feel that we should do everything to support and encourage these teachers but we should also insist that after a reasonable period of time, they know their stuff.

I read this piece earlier today on Nancy Bailey's blog. TL;DR (although it really isn't too long so you should read it) - it's on Laurene Powell Jobs, her efforts to "reform" education and why she's misguided as are most of the well to do non-educators working hard to change and in many cases privatize public education. Laura posts a nice list of simple, common sense ways to improve education.

With the school year starting I was originally planning on writing about my class rules. Instead I think I'll riff on Alfred Thompson's post today titled Curriculum is Hard. I'm guessing I found curriculum design and development daunting decades ago but at this point in my career it's something I enjoy. In any event, Alfred got me to thinking - when is a curriculum your own? If you grab a curriculum complete with lesson plans, assignments; the whole kit and caboodle and you use it verbatim it's clearly not your curriculum.

At this past year's CSTA conference, a few of us huddled in a corner voiced a very common lament - "it would be great if more CS teachers blogged." It really would be. We're still a relatively small community and while there's some good conversation going on on mailing lists and on Facebook, those aren't easily discoverable or accessible and in the case of Facebook, there's a question of ownership and permanence.

I got an email from a friend the other day. Among other things, he mentioned that he would be teaching APCS-A for the first time this year. He's a little trepidatious. He knows his stuff but he hasn't really done much using Java. I was going to respond in an email but thought I might share here instead. TL;DR - for all you APCS teachers who are new or new to Java - learn your core CS, lean on your resources and support and it's OK to tell your kids "I don't know, I'll get back to you.

Now that I'm back from vacation and summer's winding down I thought I'd start getting back to more classroom related posts. I still have a few summer topics I want to write about – standards and side projects in particular but I'm also looking forward to talking more about the classroom since, after all, at my core, I'm a teacher. When I saw this article in my inbox this morning I thought I'd talk about it.

This morning, I read Alfred Thompson's post on teaching cybersecurity. as Alfred says, it's something of a CS Ed buzzword this summer. Another hot topic in K12 CS Ed this summer is the inclusion of ethics in our CS courses courtesy of efforts like the #ethicalCS twitter chat every Wednesday at 8:00 Eastern time hosted by Saber Khan. Discussions about both topics include "where should we be doing this?" "What should we be doing?

Back in May, I read this post about Angela Duckworth and Grit. Grit has become an education buzzword in the past few years so I figured I should read Duckworth's book. It took this long because there was a long waiting list at the New York Public Library to get the ebook. I'm still not quite finished with the book but I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the book and the buzz.

I've been working on a vue.js project this summer. During the school year I really can't dive into code so it's been fun. I've already showed you most of the Emacs tools I use for development. Projectile, Ace-Window, IBuffer, Swiper / Ivy and all. One thing I couldn't easily do was arrange windows the way I wanted. I've been setting up Emacs with one large window and a couple of smaller ones: