CS50 Workshop - All you need is a few CS teachers to get together...

This past weekend I attended the CS50 workshop put on by Harvard and Microsoft.  While the conference wasn't exactly what I had hoped for, it was beneficial in a few ways.  In no particular order, here are somethings I learned:

1. All you need is a few CS teachers to get together to learn some cool things.  In most industries, networking is part of the job... yet I rarely hear teachers think about networking.  Attending these workshops, the best thing I learn is always from other teachers.  CS teachers are islands in their school/district - even more so than math teachers.  The MTBoS has been huge in my professional development, and I hope there is a way to develop that same type of comradery within the CS teaching community. 
2. At Harvard, they divide up sections based on comfort and then grade students from where they started to where they ended.  This reminds me a lot of what Joe Henry did with his geometry classes where there was an honors/regular track all intermixed.  Obviously in math we try to get all students to the same ending point, that is the goal in with CS50 but at the same time it is unfair to really expct that when students have had such drastically different experieences with CS prior to the course
3. AP CSP is going to change a lot between now and even 3-5 years from now.  As the middle school level incorporates more CS into their curriculum, I think the rigor of my AP CSP course will be able to be increased once most students have more experience in CS.

Once again, I am so thankful that I am able to teach this course this year before it gets to be AP.