2013 Highlights
2013 was the first full calendar year for the Convergence Technology Center acting as a National ATE Center. It was a busy twelve months of conferences, professional development, special projects, and meetings. Lots of meetings.
We decided to take a moment to reflect on last year and asked some of our grant partners to offer highlights from 2013.
In alphabetical order…
Mark Dempsey, National CTC
Mark believes his 2013 highlight must be the successful delivery of Summer Working Connections: four months of planning for five days of seven tracks, 108 participants, and well over 3000 back-and-forth e-mails.
Karl Dietrich, Lansing Community College
Karl named three highlights:
- Hosting a successful Working Connections North event
- Doing a presentation on the Convergence College Network (CCN) at the TRENDS conference in Traverse City, Michigan
- Presenting “Is Teaching Wireless Networking in Your Future?” with Bill Saichek of Orange Coast College at HI-TEC in Austin
Wait … maybe presenting with Bill should be my number one accomplishment?
Ernie Friend, Florida State College at Jacksonville
Ernie cited as his program’s 2013 highlight the fact that they just enrolled the 100th student in their virtualization courses. An instructor from Florida State College at Jacksonville just taught the “VDI in a Box” track for Winter Working Connections.
Jon Hardesty, Collin College
Jon proudly announced a highlight for 2014 that had its roots in lots of hard work in 2013: revamping and renaming the Collin College convergence program and adding more virtualization and cloud courses.
David Keathly, University of North Texas
David said that their highlight for the year was having a successful first offering of the new AppCamp program with over 80 students participating in four camps across the North Dallas area.
Eliazar Martinez, El Centro
Eliazar praised the 2013 accomplishments of student Belicia Miraval Albornoz, who’s already teaching classes and who participated in a special student poster session at the 2013 HI-TEC conference. Eliazar sees Belicia as one of his program’s best ambassadors.
Jen McGarvey, National CTC
Jen stated her pride as being able to facilitate the implementation of the blog and newsletter in 2013. She added that “We’re past the point of celebrating my first year with the CTC and it is great to see how much we have been able to accomplish in that year. “ Other 2013 highlights Jen noted were going up to Working Connections North to see a new program be implemented at a partner’s campus and attending UNT’s AppCamp at Collin College to witness all of the cool apps the girls created.
Timur Mirzoev, Georgia Southern University
Timur underscored the value of “continuous learning” in 2013. He always looks forward to growing with new versions of cloud and virtualization. New updates are always exciting.
Heather O’Neil, National CTC
Heather calls her highlight of 2013 witnessing the CTC flourish, growing from a Regional grant with a single director to a National grant with a full staff. This transition bought with it more CCN partners and members, more robust marketing materials and plans, and more resources to improve educational best practices and internal administrative processes. Being able to help with this growth, see the CTC’s educational “footprint” get bigger, and realize how many lives this grant impacts was enormously rewarding to her.
Bill Saichek, Orange Coast College
Bill dubbed the highlight of his program’s year the rousing success of the change in his certificate structure in moving to stackable certificates. Bill believes this change has generated more interest in the program and kept students in the program longer.
Helen Sullivan, National CTC
Helen called her personal highlight the addition of eight new colleges to the Convergence College Network in 2013:
- Calhoun Community College – AL
- Century College – MN
- Ferris St. University – MI
- Milwaukee Area Technical College – WI
- Montcalm Community College – MI
- Tallahassee Community College – FL
- Waukesha Technical College – WI
- Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College – WI