Introduction

Thank you for visiting my Leading Edge Portfolio. I'm in my 17th year as a Business and Technology teacher at Oxnard High School. My love of business and technology started as early as 6th grade, while attending Byrd Jr. High, during the LAUSD busing crisis, (Chatsworth Elememtary was my home school) when I was chosen by my 6th grade Math teacher to complete a Computer Math certification program while other students were finishing their work. I still have the certificate! For high school I had the fortunate opportunity to attend Brighton High School in Salt Lake City, Utah. I didn't care for the cold weather much and didn't fit in very well religiously, but at the time, UTah was on the top of the list for student spending and IBM was based close by in Provo. Brighton had a typing room, a lab of IBM computers, a lab of word processing computers, and a lab of Apple II's for programming (not my favorite), plus two other classrooms for Accounting and other business classes. Apparently no comparison to California high schools during that time. Ironically, when I started my student teaching at Atascadero HS and then my first teaching position at Oxnard High School in 1996, I was expected to teach computers on Apple II's. That's how far behind California was. We've come a long way in 17 years.
 

At the beginning of my tenure at Oxnard High School I taught basic typing and computer classes, Marketing Education, Computer Programming, and Computer Science AP to all grades and levels of students. Thirteen years ago I took over as the Work Experience Coordinator from the retiring teacher. After using the antiquated videos and curriculum the first year, I developed an online curriculum that connected students to relevant and current work related websites. I used a free webhost, ohscareerteacher.150m.com for a few years and then started paying for my own hosting using the webpage ohscareerteacher.com.

Last year I discovered Wordpress.com after attending a quick workshop given by professor Eileen Ditmar at the CBEA/WBITE conference. See my blog, mzerdmann.wordpress.com. I was amazed at everything Eileen knew! She opened my eyes to Web 2.0 tools and since then, there is never enough time in the day to learn things to share with my students. The other great thing that happened in 2012 was updating the Multimedia course offered in the Business & Technology department. The course hadn't been updated for 11 years and was approved for UC/CSU a-g requirements "f" visual arts. The course covers design principles and color theory and the students are designing digitally throughout the year course. The students absolutely loved learning Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and other programs. This past year, I've brought in a local artist/illustrator, recent graduate of CSUCI Digital Arts program, and a speaker on designing movie posters to speak to the students. Two students were "contracted" out to work on posters for other departments and interactive pdf flyers were created for several clubs and will be uploaded to the school website. A Multimedia club will be established in 2013-2014 for students to gain experience working on side projects for OHS and OUHSD. So far, the first year has been a great start to a great class and program!