Five San Francisco School District (SFUSD) teachers participated in an Information Technology Career Pathway (ITP) workshop held at UC Berkeley and SFUSD August 7-9. This was the second of two Summer 2000 workshops conducted by the IU Team for San Francisco teachers who are preparing to inaugurate the ITP in 9th grade classrooms this fall. The SFUSD ITP summer institutes were coordinated by Bernard Farges and Patricia Spencer, with the assistance of the Interactive University.

IU Director David Greenbaum and Tizoc Garcia

In the classroom, the IT Pathway will utilize a combination of information technology curriculum and work-based learning experiences to give skills to students that will make them more competitive in the 21st century workforce. ITP will support students wishing to develop specific expertise in technology career areas such as programming, networking, web design, and multimedia.

The August workshop prepared teachers for the Fall 2000 pilot of the IT Career Pathway at Mission and John O’Connell high schools in San Francisco. The ITP pilot will begin at these sites in the 9th grade with a year-long, introductory course in Information Technology. After this introductory course, interested students may choose an IT specialization in web development, networking, digital media or programming, and complete more specialized coursework and work-based learning experiences in the 11th and 12th grades.

Over the course of three full days--beginning on the Berkeley Campus and moving across the bay to San Francisco--the August workshop focused on discussion of the 9th grade IT curriculum and the development of implementation strategies, in particular, how technology can support this work. IU Project Manager Lisa Yesson conducted the workshop and was joined by IU Director David Greenbaum for some sessions with the teachers.

The pilot high schools are using IT curriculum adapted from Building a Foundation for Tomorrow: Tech Prep Information Technology Skill Standards-Based Curriculum, a curriculum package developed at the NorthWest Center for Emerging Technologies (NWCET). During this three-day session, the IT Pathway team also had hands-on practice with the Course Info courseware management system, and discussed how this online tool can support their collaborative work.

IT Pathway Teachers.

This presentation completed the two-week SFUSD ITP Summer Institute. After this three-day workshop with the Interactive University team, the pilot teachers joined several more of their SFUSD colleagues for two days of database training at Mission High.

For more information about the first week of the IT institutes, see the June 20 IU News story.

During the past year, the IU has helped lead the development and initial implementation of the Information Technology Pathway program, a major component of SFUSD’s Urban Systemic Program (USP), a grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal of the five year USP grant is to help improve student achievement in math, science and technology in SFUSD.