Giant Campus Blog

I attended a Keynote presentation at the TASA (Texas Association of School Administrators) conference today.  The speaker was Don Tapscott, a noted researcher and author who has studied the Digital Native generation for over a decade.  His latest book, Grown Up Digital, is a follow up to his 1998 book Growing Up Digital.

Tapscott’s basic premise is that the world of education as we have known it for the past 100 years has come to the end of its useful life and it must be rebooted or reinvented for a new age.  The book talks about how education must shift from a traditional, broadcast model to one that is customizable, collaborative, and interactive. 

The data and the research were very compelling.  The school superintendents and administrators that were sitting near me were taking copious notes and seemed very interested in reading the book.  You could sense a genuine interest in the subject and a desire to not just know more, but to start doing something with the knowledge.  These books are great, but it is going to take a collective effort to implement change and adapt!

Learn all about Giant Campus of Washington and meet the people behind our school!

Our curriculum team is including an exciting new element in our courses called Career Connections. These Career Connection features are short interviews with successful professionals in the field.

The new Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Introduction to Entrepreneurship I courses launching this spring will be the first courses to include this new feature.

Career Connections give students a sense of how the course’s skills are used in the workplace.

Professionals from a variety of careers in the industry help to show the various career options available in this field.

For example, the CAD course features interviews with an architect, an interior designer, a landscape architect, and two engineers.

The Introduction to Entrepreneurship I course features interviews with outstanding young people who became entrepreneurs as teens (or even younger!) in a variety of fields.

Featured entrepreneurs include:

• 15-year-old Lani Lazzari of Simple Sugars (www.simplesugarsscrub.com)
• 17-year-old Web entrepreneur Donny Ouyang of Kinkarso Tech Ltd. (www.kinkarso.com)
• 19-year-old Jessica Cervantes of Popsy Cakes (www.popsycakes.com)
• 22-year-old men’s fashion designer Baruch Shemtov (www.baruchshemtov.com)
• 25-year-old Andrew Mohebbi, who created a successful paintball review Web site as a teen and then sold it

Watch for Career Connection features in these and other new Giant Campus courses!