I have been reading several of the blog posts on teaching Computer Science Education and want to chime in.
I have a Master’s Degree from the University of North Texas called Computer Education and Cognitive Studies. I worked towards this degree for a long time.
I got my teaching certificate while doing course work at Texas Woman’s University which is down the road. I only had to take one CS class while doing that — and it didn’t have anything to do with teaching. I did have to take several math courses which DID help me towards teaching both math and computer science (and I am certified in both).
When my district transitioned out of teaching computer math and into computer science, we brought in a professor from UNT who designed a course for us which was a CS pedagogy course. I think I’ve blogged about it before, but as a group we developed the original scope and sequence for our computer science course and a lot of the lessons.
I’ve gone from that point and evolved our district course offerings from there — yes, I’ve been on every committee which has shaped our current curriculum and actually spent last year writing the current CS and PreAP CS curriculum. I will probably work more on the CS, and have asked for another person to work on the PreAP, hopefully she has time.
The master’s degree focused on just about all phases of CS education. While working on it, I earned my Tech Applications certification (we didn’t have a test at the time), so we worked on teaching things like web mastering, multimedia projects, but very little of that was directly applicable to Computer Science Education. However, whenever I was able to define my own projects, I did focus on CS. Found quite a bit of interesting research towards teaching CS, but there could certainly be more.
Another facet of my degree focused on online education and I’ve even taught CS online. It’s tough and it takes a very self-directed student, and those are hard to fine.
I think we should have more CS Education programs. I also think that if it not directly available, the programs can be found. I do believe UNT teaches the CECS program online — I did take two courses completely online and was very successful.