So, today was the first FULL day of TeacherCon in Atlanta. The long term goal… to get computer science to impact as many students as possible. The short term goal… to get the 500 or so teachers here on the same page and running with the CS Discoveries curriculum. The steady flow of coffee certainly helped keep us fueled and learning.

We actually kicked off last night with a dinner and some interaction with each other, our regional partners, and the amazing staff at code.org.  Dinner was good, and the community building was great.

Monday morning came, and after breakfast, we kicked off in a large session lead by Dani McAvoy and Josh Caldwell. This was a great summary of the goals of the program and the resources available to teachers.

After the opening session, we headed off to our breakout sessions. Now, I did the pilot project of this curriculum last year, so I got to look at today through a different lens… I got to see it as a sort of review combined with a look forward at how to tweak and change what I did.

I headed with several of my fellow teachers from Mississippi to one of the breakout rooms. There, we took a few minutes to introduce ourselves and get to know each other, as well as our great lead facilitators, Kevin Barry and Mauree Hagee.  We spent the majority of the rest of the day discussing lessons, working through them as learners, and watching our facilitators model the lessons.

Code.org uses a process they call TLO.  This stands for:

Teacher

Learner

Observer

They use this model as a means of having us switch our proverbial hats to force us to focus on different aspects and views of the lessons. While this can be uncomfortable at first, as we all tend to fall back into the T mode… once you get used to it, it really helps to focus one’s attention on seeing things differently.

Our final breakout session of the day was getting us started in the “T” hat.  We were assigned different lessons and paired with three other teachers each. We looked at the lesson to get familiar with it, and will spend a bit of time tomorrow planning to teach our lesson to our peers.

Overall, a great day of learning, and a great day to kick off what is certainly going to prove to be a fabulous week of learning.

Also, take a look at the picture below. These sponsors put their money where their mouths are and help fund code.org’s efforts to get CS to as many kids as possible. A sincere thank you to those who make events like this possible.