Green Tech High Charter School featured Expertise Project at its professional development day for its 50 educators and staff!
Workforce Education in Albany County
Green Tech is an all-boys, 6-12 charter school located in the South End of Albany. Green Tech has volunteered to be the “exemplar” district as part of new, county-wide deployment of Expertise Project.
This county-wide initiative is made possible via our workforce partnership with Albany County in support of their efforts to bring more workforce education services into K-12 education.
We know the leadership at Green Tech (Jaymes White, Chief School Office and Principal) through our mutual involvement in the Northeast Construction Trades Workforce Coalition. This organization advances several initiatives aimed at raising awareness of the skilled trades in the region, especially in K-12 education.
Program
Our team ran the educators through a sample of an in-class “Expertise Project” that they can use with their students. In this lesson, we featured the “Barriers over Salmon Creek” assignment developed in partnership with the New York State Department of Transportation.
In this lesson, educators were asked to:
- Use Expertise VR to virtually visit a real infrastructure project in New York State and watch skilled tradespeople install a concrete barriers on a NYSDOT project;
- Discuss how they would go about determining the volume of a complex shape, using middle school skill sets;
- Discuss how they would estimate the labor costs involved, using real data from the NYS Department of Labor for Skilled Laborers and Operators, and;
- How this exercise could help their students understand both how what they learn in school is relevant in the workforce and be introduced to local career paths in the process.
Feedback
The feedback was generally positive – especially from those educators who are directly responsible for teaching mathematics, science, and career-related courses.
Unlike other VR experiences that are artificial in nature, educators shared that the realistic, cinematic-quality 360-degree videos created on the project site (and in other area training facilities and businesses) provided a like-you-are-there experience that they enjoyed.
One educator took the time over the weekend to share that:
“It was great to meet with you yesterday. I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your insightful presentation sharing about the Expertise Project.
Your discussion on incorporating examples of real-world engineering applications into classroom instruction really resonated with me, and I can already see how the methodology of using VR to bring worksites into the classroom could inspire students towards joining the technical workforce.
In fact, I am already thinking about how I might incorporate some of your ideas into my own teaching methods.”
-Muhammad Mujtaba, Physics Major and Current Geometry Teacher at Green Tech
Next Steps
Educators are identifying the locations in their upcoming class schedules to deploy Expertise Content in their classrooms and determine how their students are engaged and impacted by it.
We are also in the planning stages of Green Tech “Creating an Expertise Project”, highlighting the work underway by the City of Albany and other partners on infrastructure projects right next door in the South End.
Special thanks to Jaymes White, Rev. Lyndrell Randle, and Stephanie Forsyth at Green Tech for engaging so quickly and enthusiastically and for the leadership at Albany County for their support!