I am Sam Green, an experienced AWS enthusiast and computing educator, passionate about teaching
cloud technologies and practical computing skills. I hold the AWS Solutions Architect Professional
certification, among others, and have been published in the Last Week in AWS newsletter.
Designed and deployed practical AWS projects, including API Gateway integrations and DynamoDB interactions.
Developed CloudWatch monitoring experiments demonstrating real-time metric changes.
Explored Fluentd and Fluent Bit configurations for containerized logging in CloudWatch.
Kebab is the name for my booklet exploring how to prepare for AWS certifications. This is an exploration of pedagogy.
I explore the purpose of Amazon certifications and how they benefit Amazon. I explain why it might be helpful to book the examination even if you are not quite ready yet, and explore various issues related to learning.
Python
I have produced a video series going through Codecademy's Python course. It is over thirty hours now.
This is how I self-teach. I produce material, watch it back, and then produce questions on it.
Teaching
I have delivered a fourteen week course online. I teach the important concepts of Amazon Web Services (AWS), some weeks to as many as fifty students.
To support students, I created a website which contains notes for each session. With the brutalist background of Westminster tube station, I called the project AWS Tube. (AWS does indeed provide infrastructure and is undernearth many critical UK functions such as TfL)
You can view actual sessions by clicking here and here.
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Students can view a Recovery Sheet for each week that we go through. I soon learned that I needed a better way to listen to students and gather feedback.
The major problem with teaching online is understanding how students are feeling and reacting, since you cannot see the faces and body language of students.
To address this, I built a feedback form online, and asked five students to fill it out after each session.
This feedback form uses a Lambda function (discrete unit of code) as the backend, which I coded. Mediating between the backend and frontend is Amazon's API Gateway.
Students are asked about the topics they felt confident with, and the topics they struggled with, and the answers are fed straight into my email inbox. Click the image above to explore the feedback form.
I wanted to investigate better ways to teach online. Usually, each ``Recovery Sheet" is for a particular topic such as Networking or Databases.
I decided to use one ``Recovery Sheet" to gather together some notes on teaching well. I have studied Dylan Wiliam, Barak Rosenshine, and Sanjoy Mahajan.
Below, I created an audio recording of Barat Rosenshine's 2012 article on Principles of Instruction. I think Rosenshine's principles (I prefer his TEN) form an excellent system of ideas. Since becoming familiar with them, I have started to wonder if certain secondary school teachers I had had read his work also. They stood out from other teachers, but it was hard to articulate what they were doing. The hardest part of implementing his ideas is "Checking for understanding", because this requires work on the part of the teacher, constantly. It is so easy to simply ask ``any questions?". But of course, a student in need of twenty answers will say ``no". In hospitality too, it is nothing to ask a customer if everything is okay. They speak with their eyes and you must teach them to feel comfortable to complain from the moment they enter.
If I had to discuss a weakness of Rosenshine's principles, I think it would be the absence of the need to motivate students.
I believe that excellent teachers can make the case to students over the course of several lessons, like undercover barristers. What they do and say, to persuade, of course depends on the idiosyncracies of the students. Rosenshine's principles define (beautifully) the mechanism of teaching but it is possible that students feel no need to perform a weekly review (tenth principle) or answer any questions (sixth principle).
Great teaching involves a careful crafting of knowledge --- of what students care about --- in the teacher's mind. All of Rosenshine's practices can be enhanced, gradually, by a teacher concerned with developing passion in pupils. I'm sure Mr Rosenshine was aware of this.
Since I started my Philosophy degree at York (2017), I have studied knowledge, and how knowledge is transferred between two persons.
I've written essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This is perhaps the greatest articulation of how humans come to have knowledge of reality, synthesising the opposing views of empiricists (``knowledge comes from out senses") and rationlists (``knowledge is arrived at independently of the world").
I wrote my thesis on Gilbert Ryle and his 1946 tirade against anybody who supposes that doing things---performing, dancing, teaching---can be reduced to a bunch of propositions, in the mind of the performer. Ryle distinguished knowledge-how from knowledge-that.
I found Ryle's notion of \systematically misleading expressions helpful and recently used it to explain why AWS's documentation on dedicated hosts is misleading.
All this is to say that I will not struggle with learning about pedagogy on a PGCE. Teaching is the familiar, and computing the area I need to strengthen.
In second year at university, I took a module in which we read through Rousseau's Emile. For assessment, I researched a passage in which Rousseau used an analogy with a plant to talk about training.
On this site is evidence of an ability to learn, to improve, to explain ideas, to articulate complex ideas, and an ability to impress.
These are things required of a teacher.
