Perry Central...Meeting the Demands of Our Regional Economy

By: Phil Zellers

Over the past several months I have had the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the job market and regional economy in Perry County.  It has been interesting looking into the numbers of our regional economy and putting together what that means for our students.  It started with a Perry County Development Corporation meeting I was able to attend last fall and has continued through the work of our Work Ethic Certification.

At the PCDC meeting, the Purdue Center for Regional Development gave some information about our regional economy, which includes our surrounding counties.  Here are some of the numbers that came from that meeting.  In Perry County, there are 814 establishments (businesses).  Of those 814 businesses, 703 are Stage 1, meaning they have 2-9 employees.  100 of those businesses are Stage 2, meaning they have 10-99 employees.  There are 11 Stage 3 businesses that have 100-499 employees.  The Stage 3 businesses make up 37.4% of our county's total sales, Stage 2 at 35.5%, and Stage 1 at 27.1%.  

Our biggest industry in the region is manufacturing, accounting for about 23% of our total jobs.  Within manufacturing, some of our largest professions include transportation, fabricated metal production, machinery, and computers and electronics.  Our other major industries include forest and wood products, and agriculture.  Some of our emerging industries are business and financial services, arts and entertainment, and IT and telecommunications.  Other staples of our regional economy include defense and security, biomedical and biotech, and energy production.

So, what does all of this mean?  It reaffirms what we already knew.  Our students are going to be facing a changing and more skilled job market and that Perry County has a real need for skilled workers.  I think it is important as educators to understand our regional economy and job market so we can better prepare our students to face the world after high school.  Almost all of the regional industries listed above require more than a high school diploma.  Technical knowledge, certifications, and degrees are becoming more and more important for our students to be able to compete in the regional job market.  Our regional economy desperately needs employees with these skills.

Perry County has a relatively low unemployment rate.  The problem is that local employers sometimes have a difficult time finding these skilled workers.  Good jobs are going unfilled or filled by people outside our region.  To maintain the businesses we already have and to attract new businesses, we have to help ensure our students can help meet these demands.  We have to work together with our local businesses to make sure we know what they are looking for in employees.

I am proud to be a part of Perry Central because I feel like we are leading the way in preparing our students to meet these needs.  We have a number of Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathways and courses for students to pursue, including engineering, manufacturing, computer science, agriculture, and biomedical fields.  Along with these pathways, we offer several dual credit courses as well as 6 different industry certifications.

Perry Central has cutting edge technology to teach students electrical circuits, hydraulic and pneumatic systems, simple machines, CNC routing, computer programming, robotics, 3D printing and more.  We have a large number of students participating in internships and getting real world work experiences through them.  We are also in the first year of offering a Work Ethic Certification for juniors and seniors.  This certification allows students to demonstrate that they are dependable, take initiative, are involved, and possess other skills employers have said they need in their employees.  This week our school will be hosting and hearing the expertise of Dr. Stone, Director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education.

Perry Central is adapting and taking the steps to make sure our students are as prepared as they can be, as they move forward after high school.  They are learning how the knowledge and skills they learn in the classroom are applied to real world situations and the workplace.  As a lifetime resident of Perry County and a father of three little Commodores, I am glad we are taking these essential steps.  I am proud to be a Commodore!

Surpassed by a Student…Good for You!

By Jamie Guillaume

Back in October, I began an adventure with my students that has not only helped me develop as a teacher, but has opened my mind to new avenues of learning.  Although I read and had many discussions with colleagues about letting students lead their own learning and study their own passions, it was not until I dove in without looking back, that I really began to understand the impact of this type of learning.  As a teacher, I naturally thought it was my job to know everything and to lead students through their passions. 

Although being the keeper of all of the information may have been what being a teacher was at one time, that time has now passed us.  During the process of implementing Genius Hour, we have had many struggles but lots of success!  Most struggles have primarily been students trying to figure out what interests them.  At first they tended to be passionate about their friend’s interest.  However once we established a safe, open and honest classroom culture, students began to flourish!

One student is now able to say and write a greeting with her name and age in Japanese.  I have another student that has digitally created music through computer programming.  Someone is writing a novel. There is a student that has mastered creating websites and even a student studying and creating origami.  This is just some of the fascinating learning that is taking place; keep in mind these students are only 5^th graders!

So you may wonder how we got here and more importantly, how did we find the time?  Time is of course the million dollar question!  I decided that I was going to let one intervention class period a week be devoted to Genius Hour.  I know this seems like a lot of time to give and so many times I was tempted to take it away because I had so much to cover!   However this time is precious to my students and me. As students began to have the time to develop their interests, it spilled over into the curriculum and helped them develop more than they would have otherwise.    

For example, the student that studied website design, made an outstanding website about the American Revolution when we were studying that topic.  The information she researched and displayed far surpassed the standard and my knowledge base!  The student who created music, has learned how to incorporate it as background music for projects.  This leads me to the most important lesson I have learned, it is okay for your students to surpass your knowledge base on a topic and if they do, congratulations, you will love the feeling! 

Google's Loon Balloons

By Nick Etienne

You climb 170 steps up a series of dusty wooden ladders to reach the top of Hangar Two at Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California. The vast, dimly lit shed was built in 1942 to house airships during a war that saw the U.S. grow into a technological superpower. A perch high in the rafters is the best way to appreciate the strangeness of something in the works at Google—a part of the latest incarnation of American technical dominance. On the floor far below are Google employees who look tiny as they tend to a pair of balloons, 15 meters across that resemble giant white pumpkins. Google has launched hundreds of these balloons into the sky, lofted by helium. 

At this moment, a couple of dozen float over the Southern Hemisphere at an altitude of around 20 kilometers, in the rarely visited stratosphere—nearly twice the height of commercial airplanes. Each balloon supports a boxy gondola stuffed with solar-powered electronics. They make a radio link to a telecommunications network on the ground and beam down high-speed cellular Internet coverage to smartphones and other devices. 

It’s known as Project Loon, a name chosen for its association with both flight and insanity. Google says these balloons can deliver widespread economic and social benefits by bringing Internet access to the 60 percent of the world’s people who don’t have it. Many of those 4.3 billion people live in rural places where telecommunications companies haven’t found it worthwhile to build cell towers or other infrastructure. After working for three years and flying balloons for more than three million kilometers, Google says Loon balloons are almost ready to step in. It is odd for a large public company to build out infrastructure aimed at helping the world’s poorest people. But in addition to Google’s professed desires to help the world, the economics of ad-­supported Web businesses give the company other reasons to think big. It’s hard to find new customers in Internet markets such as the United States. Getting billions more people online would provide a valuable new supply of eyeballs and personal data for ad targeting. That’s one reason Project Loon will have competition: in 2014 Facebook bought a company that makes solar-powered drones so it can start its own airborne Internet project. Google’s planet-scale social-engineering project is much further along. In tests with major cellular carriers, the balloons have provided high-speed connections to people in isolated parts of Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Mike Cassidy, Project Loon’s leader, says the technology is now sufficiently cheap and reliable for Google to start planning how to roll it out. By the end of 2015, he wants to have enough balloons in the air to test nearly continuous service in several parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Commercial deployment would follow: Google expects cellular providers to rent access to the balloons to expand their networks. Then the number of people in the world who still lack Internet access should start to shrink, fast.

Welcome to the Dark Side

By Hayden Hilgenhold

The internet.  A place where you can do almost anything as long as you have the knowhow and a good connection.  However, you’re usually exposed.  Out in the open where the world can see you, so crime can usually be cracked down on with relative ease.  However, there is a place in the internet where crime runs rampant, and it is completely anonymous.  The Deep Web, little known to the general public, is the dark desolate ghetto of the beautiful Utopia of the internet, where the law doesn’t have a leg to stand on, unable to make a dent in the corruption.

The Deep Web, made by the government as a tool for intelligence agents, law enforcement, and anyone else who would need to conduct their online affairs privately and/or anonymously.  However, like many things that are made for the greater good, such as dynamite or nuclear power, it had limitless dark potential that became easily exploited.  Now it is used as a bazaar for many vendors of illegal and questionable items and services such as, drugs, weapons, fake passports, counterfeit money, hired thieves and thugs, and even assassins.  

So how does it work? How do you keep complete anonymity over the internet?  Well not through any normal web browser.  First you have to have a special browser known as Tor.  Using Tor your data is completely encrypted, and then passed through several relays, running it through any other computer using Tor, bouncing you around the globe making you near impossible to trace.  Not only that but most of the sites that are selling illegal items are only available through Tor, and are hosted on private servers owned by Tor.  To break it down for you the indexed, easy to find and search internet is about 19 terabytes, or about 3,800,000 songs.  That’s a lot, right? But when you consider the non-indexed part of the internet is 7500 terabytes or 1,500,000,000 songs, it shows you just how much of the internet is relatively hard for the law to get a grip on, and with programs such as Tor it is even harder to find the culprits.  

So why doesn’t the government stop Tor in its tracks? Shut down its servers and wipe them of all these illegal sites? Well, you have to remember, Tor has become vital to many intelligence and law and enforcement agencies.  Since it is so vital, it would endanger a lot of our own law enforcement.  So Tor is here to stay, dark side and all.   

Some New Middle and High School Resources to Share

Kris Walsh

I know many of you have been suffering from withdrawal since missing Techy Tuesday last week due to our snow-cation. I know many teachers who spent at least part of the time grading, planning and getting caught up on paperwork and other tasks that need to be done. I was able to get caught up on some reading and professional social networking that often gets buried during a typical work week. I found a couple of resources that I thought were worth sharing to the group at large.

These resources that I have are mainly focused on middle and high school classrooms, but they do have applications in other settings, such as the upper elementary. These resources came to me through the DOE Google+ network for Indiana eLearning Coaches.

       (As a quick aside, there are several great Google+ networks for most subject areas and grades. They are a great way to use social networking professionally. Please let any of the e Coaches know if you would like to know more about how to get involved)

The first resource comes courtesy of Jeff Chicki. It is a link to a great mindmap (a great tool on its own) of iOS apps that can be used in the classroom. I cannot say that I have had personal experience with all of the resources that are shown, but I have used many of them and the ones that he has listed and I have used are all good. He does a good job of separating the apps out into subject areas and or tool categories. Even if you do not have access to an iDevice, many of the listed tools can also be found on the web as well. Follow the link below to access the mindmap Jeff has created.

http://www.mindmeister.com/406649297/ios-apps-for-middle-school-education

The other resource I would like to share comes to us from Maria Sellers. She shared a resource for finding free academic articles that students can use for research. The articles are in .pdf format that students can use to markup and highlight. I have messed around with the site a little and it seems to be a great and easy place for students to use for research. The sites and articles that I found were all reliable sources that would be useful in completing a project which required it. One warning is that the first 2 or 3 search results are ads. They are marked as such, but students may not notice that, you may want to let them know this. Ads are often a sad fact of life when looking for free web resources. Follow the link below to access the site.

PDF search engine for free scientific publications - FreeFullPDF

Flash Storage Vs. Traditional Hard Drives

By Sean Bybee

Even before I began working for Mr. Wright, I was already well aware of the beating that our school laptops endured on a day to day basis. Every day, I see laptops dropped, crammed into backpacks with heavy textbooks, and hit by frustrated users. Last year, my little brothers laptop was taken and dropped from the gym’s second floor into a trash can fifteen feet below. When laptops are given to young students, there is very little guarantee that any care will be taken to ensure that it stays in good condition. That being said, while we cannot easily prevent students from ripping optical drives out or shattering displays, there is one step we can take (that I can think of) to minimize necessary repairs, and potentially even lower the total costs of laptop repairs.

With fewer moving parts, a solid state drive (or SSD) has a much lower chance of going bad as a result of dropping or being hit repeatedly by the user. To those not familiar with the internal operation of a traditional hard drive, it is important to know that the basic operation is dependent on an internal disk, most commonly spinning at 7200 rpm. This, in combination with a small arm that “reads” the disk, allows information to be stored on the disk magnetically. These constantly moving parts are always at risk of being jammed or otherwise damaged. An SSD operates similarly to flash drives in that they have absolutely no moving parts and operate on the concept of flash storage. While the initial investment of an SSD is slightly higher than that of a hard drive, the increased durability would likely allow it to pay for itself in the long run. It seems like it is a daily occurrence that someone’s hard drive has gone bad and needs replaced. With a lack of moving parts, I feel that replacing the traditional hard drives in our school laptops with SSDs would help to save Mr. Wright some hassle, and perhaps even save the school some money.

Lasting durability is not the only advantage of SSDs over hard drives. Because a solid state drive is not dependent on moving parts, access to the information stored on the drive is much quicker compared to that of a traditional hard drive. In a hard drive, in order to access information, the disk must spin to proper position, and then a mechanical arm must maneuver to the exact position at which that information is stored on the disk. Anyone that has ever seen the inside of a hard drive during operation will know that this all happens extremely quickly. However, regardless of how fast we are able to make the disk spin (10000 rpm drives currently exist), that hard drive could never be quite as fast as a solid state drive, because they do not have these physical limitations at all. This is relevant to Perry Central, because anyone that has used our laptops even once will be well aware of the time consuming process of booting them up. 

Overall, I think that SSDs for the school laptops would be a worthy investment. The increase in speed would hopefully increase the productivity of students, allowing them to spend more time working rather than trying to boot their computers. In addition despite the higher price per gigabyte of flash memory, the price is steadily dropping. This, in combination with the longer lifetime of the devices could potentially save the school money in the long run.

More Power for Steam

By Chris Bybee

Graphics cards such as brands like ASUS, can provide vital resources like extra memory. Some of these graphics cards are already used in computers, like in the wood shop and the yearbook room specifically for editing and graphic design. Should this equipment be added ti all computers that are owned by the school such as in the lower grade classes on the other side of the school? No computer in the school (laptops) besides the computers in the shop and yearbook room have these and I believe that they should! Laptops however, with no graphic changes available to them, can stay as is. I’ve seen the insides of our old desktops, and they are not all that expensive, so putting even the same types of cards into the desktops we already have can greatly improve the speeds of our students work, while using programs like Autodesk or another 3D render program.

As far as laptops go, cards are not really needed because normal students with laptops will have no need for a 3D render program, however for those who do, a computer that has that upgraded technology like a graphics card, could be supplied to them if it is needed for the education of that specific student. Now, from my old blog about RAM, this can be the same concept because of how much memory can be stored inside the graphics card itself. I believe that the cards in our desktops now have about 512 megabytes of random access memory stored inside of them to help with the speeds of the game and or program it is trying to run that just needed a little bit more of the computers system resources.

With this new equipment, students can work a little faster than they would have been able to because of how fast the program could be running. So let’s say that a student spends 10 minutes of his time waiting for the program to load up while the student next to him waits 5 with the new equipment. Even with that short of a time difference, it can make a large impact in how much work can be done for these students allowing teachers to move on to any new lesson faster to get their work done just a tad faster too! I’ve stated my reasons as to why I think that this is needed for our students in programs such as Steam and LEAF because they can get so much more done than before.