Happy 1st Quarter of 2022!
How to use the BayICT Partnership is the theme of the March 2022 Quarterly Partnership meeting. While our projects and collaborations focus on student success, everyone who participates in the Partnership – employers, faculty & administrators, tech industry, workforce development agencies, professional organizations, and community organizations – can leverage BayICT to support the achievement of their goals. For this first quarter of 2022, we’re shifting gears by both raising awareness of who we are and how the Partnership can be an instrument for member success.
We hope this edition of the newsletter illustrates the possibilities for leveraging the Partnership to support your mission. In addition to the activity and outcomes reported below, we have exciting new initiatives in development that we look forward to sharing at the Partnership meeting on March 10, 2022, 9:30 – 11:00am Pacific. Register for the virtual meeting below under Upcoming Events.
Finally, if you missed our Black History Month Tech Talk, we highly recommend you share the video with ALL of your students. Unanimous feedback was that it was THE most inspirational to date!
Winter Conference Reflections
The annual WASTC Winter ICT Educators’ Conference returned, January 6 and 7, for the seventh year. Like last year, the event was virtual. The WASTC team delivered powerful, interactive, gamified, and engaging professional development for faculty, with a budget-friendly virtual event platform. This was not another ZOOM meeting/webinar.
“Excellent conference. The structure, keynote speakers, breakout sessions were outstanding. It’s amazing how you could improve on perfection, but in 2022 you did. It was apparent the thousands of hours of preparation planning paid off“
James Cregg, Riverside Community College
“This is one of our best outreach and engagement efforts to promote the Alteryx SparkED education program to top faculty from across the western region of North America (and beyond). These are the key curriculum leaders who influence and teach the technology currently in demand across today’s business, government and nonprofit sectors.“
Jen Miller, Education Marketing Manager, Alteryx SparkED
“Keep doing what you are doing. Your event is one of the most fun, engaging virtual conferences I have attended. Thanks!”
Anna Carlin, Fullerton College
BayICT RoadShow
BayICT will be doing a roadshow to reconnect with ICT/DM administrators and faculty at all of our 28 member community colleges. Our objective is to highlight resources and support available via BayICT and also to learn more about how BayICT can better support individual member colleges.
Already have a meeting in mind? Share the meeting details via this link and we’ll be sure to join.
IBM Skillsbuild
Implementing IBM Skillsbuild in Canvas – Canvas Tutorial
(Please note, you’ll need both a Canvas & IBM Skillsbuild account to take advantage of this tutorial and sample assignments.)
The BayICT team recently created an IBM Skillsbuild Canvas tutorial, **Implementing IBM SkillsBuild in Canvas created to help community college instructors in incorporating some of IBM’s pre-built job-readiness curriculum into any of your Canvas courses.
The goal of this online tutorial is to prepare you to be able to navigate and utilize the resources and tools in the IBM SkillsBuild platform for your students. You will learn how to access and navigate the IBM platform, select and assign courses and learning paths for your students, and support and track your students’ progress. Finally, you will learn how to add or integrate this curriculum into your current Canvas course.
The end of the tutorial includes sample assignments along with a Canvas upload file and instructions on how to add the sample assignment to your course(s).
Sample IBM Skillsbuild assignments available for download include:
- Working in a Digital World – Essential Skills (Digital Badge)
- Working in a Digital World – Professional Skills (Digital Badge)
- Job Application Essentials (Digital Badge)
To self enroll, please follow this top-secret enrollment link exclusively available to BayICT partners – Implementing IBM SkillsBuild in Canvas
Need an IBMSkillsBuild Account? – Request one today.
Want to learn more? Check out the BayICT & IBM’s joint IBM Skillsbuild presentation from the Winter ICT Educators’ Conference.
BayDM Update
The BayDM Project is now exploring enhancement of programs to meet job market demands in digital media careers. LMI is showing an escalating need for virtual production and video post-production technicians. Virtual production uses technology to join the digital world with the physical world in real time. It enables filmmakers to interact with the digital process in the same ways they interact with live-action production. Video post-production is the third and final stage of video creation. It’s a detailed process that involves many different services, skill sets, and types of professional software, all working together to create a final version of a video or film.
We are developing plans to create collaborative certificates and credentials to prepare students for virtual production jobs built upon existing game design, VR, and animation curriculum, enhanced by emerging uses of the Unity and EPIC Unreal Engine for content creation. For preparation for video post-production jobs, the BACCC has engaged Keycode Media to support colleges with video production programs wishing to pilot a capstone certification that teaches novice editors the soft and hard skills needed to become an Assistant Editor or a Post Production Coordinator. The curriculum is based on the AVID industry-standard editing software and is Canvas-ready. Interested department chairs can contact Olivia Herriford (olivia@baccc.net).
NextGen CyberTalent Expands Completion Incentive Grant Program – Partnership Update
NextGen Cyber Talent has announced start dates for its next cybersecurity internship training cohorts. Securonix SNYPR self-paced training begins March 14th. Palo Alto Networks Foundation, Gateway, and Essentials virtual training begins April 24th. For more information to share with your students, visit the BayICT Student Resources page.
NextGen kicked off its completion grant program at CCSF in Spring of 2021 (see the press release here) and added Merritt in Fall 2021. The program awards students successfully finishing courses in cybersecurity certificate and degree pathways. Students who complete courses with a B or better can receive $350 for a 3-unit course. To apply, students must register for the programs at https://www.nextgencybertalent.com/students/.
Psssst….Did you know, there is a place where we can all connect?
Community of Practice
Student Spotlight – Veronica Plante
Veronica Plante Agora Studio Animator, Cañada College Student
Veronica grew up and was homeschooled in the South Bay. V had an early interest in the fine arts, but they knew then that the liberal arts career path was limited. The arts, media, and entertainment pathway sparked V’s creative curiosity and they began taking dual-enrollment animation classes at Cañada College at 15. That was the beginning of their journey to becoming, at 21 years of age, maybe one of the youngest animators at Agora Studio, a global network of professional artists providing services to animation studios around the world.
Industry Partner Spotlight: Alteryx
Analytics skills are no longer reserved for a few data-focused job roles. They are now in high demand and relevant for every discipline. For this reason, data analytics career education is a priority in the BACCC’s ICT-DM sector strategy. Alteryx Designer is a leading analytics process automation platform used to easily perform data preparation, blending, reporting, modeling, and more in a no-code/low-code, drag-and-drop interface. Alteryx offers its SparkED program at no cost to educational institutions and is now a BayICT industry partner. The SparkED program empowers learners of all skill levels — across every field of study — to develop the analytics skills they need to question, understand, and solve with data.
Our partnership with Alteryx provides educators with customizable resources, free licenses, and access to a community of peers. Faculty may expand existing curriculum or establish a new program, selecting from a menu of learning modules. Students also receive free licenses, giving them the opportunity to learn from the same materials used by business professionals to develop their analytics skills, and earn the same Alteryx certifications: Core, Advanced and Expert.
You can find more information about Alteryx and SparkED on the BayICT faculty resources page. When you’re ready to take advantage of the program and get involved in the community right away, contact Wendy Porter at wendy@baccc.net.
Upcoming BayICT Partnership Events
Tech Talks
- March 8th – Fernando Borrego
- March 24 – Women in Tech
- April 14 – AI Career Education Pathways
- May 19 – Tech Careers: Taking a Deeper Look
Quarterly Meeting
March 10, 9:30 – 11:00 “How to Use the BayICT Partnership”
Bitwise Information Session Mar 14, 2022
Bitwise Industries creates a bridge between humans from marginalized communities and stories of systemic poverty to skills and resources necessary to access opportunities in the tech industry.
Cyber Security Summer Camps Jun 13, 2022 – Jul 29, 2022
CyberCampers will learn about cyber hygiene, ethics, systems administration, security audits, cryptography, digital and network forensics, and web application exploitation. The ideal CyberCamp candidates are incoming (2022/23) 8th to 12th graders or community college students with little to no cybersecurity experience.
https://bayict.org/events/2022-cybercamp
Faculty Dev Weeks
Coming this June: The WASTC 2022 Summer virtual Faculty Development Weeks (vFDW). The event venue is “Medieval Times” and our theme will be the “Quest for Knowledge“