ITA summer internships

[Clint Johns]

Greetings ITA parents,

Hope everyone has been doing well! I would like to thank all of you for your participation and input throughout the year, and would like to give you a very brief overview of what we've been able to accomplish this year as an Academy:

1. Established a grade 7 and 8 technology elective at Horner Junior High, our feeder school
2. Created a Robotics Club at Horner Junior High to compete in the FIRST Lego League Competition (we had 50 students and 8 parent volunteers and had to turn many more away)
3. Created an academy website and purchased a domain
4. Created an academy facebook site
5. Field trip to Synopsys to tour IT Help Desk and data centers (5 students)
6. Field trip to CISCO All Academy Day (4 students)
7. Field trip to Hurricane Electric ISP (15 students)
8. Field trip to Ohlone College to compete in StRUT (Students Recycling Used Technology) (12 students)
9. Field trip to Horner Jr High to teach 7th and 8th grade tech classes how to build 10 computers that their school purchased (6 students)
10. Field trip to Brier Elementary to upgrade a computer lab (~ 25 systems) (5 students)
11. Field trip to Hopkins Jr High to help tech club build 4 computers that their school purchased (4 students)
12. Field trip to Harvey Green Elementary School to upgrade a computer lab (32 systems) (6 students)
13. Field trip to Monterey Bay Aquarium behind-the-scenes tour (50 students)
14. Reward Field trip to Santa Clara PaintBall (15 students)
15. Presented at Midway Pacific Information Communication Technology (MPICT) Symposium @ Ohlone and were well-received
16. Establish MouseSquad Computer Support Club to run online help desk for Irvington High School and have completed ~ 300 service calls this year, and earned over 100 service hours
17. Held 3 ewaste recycling events to raise funds to support computer repairs and maintenance at Irvington
18. Increased Irvington Robotics Club participation 5-fold to: FIRST Tech Challenge (Brentwood Qualifier, Irvington Qualifier, Newark Championship, MakerFaire), BotBall (Regional Qualifier), and outreach at Espanolandia (Spanish DisneyLand event at Irvington High)
19. Continued with second annual 8th to 9th grade transition summer camp for IT students @ Ohlone
20. Students beginning to earn CompTIA A+ certification
21. Students enrolling in summer bootcamp for CCENT certification @ Ohlone
22. Added an interview / essay application process for incoming students in the program ; retention has increased significantly this year due to increased teacher collaboration, more and varied project opportunities, increased student buy-in
23. Nearly all ITA teachers have SMARTBoards as of last year; this year we have increased our robotics kit count, workstation computer count, upgraded the amount of RAM and migrated to Windows 7 in our computer lab, and begun setting up hi-def webcams for ~telepresence between classes.
24. Our seniors all have a graduation benchmark requirement to job shadow, and from this identify a community issue that they can change, then present their findings to a panel of community members and teachers ; our ITA seniors have elected topics in: telepresence, cyberbullying, educational gaming, generational technology divide, ergonomics, and gaming addiction. Presentations will be this Wed/Thurs from 12-5pm. Please contact me ASAP if you would like to be on one of their panels.
25. 4 ITA teachers will have summer internships as part of the IISME program (www.iisme.org) - FujiFilm Dimatix, Intel, NASA, and Stanford Laboratory; they plan on working together this summer to create multidisciplinary projects for our students that have current, real-world applications.
26. Students in the process of looking for summer IT internships - if your company would like to host one (or more) students, please let me know ASAP; we have begun collecting resumes from our students to help aid in identifying where students would be good matches. We currently have placement opportunities at: City of Fremont IT Department, Peer One Dedicated Hosting, and Robert Half

Continued success in all you do,

Clint Johns

Irvington Information Technology Academy Coordinator

www.irvingtonita.org

www.facebook.com/IrvingtonITA