Prepared for Success

At Empire High School, students receive the privilege of an electronic-based education. Although students are unaware of how much they will benefit from using laptops in their classrooms, they will be fully aware once they go to college or enter the workforce.

Through years, or even just months, of being in Empire’s classrooms, students become familiar with numerous computer programs that are commonly used in higher level education and in their possible future job(s).  Not only do the students become familiar with the programs, but they also get to learn more advanced uses for them.

For my statistics course, students learned how to use Microsoft Excel, including how to store data, calculate various types of equations using that data and making common graphs to display the data. My statistics teacher taught my class the program's shortcuts and incorporated its uses into our lessons for weeks. After extensively using Excel, I clearly remember how to use the program, even after over half a year’s time of not having to use it.

Excel programs are used in college for classes such as marketing and in careers that involve organizing charts of numbers for needs such as cataloguing income. Because Excel is such a versatile and useful program, I am glad that I learned how to use it as early on as my junior year of high school.

Every student at Empire has had multiple classes in which they give presentations with the help of programs such as PowerPoint and Keynote, which are common presentation programs that businesses use. Through years of experience with those programs, students at Empire learn how to make the right PowerPoint for every occasion, whether it needs to be flashy or present direct information.  In addition to knowing how to use the programs, students learn how to properly present their ideas and speak in front of audiences.

I once had a talk with a friend who goes to a neighboring school in the Vail School District, Cienega High School, and he commented on how hard it was to put papers in MLA format. At Empire, students learn how to use the functions of their Microsoft Word program with ease and can put a document into perfect MLA format in under a minute.

Not only do students learn how to format papers, but they also learn how to create tables in Microsoft Word to organize information in words. The list goes on of how many things that the students at Empire High School can learn to enhance their general skills for the future, but they also learn skills in programs that can directly put them into career fields.

Design, programming and editing applications are all available to the school. Courses such as Web Development, Interactive Digital Media and Photography teach students how to code and create Web pages; use design programs to create images and movies; and edit photos. What students learn in those classes will help them land a job in many career fields. A couple excelling students have even done things like format the Empire High School website and its pages.

While a lot of students wonder why they get the assignments they do, teachers are subconsciously putting information and skills into their minds to help them be successful in their future. From kindergarten through high school, teachers are preparing their students to meet the demands of the next level of their life.

At Empire High School, teachers are preparing their students to exceed those demands with the help of technology.
 

About the author: Spencer Taylor is a junior at Empire High School.