The championship continues! Just as we were excited to see our Tampa Bay Rays play in the World Series, we're also excited to see how our educators and students are excelling as our school year continues. #TeamCTE/AEProud

Please feel free to contact us at 813-524-2204, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @PascoCTE!

Stay safe, keep it simple and be well,

Lori Romano, Ph.D.

Director, Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education

2. He attended Pine View Middle School.

3. He attended Sanders, Connerton and Pine View Elementary Schools.

4. He runs cross country and plays soccer (striker).

5. He plans to join the Navy after graduation and would like to be an officer.

6. He has an older brother and a younger sister.

7. Favorite sweet: chocolate.

8. Favorite movie: "The Hunger Games" (actually - the whole series)

9. Loved reading "The Magic Treehouse" books as a kid.

10. Dream car: custom 2-door Jeep Wrangler

The CTAE team is very blessed to have Brandon working with us this year! Be sure to say "Hi!" to him when you call or stop by our district office.

HOW TO USE BITMOJIS TO INCREASE ENGAGEMENT

Hi, amazing CTAE educators!

In our last newsletter, I shared a document I created about how to use filters in myLearning. You may have noticed I used a cartoon avatar of my alter-ego, "P-Dub", to inject a bit of personality to those directions. My avatars are courtesy of Bitmoji, the secondary social media app that lets you create your own expressive cartoon and share in numerous ways.

This article from digitaltrends.com provides the details about the history of Bitmoji, as well as directions on how to use the app: You may also want to add it as a Google Chrome extension, which streamlines your ability to add various Bitmojis to any communication. Feel free to share your favorite as a comment on our CTAE Facebook page post about Bitmojis.

Once you have played with Bitmojis a bit, feel free to take them to the next level by building a Bitmoji virtual classroom in Google Slides and embedding it in your myLearning (Canvas) Home page. They're a lot of fun, and help increase engagement and community among classes. Edutopia has an excellent article with several AMAZING examples of interactive Bitmoji classrooms that teachers of all subjects and all grade levels have shared in their online courses. The Facebook group Bitmoji Craze for Educators will also inspire you to set up your own virtual classroom. Fair warning: you may fall down a rabbit hole once you get started!

Be inspiring!

Pam Willoughby 🙂

- submitted by Stephanie Steffens

Although this form of communication has been around since the days of cave paintings, it have seen a resurgence in the past decades. To locate one, look around your school building and I bet you will see one explaining how to wash your hands or wear a mask properly.

These visual communications are often difficult to design effectively. Michelle Keyser, former marketing manager (now working at the testing center at Marchman), critiqued students designs. She took time to explain how their designs worked, how they didn't and how they could be improved. Students took her feedback and made changes to improve their overall design.

Thank you, Michelle, and students who put forth much time and effort into this project. Check out a few and see if you learn something about a topic or two.

- submitted by Linda Bourne

- submitted by Jenna Eyers

Wiregrass Ranch High School AP Computer Science Principles students have recently participated in the CoderZ Cyber Robotics Challenge and learned how to program Amazon warehouse robots via challenging missions, using Scratch visual programming language.

Pictured, L to R, Samuel Krall and Gehrig Grzanka, learning Scratch using pair programming approach.

We also had an amazing virtual guest speaker, Dan Hickey, a recipient of very prestigious Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship. Winners of the award receive $10,000 per year at an accredited four-year college or university as well as a paid summer internship at Amazon after their freshman year of college. Dan, a computer science major student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Founder and CEO of Discover Technology NFP, shared his experience with programming Alexa as part of his internship experience and answered various questions from WRHS students.

- submitted by Tatyana Pashnyak, Business and AP Computer Science Principles Teacher

Dan Hickey Info: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-hickey-431772178/