Get Connected - April 2008 - (Page 6)

Hands-on Education Technology Students from Spring Hill High School, Maury Co., TN, Visit ENA for Workplace Insights and Career Advice On Friday, March 14, ENA treated students from Spring Hill High School of Maury Co., TN, to a half day of facility touring, career testimonials from a range of ENA employees and a pizza buffet lunch. A contextual, technical curriculum Thirty-six students are enrolled in Spring Hill High’s Academy of Informational Technologies program and are interested in one day beginning careers in technology. One of three IT Academies in the state sponsored by Nashville State Community College’s Center for Innovation in Technological Education (CITE), the Academy’s mission is to use contextual teaching and learning methods and connect students to technical careers in order to meet the needs of the 21st-century workforce. Students in Spring Hill’s Academy have the opportunity, for instance, to take a technical writing course in lieu of a traditional English class; and quite significantly, instead of enrolling in conventional vocational training such as wood or machine shop, get their systems engineer A+ and Network+ certification. The school is a Pearson VUE academic test facility (Pearson VUE is the world’s leading test center network, testing 4 million tests a year in licensure, certification, academic admissions, regulatory and government testing service markets) and Brent Cook, the Academy’s IT instructor and main architect of the program, is a Pearson administrator. As a managed network service provider and a company committed to advocating for the 21st-century education of schoolchildren, 6 ENA was only too happy to give the students a taste of what the working world might have in store for them. “We’re delighted to host a group of students like this,” said Paul Brady, ENA’s director of Network Engineering. “It gives us the opportunity to interact with the most important segment of our customers, the students, which is fun and exciting for our employees. And we are able to give these students an extremely focused view of how a real-world managed service provider operates. This helps prepare them for the specific aspect of the career that they’re most interested in.” A taste of the real world Cook, one of the chaperons on the group’s field trip to ENA, explained that “about 50 percent of my students will go into a technical career. For some, they know that they can get a certification out of our curriculum that translates immediately into a job after graduation. Others, they build on the training they receive by going into computer science or engineering in college.” To date, Spring Hill’s Academy has a record of 100-percent job placement for its graduating certified students that elected not to go college. For the ones that have gone on to college, the school has been able to place all of them in summer jobs in the IT field. The students toured ENA’s facility and seemed most impressed with the server room—the stacks and stacks of servers and seeming miles of Ethernet, KVM and power cables—and the NOC, the Network Operations Center, with its wall-sized displays and customer support analysts busy monitoring the entire ENA network from a single site. Relevance, another part of education’s responsibility According to Brandy May, the Spring Hill High School guidance counselor who helped Cook sell the IT Academy program to administrators and parents alike and the students’ other chaperon, the day’s field trip to ENA “was perfect.” As she explained, “We like kids to have something that interests them, something that’s relevant to them. That’s also part of educators’ responsibility. These kind of work-site field trips are critical to showing them what’s possible.” Cook, like May, can’t help feeling personally invested in his students’ educational fortunes and their post-graduation futures. While May frankly admitted “I care a lot about these kids,” Cook said he probably knows “where just about every graduate of the program in the last four years is right now.” The program has been so successful, local employers trust Cook implicitly. “Word has gotten out [about the competence of the students]. When I place a call to a local business about one of our students, they say, ‘Oh yeah, send him or her right over.’ It’s enough to at least get them an interview.” Seniors with technological aspirations Chris Stepanick, a 17-year-old senior in the program, plans to turn his Academy

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Get Connected - April 2008

The End of a Bottleneck: OCPS’ New Network Contents A Letter From the President Not Your Average Library: New Carlisle, IN New Consortium Program Launches May 1 Hands-on Education Education Leaders Decry EETT Cuts Much More Than E-mail: Gaggle’s Other Apps Notes From the CTO

Get Connected - April 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.