The course that you're taking is part of a series of courses called Specialization on Teaching Impacts of Technology in K12 Education. We're offering this specialization because we know that every day we are using computers, technology, and computation in all new ways to both change our personal everyday lives, but also to change what we know about what is going on in the world. We think it's really critical that all primary and secondary students not only learn about the field and discipline of computer science, but also that especially, they learn to come to be able to understand and analyze the impacts that technology is having on our society everyday. So, we want to help prepare you, teachers, who want to help our children learn these critical things. In this particular specialization, we'll be focusing on these standards developed by the Computer Science Teachers Association, an international organization. Particularly, we'll focus on the impacts of computing, and specifically, we look at three different subsets; how it's impacting our culture, our social interactions, and around the issues of safety, law, and ethics. This specialization and this course is primarily for teachers. Particularly, we imagine teachers that maybe don't necessarily particularly have a background in computer science, but maybe have been teaching computing or interested in teaching computing, but may need to get an authorization, or accreditation, or credentialing to do that. So, we're looking to talk to you teachers. But we also feel that there are some other people who might benefit from this specialization, and those might be computing professionals, who maybe they're interested in going out and working in an after-school club, or supporting a teacher in a classroom. May be even parents who want to know like, what should my kids know about computing in society? So again, this is one of a series of five courses plus a capstone that together form a Coursera specialization, and then get you one of these great specialization certificates. You can take the courses in any order, but we do recommend if you plan to take them all, that you take them in order we have listed on the specialization page. Let me tell you a little bit about each of the courses. Essentially, we've designed each course to approach how is computing and technology impacting our lives, thinking about the various different digital worlds that we all live in. The foundations course basically says, let's take a look at our life over the span of say 24 hours and let's look at the things that we use every day, and explore then the technologies that come underneath that. In our second course, we look at the world of our personal data. How does NSR know what to recommend for me to buy anyway? In that third course, we look at the complex issue of technology and relationships, and how it might be expanding and improving our ability to maintain relationships with people who maybe live a long way away from us, but maybe also negatively impacting our relationships. In the fourth course, we'll look at the issue of the workplace of the future, how is technology and computing changing our existing careers and disciplines? How is it modifying the kinds of jobs that we'll get in the way that will stay prepared to have new jobs or new careers throughout our life? Finally, in our last course, we'll be looking at the impact of technology on society globally. There's many things that we can look at from here, including, is it easier to travel to a foreign country even though that we have access to our smartphones all the time? To the way in which technology has enabled each of us to be able to speak and share our experiences with a formal global audience. Finally, in our Capstone course, we're going to be very applied. We know that for many teachers especially United States, there's a lot of pressure to offer the new Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles course. As a person who is one of the first piloters of that at the university, I can tell you I've really liked the course, it's fun. Students learn great things, but we're going to give you a chance in this Capstone project to actually do the explore task, which is one of the required tasks that you as a teacher would guide students in. So, you'll have a chance to do it for yourself. Nothing better than to help prepare and teach it, but we'll also provide you some insider knowledge, giving you the opportunity to practice applying the checklist for grading it to some actual simple student work from high schools, and to share some of our knowledge about what are the challenges that students most frequently have when completing the explore task. Finally, as you get ready to do the capstone, we'll remind you and ask you, do you need to get actual accredited transcript from an institution of higher education? If so, we have a special way that we are going to enable you to get four graduate unit credits in education and computer science education from UC San Diego, if that would be helpful to you. Some people might need this in order to meet accreditation or authorization responsibilities in their state, and others of you might be able to get a pay raise based on completing more graduate credit units. We will remind you more about that when we get to that point. So, we hope that if you are interested in preparing to teach kids about the impacts of technology on our society, that you'll join us, and not only in this course, but in all the courses of our specialization.
