The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) is holding its annual conference in Denver this year, with delegates including students from the Thompson School District scheduled to present.
ISTE holds its conference in a different city each year, and this year’s location in Colorado gives TSD an opportunity to showcase its apprenticeship program, said Kelly Thayne, chief technology officer.
Sain has served on the ISTE board of directors in the past and is heavily involved in running the annual conference, although this year he is not an organizer, only an attendee and presenter.
The Information Technology Apprenticeship Program offered by TSD is different from an internship, but it does offer internships to students.
Thain said interns will work on a variety of devices, including student Chromebooks and iPads, just like apprentices, but their work will only be during the school year and will be considered classwork rather than employment.
Interns, on the other hand, are considered district employees, receive their own district email address, are members of employee groups on office chat platforms like Slack, and work and receive a paycheck during the summer.
“They’re part of our team, they attend staff meetings, they take part in chats and things like that,” she said of the apprentices.
The apprenticeship program will be one of the topics Thayne will be presenting about this week, and the apprentices themselves will join her to answer questions about their day-to-day work and what they get out of the program.
With more and more jobs in the modern American economy being technical, Thayne and her students plan to offer tech-minded students insight into what they can gain by placing them in professional environments operating student devices, providing IT and customer support and acting as technical employees, even before they graduate from high school.
But technical education these days doesn’t just apply to people interested in working with computers: Essentially, every career path is using technology more and more every day, she said.
“We have to train students for the jobs they will have in the future,” she said, “and there is not a single job that doesn’t require some kind of digital tool.”
The conference will address not only the teaching of technology topics, but also how technology has transformed the teaching of non-technology related subjects such as history and literature.
“I think access to resources and information has changed,” Thane says. “Students are constantly inundated with technology and information: books, websites, online digital tools. So how do you become a better digital detective? How do you check your sources? How do you verify the information you’re learning? And how do you go from being a consumer of information that’s constantly coming at you to being more of a creator? How do you demonstrate your knowledge, your thoughts, your experiences?”
