Week #1: "Me" Stuff

Greetings, gentle reader. I am Larry O. Hetrick. O is for Otto - not my fault, it's a multi-generation naming convention in my family. Not O'Hetrick - although I have a small amount of Irish in me.

I am currently teaching Information Technology (IT) introduction courses to high schoolers at Licking Valley High School and Northridge High School. Specifically, I teach computer literacy and Microsoft Office applications basics to ninth graders and IT Foundations, a general intro to all areas of IT, to 10th graders. I am an employee of C-TEC, Licking County's joint vocational school. They pay my salary, but I do my actual teaching at LVHS and Northridge.

This is my second year in this job. Previously, I have wandered back and forth between working in IT and teaching IT to others for my entire working life. On the IT side, I have been a computer applications programmer/analyst, a computer systems programmer/analyst and a database designer/administrator. On the teaching side, I have taught computer programming and related topics to IT professionals, end users and other post-high-school audiences, including a couple of courses taught at Franklin University. This is my first job teaching high school students.

My B.A. is in Political Science, from Kent State University. I have an M.S. in Computer Science from Franklin University. My only academic exposure to education has come from the courses I am taking here at OSU.

I have never worked professionally as a web designer or web programmer. My exposure to the art and technology thereof is basically academic - I have studied these topics in some classes and taught some in other classes. I am very familiar with HTML and CSS. I have used Javascript occasionally - I am more familiar with server-side technologies such as PHP and JSP. I teach MM Dreamweaver as the primary web editor/design tool for my classes. I have used MS FrontPage, but I don't like it. For this course, I will be trying out nvu, a free software tool for website development. We'll see how that goes. I am pretty competant on the technical and coding side of web site construction, but have no real design skills - that would be a body of knowledge that I would like to explore while taking this course.

I am not sure how I will be able to use the skills I will be learning here in my teaching. Eventually I would like to have a web site for my IT Foundations courses. Unfortunately, Licking County's Internet Service Provider (ISP) is very - controlling. They will not allow a teacher to have the ability to directly maintain a website on their server. All blogging and message board sites are blocked by them, so I can't really introduce those activities to my students.

Here is the Northridge HS web site...

http://northridge.k12.oh.us/NorthridgeHS/index.html