2019-2020 BIT Highlights

Andres Hernandez, a Web Development teacher at Von Steuben High School, led a group of student interns to develop a website for the 2020 Summer Conference. Click here to see the site they developed.

Mohammed Ikrammullah, a Web Development teacher at Mather High School, led a group of student interns to develop a website for CTE work-based learning in summer 2020.

More than 50 Business and IT students participated in six-week virtual internships in summer 2020 focused on soft-skill and employability-skill development - and project-based learning. Valerie Garcia spearheaded the initiative, and received wonderful support from Game Programming teacher Alba Ursu and Entrepreneurship teacher Lauren Zucchero. Two students interned with a Game Development company and two with CPS' ITS department.

Entrepreneurship teachers Calvin Clark, Melissa Muro, Carol-Uhl Alba, Lauren Zucchero, and Instructional Support Specialist Troy Meinders attended a four-day VEI (Virtual Enterprises International) Conference in summer 2020. We are implementing VE into our Entrepreneurship programs in fall 2020. We are super excited about the many great things VE will bring to our students. They will join a global network of more than 7,000 practice enterprises in more than 40 countries.

IT Teachers Timothy Graham, Gregory Harris, and Heather Williams were selected to attend an Urban Alliance Teacher Institute during summer 2020 centered around Social Emotional Learning.

Game Programming and Web Development teachers Teriah Abrams, Alba Ursu, Toinette Flowers, Andres Hernandez, and Ann Winterhalder engaged in an exciting and intensive five-day training in July 2020 to learn about the geographic information system (GIS) technology. Teachers also began collaborating to develop creative student-centered solutions in IT courses that will assist with gathering, managing, and analyzing data.

Seventeen Entrepreneurship and 137 IT students earned Entrepreneurship Small Business (ESB), Cisco IT, CIW, and Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) certifications in Python, HTML & CSS, and JavaScript - with the majority of credentials earned during the remote-learning period. The ESB and MTA credentials will provide students access to industry and college credit in entrepreneurship and computer programming courses.

Through Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), ten CTE Accounting and Entrepreneurship students from South Shore, Sullivan, and Taft placed in the top ten (within their content areas) against other students in the state.

Our very own Troy Meinders was elected to the Illinois State FBLA Board of Directors for a three-year term in 2020.

Junior Achievement provided career speaker, job shadow, career exploration, personal finance, and/or entrepreneurship opportunities for 143 Business and IT classes during 2019/2020. Some of their partnering corporations include: AT&T, Avanade, Capgemini, and Microsoft.

One of Ms. Ursu's Game Programming students at Juarez received a $60,000 scholarship from our partner Junior Achievement.

Through a generous donation from Software solutions company SAP, Web Development teacher Tiffany Westmoreland at Curie received a $50,000 gift for a new technical lab.

Thirty Business and IT student teams registered for the BIT Senior Capstone Event on March 27^th, but it was cancelled due to remote learning.

More than 50 Business and IT teachers attended PD at IBM in February 2020. During the event, partners provided support for six of the 12 elements of high-quality CTE programs. A subsequent PD was scheduled to be hosted at PricewaterhouseCoopers in May 2020, but was cancelled due to remote learning.

Accounting and Entrepreneurship teachers engaged in monthly PD to provide input on curriculum development, and collaborate with post-secondary academic and corporate partners – in an effort to increase entrepreneurship and dual-credit opportunities for students.

New Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers were part of a powerful professional development experience on Classroom Management and REACH Domain 2 - with Business and IT Instructional Support Specialists (ISS) Dr. Nadine Leblanc and Troy Meinders. The Saturday PD was part of an ongoing series of ISS-hosted training designed to provide essential pedagogical training and support for new CTE teachers.

One hundred and thirty Business and IT students participated in a team-based challenge during CTE month, as they completed Cisco’s 15-hour Introduction to Cybersecurity course to: learn about the security challenges facing academic, corporate, and government institutions; explore college and career opportunities in the discipline; and learn strategies for protecting their own privacy in an interconnected world. Amundsen and Mather High Schools had the highest percentage of students complete the course, and took home the wins!

We established a Business and IT Industry Advisory Council and scheduled quarterly meetings.

We developed more than 50 new Business and IT academic and corporate partnerships.

In December of 2019, more than 400 Business and IT junior and senior students from 15 schools engaged with 24 academic and corporate partners during a BIT Cluster Bash. As students engaged with partners, they: explored a variety of emerging technologies; attended professional attire workshops; and participated in collaborative challenges.

Through a partnership with Future Founders, Roosevelt High School's CTE IT students had the opportunity to showcase and pitch their apps to an audience of academic and corporate professionals at MATTER Chicago. Networking students Deanna Davila and Monica Feliz took home the win.

Von Steuben Web Development student Emily Aguilar received a National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Award for her computing achievements.

In August of 2019, 38 Business and IT teachers attended our week-long PD where they received soft skills implementation training; content-specific Business and IT training; and learned strategies for implementing quality work-based learning experiences from seven corporate partners.