Introducing CodeHS PD Cohorts for the 26-27 School Year

Welcome everybody. Hope everyone's having a good day. We will start in about a minute. Thank you for joining us here. You probably see a poll question, just a fun quick question to see which cohort everybody's interested in. Hope everybody's getting ready for the end of the school year. AP exams wrapping up. For those of you just joining, we'll start in just a minute. Steve just put the slides into the chat and there's a quick little poll there. Looks like the AI cohort is currently in the lead. Not that there's any competition, but it's fun to have competition.

All right, folks. I'll go ahead and get started here. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to our short webinar here on our PD cohorts. Thank you for those of you that filled out the poll question. Looks like a lot of interest across all of the cohorts. So excited to dive into all four of these and share what we have been building and what we're excited to offer you all.

So, real quick, some introductions here. My name is TJ, one of three PD specialists on the call with you this afternoon. Former teacher, taught high school computer science. Have been working with CodeHS for a number of years now. Excited to talk everything about our cohorts and I'm joined here with Danielle and Steve. I will let them quickly introduce themselves and then we'll get going on today's webinar.

Hi, I'm Danielle Santilli. I'm based out of Michigan and I'm also leading the AI cohort. So excited to see that my poll won. Not that it's a competition. Before I was a PD specialist here at CodeHS, I was also a computer science teacher. I taught at the high school level and before that I actually taught music and I taught K through eight. So I have a vast array of educational experience at all the ages. Now I'll pass it on over to Steve.

Yeah. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Steve Codington. I have been with CodeHS for a little over a year now. I just led our first ever teaching cohort which was our APCSA cohort and excited to be doing that again next year. And also I love that we're expanding our cohorts to all the different offerings that you're going to learn about today. I taught in the classroom for 11 years with computer science. I used CodeHS in my classroom for seven of those. I taught everything from sixth grade tech apps all the way up to APCSA. So, love computer science, love CodeHS, and excited to be talking to you about some pretty cool cohort offerings today. And I'm based in Houston, Texas. And again, thank you all for spending some time this afternoon with us.

Forgot we were sharing locations. I'm in central Connecticut, too, so we're all over the place.

All right. So, jumping into our agenda here. So, a few things we're going to talk about. We'll discuss the cohorts overall, what they consist of, their curriculums, start dates, and then we'll dive into specifics, too. We'll talk about our AP specific cohorts, and then Danielle's going to speak to our applied AI cohort. We'll talk about how to register. We'll share syllabi, answer questions. We have a lot of great information that we are going to be putting into the chats, so excited to get started there.

First thing is we're going to put this at the start and at the end. So, if you are interested in just getting some more information about the cohorts, please follow up on this link codehs.com/pdcohort. That'll take you to a form where you can fill out information and somebody from our team will follow up and provide you with more information on what you're interested in.

For today's webinar, if you have questions, I see looks like some questions are starting to come in. To make things a little bit easier and organized, there is a Q&A button at the bottom of the Zoom if you were unfamiliar with that. It would be helpful if you have questions, you can throw them into the Q&A area through Zoom. And then that way it's just a little bit easier to organize and answer questions as they come in. And if you are new to CodeHS, you can sign up for a free teacher account. This is codehs.com/signup and you can register for a teacher account and get verified. It takes a couple of days and then you become a verified teacher to have access to all of our great curriculum.

All right. So, I'm going to go ahead and jump in here, and yeah. So, cohort overview. So, what are these cohorts that we are offering for the following school year? So, four main cohorts, three of which are AP focused. So, we have our AP computer science A which is taught in Java and there were some significant updates to the CSA course through College Board for this school year. AP computer science principles in both languages of JavaScript and Python. We have two different versions. So, if you teach either of those versions please go ahead and sign up there. AP cyber security. So that is a completely new AP course for everybody for the following school year. So we're super excited. We are building a student course. We have a teaching course that goes along with that. And so yeah, excited to show that content as well. And then our applied AI for educators course.

So let's dive into a little bit more details. So an overview of these cohorts. What do they look like? So there's three main parts. There's an asynchronous piece where you will be enrolled as a student in our professional development course. So that includes a lot of spotlight lessons which we will look at a few examples in a little bit today, various teaching resources and pedagogy to help assist you in the classroom. And then there will be five 90-minute live sessions throughout the school year that relate to the different content in each of those cohorts, tips and tricks, pedagogical strategies and opportunities to collaborate with peers that are also teaching that content. And then the last piece is one-on-one support with our professional development team. So you have myself, Danielle and Steve on the call. So we are part of the professional development team, so that comes with being a member of these cohorts. So those are the three main parts there too.

All right. So some benefits of the cohorts here. So this year-long sustained support. So it's not just like a one-off PD. You have support, various types of support across the entire school year. Especially with like the AP courses. You have that support all the way up to the AP exam and after for additional resources and content that you would need to help finish out the school year. Classroom ready and immediate impact. So, everything that we create for these cohorts is designed to be used right away in the classroom. Collaborative teaching community. When you buy into these PD cohorts, it's a great opportunity to collaborate and network with other CS teachers, especially true if you are one of few or only CS teachers at your school. This is a great opportunity to be part of a larger community there. And then building confidence with various topics. So, AI is so new and everchanging. Our AP cyber course is brand new to everybody and so having that confidence and working alongside other teachers and professionals through that curriculum and content is super helpful. And then there's the flexibility, too. You have asynchronous coursework. You have live sessions. If you can't attend a live session or have to leave early, all of those live sessions are recorded and shared out after. And then if you ever need additional support, you have that availability of meeting with somebody on our professional development team to go through really whatever you need in terms of support for the course and content that you are going through in the cohorts.

And then just kind of a high-level overview of what a live session could look like. So opportunities where there's time to discuss, ask questions, share what is working in your classroom, share some of the challenges and hear from other teachers on what they do and where they need support. We also will do a lot of deep dive into various topics whether that is specific AP lessons where students tend to struggle or where teachers may need additional support or AI specific tools and chatbots that can really help with any part of your teaching or whatever role you are in as an educator. A lot of hands-on activities and applications and Steve and Danielle will go into a little bit more detail about those and share some specifics on some of our spotlight lesson activities and what those will look like throughout the course and then just the collaboration piece. So on those live sessions having the opportunity to work in smaller groups and go through a lot of content and share ideas and resources.

And then again a little bit more in detail about some of the content covered in these cohorts. So you can see from all four of these cohorts what some of the spotlight lesson topics will entail. So for example like our applied AI course covering different topics such as chatbots, different AI tools, ethics, classroom integration. And then I'll highlight our AP cyber security: threats, vulnerabilities, risk management, real-world scenarios.

And then if you're interested to dive a little bit more deeper into each of these cohorts and what the syllabus will look like, Steve just put that into the chat there. So you can explore any one of the syllabi there and get a little bit more detailed information about the content that is covered there. So, with that, I'm going to go ahead and pause here, and I'm going to let Steve go ahead and take over and do a little bit more deep dive into our AP specific cohorts.

Awesome. Thanks, TJ. And let me get my screen shared. There we go. So, yeah, I'm going to go over our three cohorts for the different AP courses. And again, I know it's been awesome having you all here, too. If you have any questions as we're going, please feel free to use the Q&A, drop them in there, and we'll make sure we get them answered. But wanted to specifically talk a little bit about each of the AP cohorts. And I know TJ kind of gave an overview, but we'll do a little bit more of a deep dive here, and I'll show you some of the spotlight lesson materials that come with each cohort.

So, for APCSA, this was a really fun one. This was the one we ran this year because of the new course and the thinking was we would be able to kind of help teachers navigate the new framework from APCSA, navigate our new course. It was a very enjoyable year. We had a lot of collaboration across teachers and one cool thing is in the synchronous sessions we went over constantly new platform features at CodeHS, and the cohorts are a great way to learn about new platform features and specifically how you can use those in the APCSA course. We did a deep dive into curriculum, each of the four units. We did a lot of FRQ prep as well. You'll also get a lot of collaboration and resource sharing with other APCSA teachers. I know when I taught APCSA, I was the only one in my building doing so. So, it was really nice to see the collaboration across all different time zones from teachers sharing resources, sharing things that worked in their class and really learning from each other. And it felt like we were our own APCSA department, which was a lot of fun in these live sessions. And then you'll get exam prep strategies, too. We talked about FRQs. We did a lot of multiple choice prep as well.

CSP will look similar and I will highlight a couple things. You will get a lot of create task help as well with APCSP since that is of course one of the big parts of the exam. And then as TJ mentioned we do have APCSP versions for both Python and JavaScript. Doesn't matter which one you teach, the cohort will support both, so it'll be one cohort and you can use either language in your classroom because the strategy will be pretty similar and the curriculum is similar. But again, a deep dive into the curriculum, create task resources, and again, platform features that specifically will help APCSP.

And then, of course, AP Cyber is an exciting one. I know there was a lot of interest in that too at the beginning of the webinar. It's new for this year. We're really excited about our curriculum and we're excited to have a cohort of teachers going over it with us. So we'll again talk about platform features that specifically will support AP cyber security. AP cyber security is going to have five units from College Board, so you'll get a deep dive in each of those as you're learning this new kind of curriculum, new course and new exam. You'll again get to collaborate with people all over, other teachers participating and learning and sharing what's working in their classroom. Same with exam prep strategies. This next year will be the first year of the AP cyber security exam, so you'll get to kind of work through those exam prep strategies with other teachers. I think it'll be a super useful resource as we're all kind of approaching this exam for the first time.

And what I did want to show you a couple things. And I think for AP Cyber of course it's new, but for CSP and CSA maybe you're teaching it here for the first time, I saw that in the chat, maybe it is the 30th time you're teaching it but you just would like a refresher or some collaboration. Particularly with CSA, of course, they just changed their exam and curriculum framework last year. So this was data from our APCSA cohort we had this year. We had 33 teachers participate. And what I thought was super interesting as you can see it's a real wide range of experience levels. We had teachers who had not taught CSA before, but we had teachers plenty of teachers who had taught it for seven or more years. It was really like one-third of teachers had actually not taught it before and two-thirds had taught APCSA before. So there's a good range. If you are a new AP teacher, you will have other people in the cohort that you can talk about that with, but you'll also have a lot of veteran teachers that you're able to learn from through the cohort, too. That's why the collaboration and resource sharing is such an awesome part of it. And if you have taught these AP courses before, you will have plenty of people to talk to who also have that level of experience and you can kind of learn new things from them. And again, it's always great to still get the refresher, particularly when College Board has made changes like they have. This decade now, CSP and CSA have both changed. So again, we saw that this first cohort was super beneficial for all audiences.

And then another thing that our teachers that participate in the APCSA cohort and that have done our PD courses before always highlight is there's an asynchronous PD course that you'll get to work through. You'll have modules you get to work through throughout the year in addition to the live sessions. And those asynchronous courses come with spotlight lessons where you're going to get kind of some bonus planning resources for specific concepts in each unit. So, a lot of extra teaching resources for some of those maybe a little more difficult, higher leverage lessons that will really help you make a difference and maybe get a fresh new perspective on how to teach it. So, I'll just show you kind of what those resources look like before I pass it over to talk to Danielle to talk about the AI cohort.

This is an example of a spotlight lesson from APCSA. So again, this is not in the student course. This is something that you in our cohorts have access to. They are teacher-facing resources designed to help you approach some of these lessons and figure out new and innovative ways to teach these concepts to your students. So this one was for writing methods and you'll see it goes over student comprehension issues with some strategies to specifically address those, some creative teaching strategies. So an unplugged activity for the different types of methods because of course when you're learning methods that's one of the new things in Java that is a little bit different if you're transitioning from Python and JavaScript. So a nice fun unplugged game to help them understand. But then we also give you these kind of simulations. This is a method guessing game that you could project this on the board and have students kind of collaborate and work through. It's a lot of fun, but is this return type correctly declared? And of course, I see an int, but I see it's a string, so I'm going to put incorrect and I'm going to get it right.

So, that's one for CSA. For CSP, one of the ones we've highlighted is binary, and it's similar. This is again a really high-level concept. Once they can do binary conversions, there's a lot of different questions on the AP exam that they can get right, so a really important lesson for it. But again, you'll get teaching ideas. You'll get common student challenges and how teachers can help. You'll get recommendations for areas of our platform that help with binary in addition to the course. But again, you get another fun little game converting 10 to binary. Okay, pressure's on, I got to do this for the webinar. All right, I got score one, we got it, we converted it correctly. So, this would be a fun game, and this one actually is available to students, so you could run a binary builder race in your classroom and have students compete.

And then same for cyber. This is going to be super helpful because cyber is going to be pretty much new to everyone since it's a new course, but you'll get some background knowledge on the concepts. You'll get some simulations you can work through to help you learn before you prepare it to students. Again, all of the resources I'm showing you, these are examples of things that come in our teacher-facing asynchronous PD courses that are in addition to other things in our platform in the student course. So, these are resources designed just for you and our cohort to get a little bit of extra help and resources for some of those lessons. You'll get, I like this one, it gives you some example analogies. It gives you a teacher CFU for clarification, and you also even get a script for introducing some of the new activities in this course. So we highlighted usually about two or three spotlight lessons per unit in each AP course, so you will have a lot of these throughout the asynchronous PD course to help you with those concepts. And again these are extra in addition to the student course you already get. These are bonus teacher-facing resources for you as membership in our cohort.

So, that's kind of what the AP courses look like. They're a lot of fun, great collaboration, great resource sharing, and useful. If it's your 40th year teaching APCSA or your very first, we would love to have you in our cohorts, and I guarantee you'll find some value from them. And moving on to our entire new fun cohort, I'll pass it over to Danielle to talk about the main event, the Applied AI for Educators cohort.

All right, let me go ahead and share my screen. All right. So, AI training. I feel like AI is here and we need to be trained on it, right? Here it says 93% of teachers see AI's potential to make learning more engaging, but 68% of educators have not received specific PD on AI. We can't really teach AI or use AI if we don't understand it ourselves. So we really need to focus on making sure that we have the understanding on these technologies that are only getting more and more sophisticated and more prevalent and we need to get a handle on it so that we can train our students and decide how we want to implement them in education.

So our cohort professional model is pretty similar. You know you'll have an asynchronous course. It's slightly shorter than some of the other ones. It's about 30 to 40 hours. And you'll work through those different modules and they kind of start it foundationally and then build from there. So you'll start with some very basic AI literacy and by the end you'll be making some AI agents. So it really does expand as you get through it. We do have those five live sessions. They're very collaborative. They are in addition to the course, so it's not just going over the course stuff. We really highlight a different theme that we focus on and then we really dig into that concept. We'll do some collaboration breakout rooms, it's pretty engaging. It's in addition to the course and really builds off of that, and then also one-on-one support. If you have questions on the concepts or the activities, you need some help and support, you can always reach out to me and I would be happy to jump in and work with you on whatever it is you are struggling with.

It's broken into these kind of five main areas. Like I said before, you start with those foundations, understanding what AI is, where we've seen it for many, many years. I feel like we've heard AI recently and we think it's brand new, but it really isn't. There's a rich history to AI that we've been seeing in bits and pieces. So, we kind of learn a little bit about how it works and then we apply it to different ways that we can use it to help our own practice as teachers and educators or as administrators in education. And then we kind of move beyond chatbots. AI is very much more than chatbots these days. So, we kind of explore different AI tools and how they're even embedded in a lot of the academic tools that you use at your own schools. And then of course addressing those AI challenges both in ethics, in education, academic integrity. I'm sure you guys are very much aware of those academic integrity pieces. So, we really dig into those concepts and kind of work through that. And then at the end is very much hands-on building. You're building custom chatbots. You're building AI agents. You are building AI created apps. So, you're going to end with a lot of tangible resources that you can use in your practice. Whether it's materials you're using with students, whether it's behind the scenes chatbots to help you quickly generate emails or however you're going to utilize these technologies, it's going to give you a lot of resources to build off of.

So what kind of makes this course a little bit different than maybe some other AI courses is it's very tool-neutral. You're not going to walk away being an expert on using a very specific tool. I'm not going to be like, "Yes, I'm a ChatGPT expert. I know how to use it perfectly." That's not the focus of this. You'll be able to kind of look at AI tools in general and understand how they work and how to use them. So it's not just tool-focused, especially nowadays when there'll be a new AI tool and then a month later your school blocked it, then you just were trained on using a tool that you can't use anymore. So we really try to keep it on the more general concepts and things that apply with these tools in general. We also focus on AI literacy but also creating these evaluation frameworks. We can look at different tools and evaluate the pros and cons. What kind of AI is it using? What kind of information is it gathering? What are some safeguards I need to have in place when I'm using this kind of technology? We also build around real educator workflows. We're focusing on how you can use this in your practice in education, how it actually can benefit you in your day-to-day professional lives. And it's very hands-on. We're working with these technologies, we're working with these tools, and you're building tools. By the end, you're going to have a lot of materials and resources for your own practice.

And what's a little bit different too about this cohort than some of our other ones is it's very much open to everyone in education. So, I just had a breakdown of a cohort that just wrapped up. This was about 46 educators and you can see that this one in particular had a lot of elementary school teachers, and it was elementary school, middle school, we had administrators in it, and high school, and everyone at all levels got a lot of benefit from learning how to use AI. So it's not just for high school teachers, it's not just for CS, it's for everybody. It is for everyone in education who needs to understand and wants to better understand this technology. So even if maybe you came in for an AP cohort but you know somebody at your school that might be interested in this, it really is very much open to everyone under the umbrella of education. And that is it for my AI part. I'm going to pass it back over to TJ to wrap it up here.

Awesome. Thank you, Danielle. All right, let me just back up right here. So, thanks everybody for joining us today. Again, if you are interested and want to just hear a little bit more about pricing options with our PD cohorts, please go ahead and just fill out this form, and somebody from our team will contact you. Steve or Danielle will put that in the chats, the same link from earlier today. Yeah, and then if there's any questions, keep firing away in the Q&A section.

And then just some additional resources here. Great opportunity to be part of our CodeHS certified educator group. We also offer CodeHS micro-credentials, super fun way to test your knowledge on different CS concepts. Our Facebook educator group is a very active, exciting group, so please, encourage you to join there, and then also on all of our socials. And then there's also a certificate of completion. If you would like to get that for attending today's webinar, all you need to do is be logged into CodeHS and then click the link that was just put into the chat there and then you'll be able to get a certificate of completion. We also have some summer PD webinars coming up. These are free PD opportunities, everything from just getting started with like web design and JavaScript, a little bit of a deep dive with CSA, CSP, teaching Python, and then probably my favorite, most excited one near the end of June, AP cyber security, a preview of the new cyber course that we are creating that will be aligned to College Board. So very excited about that. We also have a webinar library, so if you want to go back and watch some recordings, read through some of the transcripts, there's a lot of great resources in there. So take a peek, bookmark that. And then additionally, if you are interested, if you don't currently have CodeHS at your school and you're interested in bringing it to your school or district, you can go to codehs.com/learnmore and somebody from our team will reach out to you.

So we want to thank you so much. We're one minute over, so not too bad. Thank you everybody for joining, for learning more about cohorts. We are super excited. We're very proud of what we're building here. So, we hope that you will explore some of these options and share these options with other educators. And we hope to see you soon in a lot of other capacities on CodeHS. Thank you for joining everybody.