Stories

If you are a member of a CSTA chapter, you'll also be asked to give some feedback on your chapter. Chapters are at the heart of what CSTA strives to achieve — building local communities amongst CS teachers and supporting their ongoing professional development. 

The information gathered will support CSTA as well as your Chapter Leaders in setting goals and planning for activities in the 2024-25 school year. CSTA will only share aggregate data with Chapter Leaders and staff members; responses will be anonymous and not linked to specific members. We anticipate it will take 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

We know you've been inundated with emails, and we appreciate and value your time. We understand that this has been the most challenging couple of years teachers have ever faced, and we are grateful for all that you have done for your students, for your chapter, and in support of CS education. 

To thank you for your time, the first 1,000 CSTA members who complete this survey will receive a $10 Amazon gift card. We appreciate your willingness to help support CSTA and your local chapter.

This year’s ACM sanctioned Greater NY Regional High School Programming Competition will be held on Monday, May 20^th, on our Patchogue Long Island campus in the Business and Technology Building. If you would like to enter a team (or multiple teams) composed of three students into the competition, please e-mail William McAllister  (wmcallister@sjny.edu) some time after 8:00am on April 8^th  and before 12:00pm on April 15^th.  Include in your email:  

• your name,
• phone number,
• e-mail address,
• the name of your high school, and
• the number of teams you would like to enter into the competition.

Teams will be accepted into the competition in the order in which he receives the responses. If the total number of teams entered does not exceed the maximum number they can accommodate, all the teams entered will be accepted into the competition. Otherwise a team will be eliminated from the school, or schools, with the highest number of entered teams on a last-received-first-out basis until the total number of teams accepted into the competition is the number of teams that can be accommodated. 

Team check-in will begin at 10:45am on the morning of the competition in our Business and Technology Building, and end at 11:30am. The full competition day schedule is available on the competition’s webpage, as are other materials that you may find useful as you prepare for the competition. The programming language used during the competition will be Java.

Food will be available from 10:45am to 3:30pm in the competition briefing room located in O’Connor Hall. Teams will be directed to that location after they check-in at the registration table. 

There is a Statewide Professional Development offering, this Thursday, March 21 from 5:00 to 6:00 PM via Zoom. 

Diane Levitt, Director of Cornell Tech's K-12 Initiative, will be speaking to us.  She will be providing  An Update on Cornell Tech's K-12 Initiative in Computational Thinking and Computer Science Education.    In this discussion, there will be a focus on younger learners, so this would be a great opportunity to engage some of our colleagues from our middle and elementary schools. 

Diane Levitt is the Senior Director of K-12 Education for Cornell Tech. She drives engagement with the NYC computing education community, including the Dept. of Education's CS4All initiative, and works with individual schools to catalyze K-12 computer science. 

Zoom Link for the Meeting:   https://ufl.zoom.us/j/95399986804?pwd=bkt3MWJuNTh6WlNUVlZPTkhiNXRyZz09

• Connect with other colleagues teaching CS at the high school, middle school, and upper elementary school levels
• Learn about how others are implementing the new NYS Standards at elementary, middle, and HS levels
• Discuss changes in the AP classes and curriculum
• Gain insight from AP readers who scored APCS A and AP CSP
• Be a part of a community of educators

• voting on our updated Chapter bylaws, (you can read them here https://drive.google.com/file/d/14zSdtnWbyOCwocMuJ7YQQXjepCIzs_SK/view)
• updating the Chapter on changes in our financial activities,
• planning the meetings for the first half of the year, and
• planning our in-person conference on November 7^th. 

This year’s ACM sanctioned Greater NY Regional High School Programming Competition will be held on Wednesday, May 17th, on St Joseph's Patchogue Long Island campus. If you would like to enter a team (or multiple teams) composed of three students into the competition, send an e-mail after 8:00am on April 10^th and before 8:00am on April 17^th to William McAllister  at wmcallister@sjny.edu.

 Include in your email:  

• your name,
• phone number,
• e-mail address,
• the name of your high school, and
• the number of teams you would like to enter into the competition. 

"The Future of Education: Exploring the Benefits and Challenges of Generative AI Tools," will delve into the impact of generative AI on the education and learning sectors. The session will cover the latest developments in generative AI technology and its applications in education, from personalized learning to content creation. The speakers will also discuss the challenges faced in implementing generative AI tools in education and the steps that can be taken to overcome them. This session will be a unique opportunity for educators, administrators, and technology professionals to explore the future of education and to learn about the benefits and challenges of generative AI tools. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the potential of generative AI to transform the education landscape and the role they can play in making this a reality.

https://coffeeforthebrain.com/virtual-coffeehouse-conversation-on-ai-in-education/

 

• CSTA is offering a cybersecurity PD online.  We thought it might be fun do the PD together.  We'd all register but then get together to watch and discuss the videos and collaborate as we work through the activities.
• There are very few resources that contain sample Computing Innovation questions that we can use with our AP CS Principles classes.  We thought it might be useful if some AP CSP teacher (current, past, or future) met and developed our own question sets.  This would be a single session, and we could try out each others' questions.  We would leave with multiple sample question sets to use with our classes.
• Are these of interest to you?  Do you have ideas for other PD that you need or would like to lead?