Business is booming at Hartford's Pathways to Technology Magnet High School and teacher Dennis Barham Is sharing more than 30 years of IT experience with his students.
Most students come here with little or no knowledge of technology and the goal is to provide them with tools to succeed in the 21st century workplace.
Pathways is the only Hartford public magnet school that's not actually within the Hartford city limits. The temporary site is in a Windsor strip mall and students from 40 different cities and towns attend.
The capstone course is project-based, Barham said, and students take those tools and apply them in a real world context.
"Over the four years, they get pieces of technology. They learn how to do graphics, make videos. They learn how to make basic webpages," Barham, a former Cigna executive, said.
This year, the class is designing a webpage for Andrea Oden and her Plainville-based Financial Aid Consulting Team.
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The class breaks up into smaller groups to tackle tasks along the way and the seniors take the lead.
"My group had four or five pages and we developed them and would e-mail her when we finished to see if she would approve," Fatima Duric, a senior from Hartford, said.
On presentation day, there was plenty of anxiety about how Ms Oden would respond, but she loved it.
"I didn't know what to expect, and when I first saw the home page with the streaming slides, I thought 'this is great'," tFACT's director said.
As far as Barham's concerned, success is measured a little differently. He's hoping to provide a pathway for these students beyond the walls of the school.
"What's interesting is to watch the students discover what they have an affinity for. What's important is that you get to do a job that gives you a decent living, but better still that you enjoy doing every day," he said.
