Teaching Impacts of Technology: Workplace of the Future

In this course you’ll focus on how the Internet has enabled new careers and changed expectations in traditional work settings, creating a new vision for the workplace of the future. This will be done through a series of paired teaching sections, exploring a specific “Impact of Computing” in your typical day and the “Technologies and Computing Concepts” that enable that impact, all at a K12-appropriate level.

This course is part of a larger Specialization through which you’ll learn impacts of computing concepts you need to know, organized into 5 distinct digital “worlds”, as well as learn pedagogical techniques and evaluate lesson plans and resources to utilize in your classroom. By the end, you’ll be prepared to teach pre-college learners to be both savvy and effective participants in their digital world.

In this particular digital world (careers and work), you’ll explore the following Impacts & Technology pairs --

Impacts (Getting jobs in new ways): technology based freelancing, Linkedin and how it changed the way we work
Technology and Computing Concepts: Data retrieval, data vs metadata, SQL, Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT)

Impacts (Physical ties to work restricts people and businesses): work communication, the cloud, cloud computing, companies affected by ransomware attacks
Technology and Computing Concepts: how the cloud works, FTP, cloud storage, clients and servers, scalability basics, fault tolerance, AWS, devops

Impacts (Advancing your career in the fast moving technical world): digital technology changing jobs, online classes, machines replacing jobs, data science and artificial intelligence

In the pedagogy section for this course, in which best practices for teaching computing concepts are explored, you’ll learn how to effectively explore and critique curricular material you find and practice reviewing lesson plans, with a focus on material aimed at learning HTML.

In terms of CSTA K-12 computer science standards, we’ll primarily cover learning objectives within the “impacts of computing” concept, while also including some within the “networks and the Internet” concepts and the “data and analysis” concept. Practices we cover include “fostering and inclusive computing culture”, “recognizing and defining computational problems”, and “communicating about computing”.