A video by the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing at Georgia Tech will be featured in the 2020 STEM for All Video Showcase, a free online event taking place May 5-12 and funded by the National Science Foundation.

The video, entitled “Professional Development – A Sustainable Approach” allows viewers to learn more about the center’s teacher professional development work and also meet Constellations teachers and leadership.  

The video includes a look at recent in-person workshops hosted by Constellations that were focused on allowing teachers the time, space, and personalized attention to help them better grasp the computer science curriculum they are teaching in their classrooms. The center will host another workshop virtually over the summer to help prepare teachers for the upcoming year.

“We created the workshops as a way to bring all of our teachers together so that they could build a community amongst each other, while also gaining the tools and knowledge to build teacher efficacy. We feel like these workshops have been instrumental in our success so far and wanted to share that with the bigger education and research community,” said Lien Diaz, Constellations director of educational innovation and leadership.

Workshops were planned by the Constellations fellows, who are all former teachers, and drew on their experiences from attending professional development workshops in order to create a more effective and sustainable approach for their own training offerings. Workshops regularly incorporate physical computing and unplugged activities that the teachers can tangibly grasp and integrate into their own classrooms.

Now in its sixth year, the showcase regularly hosts 200 videos, drawing over 80,000 views from more than 180 countries. During the seven day event, practitioners, researchers, administrators, policy makers, industry representatives, principal investigators, and the general public are invited and encouraged to participate. All participants can watch videos, post to facilitated discussion threads and vote for videos in three categories; Facilitators’ Choice, Presenters’ Choice, and Public Choice. The theme for this year’s showcase is STEM for All: Learning from Research and Practice.

The STEM for All Video Showcase is created and hosted by TERC, a non-profit, research, and development organization, located in Cambridge. MA.  TERC is partners with six NSF funded resource centers: MSPnet, CADRE, CAISE, CIRCL, STELAR, and CS for All Teachers. The showcase is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (#1642187).

Vote for the video to win the Public Choice Award at https://bit.ly/2zb8iAe