2019-2020
On June 5th, 2019 Storm Lake Elementary School was awarded the Computer Science is Elementary Award. Once our district received the CS is Elementary Award, communication was sent out to certified elementary and middle school teachers to see if they would be interested in receiving computer science training throughout the 2019-2020 school year. A goal was to have two representatives from each grade level from Kindergarten to 8th grade as well as other teachers that would support computer science implementation in their own capacity such as media specialists, STEM teachers, and computer teachers. The representatives from the elementary school became the Computer Science is Elementary Team. Team members received training, a stipend, and the expectation that they would begin to implement computer science in their classrooms. Before training began in the summer of 2019, a leadership team was created. At that time, the leadership team included our superintendent, technology director, instructional technology coach, and our elementary STEM teacher.
To best prepare our computer science team teachers, our district contracted BootUp Professional Development to provide professional development around computer science during the 2019-2020 school year. The leadership team worked closely with BootUp to develop a plan that would work best for our district. BootUp sent a trainer for four separate week-long visits. There were four days of on-site support leading workshops and sixteen days of model teaching and peer coaching (We were supposed to have a fifth week with BootUP, but it was postponed due to Covid). During this time our district technology director, instructional technology coach, and elementary STEM teacher received a Train-the Trainer and instructional coach support.
During the 2019-2020 school year, members of our CS team attended the Computer Science Elementary Institute, Iowa Technology and Education Connection (ITEC), the Future Ready Iowa Summit, and visited Loess Hills Computer Programming Elementary School. Our leadership team organized a Family STEM Night to be held in the spring of 2020, which was postponed due to Covid. We had plans to send members of our team to CSTA in Virginia in the summer of 2020, but those plans were also postponed due to Covid.
2020-2021
During the 2020-2021 (our return back to school after the Covid shut-down) things looked very different for us. Students stayed in their classrooms called "pods" with the same group of students for the majority of their day. With the pod concept, teachers may have moved classrooms or to a new building in or another facility in our community for the year and no professional development was offered. Due to the reality that was Covid, computer science was put on the back burner for the year and not much progress had been made.
2021-2022
In the 2021-2022 school year, teachers were back in their "normal" building and classrooms and limited professional development was offered. The Computer Science Leadership Team was able to attend the Future Ready Iowa STEM Summit in Des Moines in September. At this time our district offered teachers to opportunity to join the Computer Science Planning Team that was tasked with the creation of our K-12 Computer Science Plan. That team is currently working on the plan to be completed by July 2022. In November we hosted our first Family Code Night partnering with Northwest Iowa STEM and utilizing resources from Code.org. The event was well attended by students, families, and our business partners. In December, members of our leadership team organized activities for their buildings for CSEdWeek. In May 2022, we hosted a tech playground at our new early elementary building led by our Northwest Iowa STEM Regional Manager Mary Trent and our Prairie Lakes AEA Instructional Tech Consultant Julie Graber. We had staff from our pre-school, early elementary, and elementary school in attendance. The tech playground had robots and other computer science materials from Northwest Iowa STEM and Prairie Lakes AEA. Our staff deepened their understanding of computer science, then had the opportunity to explore and play with the robots and materials. The staff was highly engaged and comments were made that all professional development should be like this.
