Welcome to Technology!

Digital Citizenship and Online Safety

All students are provided the digital citizenship and cyber hygiene curriculum to help them navigate through the online world and avoid common pitfalls like being hacked, falling into online echo chambers, and cyberbullying.  Students gain a solid understanding of their digital footprint and how that affects their current and future reputation.  We also cover copyright and creative commons licenses and the ethics of hacking.  All of this prepares students for life on the internet while staying safe and becoming a positive digital citizen. 

Graphic Design and Digital Art

Students in my classes are also provided a curriculum that covers Digital media.  All my students are provided access to the Adobe Creative Cloud where they can utilize all the Adobe products to create masterful pieces of art.  This includes instruction in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Character Animator.   Students also gain an understanding of the elements and principles of design and are guided in the art of composition.  The final project of this curriculum is printing a poster for a client of their choice.  Students are offered a real-world experience of searching for a teacher or other faculty member to design a poster that will be printed with our in-house wide format printer. 

Students who enjoy digital art are encouraged to join WPTV where they will learn the art of video editing, animation and digital graphics in a television production setting.  This provides them with real world experience in attracting and gaining an audience for their productions.

CODING

Students learning about critical thinking, procedural directions, and how to provide exact instruction using code.  Students start with block coding using Scratch to build basic videos games.  The learn about event triggers, variables, loops, and conditional statements.  Since the first unit is block coding students don't have to write a single line of code, instead they drag and drop different code blocks to snap together and create a program of their liking.  This is the first step towards teaching them how to program. 

The next level moves the students into coding with Python.  The Python language is an extremely powerful language that is used across the technology industry from companies such as Google, Paypal, Amazon, Netflix facebook and Reddit.  We teach python first because of the forced indentation that is required of the python language.  This teaches students to produce clean and easy to manage code while giving them real experience in a real language.  Students who excel at coding will move into using Python to program a Micro:bit, learning about electronics and advancing to the Robotics class.