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Externship Summary - 2006

RCNGM Leader: Jeremy Rubock, Technology Education, Wilby High School

Externship: Travelers St. Paul Insurance Company

(Go to this link to find out about the curriculum project)

Lessons Learned:

All components and tasks were fully challenging. (The initial one or two tasks were given to me to determine my base skill set.) Certainly, the final assignment, which was to use to company database to reverse engineer and document the particular manners in which various servers, firewalls, and routers are interconnected, spanning from Hartford, St. Paul, to Norcross, VA.

Impact on Teacher and Student Learning

My curriculum plan involved having the kids design a wireless network for the ground floor of my high school. The plan was based on one of the projects I participated in at Travelers. The issues involved making sure the kids had the proper preparation and theory necessary to conduct the project. It took a number of months to arrive at that point. I wasn’t expecting for it to take that long, however, the kids worked to their abilities and succeeded in finishing the assignments.

The students were exposed to real-world ideas and situations. The students were familiar with wireless networking from their own homes and from one of the computer labs at school, however, they were exposed to the designing and engineering of a wireless network in the enterprise. They used their home based experience and transferred that knowledge to develop the resulting network and documentation.

Externship Sustainability:

I met departmentally with my peers and presented the PowerPoint presentation on my experiences and responsibilities at Travelers. I also reminded them that they, too, can have the opportunity to upgrade their skills by contacting the CBIA.

The externship provided me with the impetus to seek out more community based cooperative learning both for teachers, and especially for students in the manner of job-shadowing. It set forth the commitment that learning is not just school-based, but is available in the community and in the industrial / business sectors, by way of coordinating and cooperating with all involved to benefit both sides of the education equation.

 


The Regional Center for Next Generation Manufacturing is funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Education program. Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.