ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

A tech instructor is revamping the curriculum for his school district's business department. Check out his ideas and then weigh in on what you'd like to see taught so that future employees are fully qualified and prepared.

The Athol-Royalston School District in Massachusetts is making changes to its business and technology curriculum, and this is a school district that "hasn't had a computer science program to speak of since the math department stopped offering COBOL and Fortran several years ago."

Here are technology director Christopher Dawson's ideas for new courses:

• Office Productivity Applications. This calls for teaching freshmen and sophomores in high school the basics: Microsoft Office and OpenOffice applications for creating spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and databases. Dawson is even progressive enough to suggest introducing cloud-based apps like Google Docs and Zoho. A lot of these programs are fairly simple, and Dawson makes a point that it wouldn't take an entire semester to learn Word or Excel (ouch -- I, myself, never managed to master Excel), so I think he's on the right path of realizing that while Office is extremely useful and probably highly relevant to a lot of students' job prospects, it's also important students learn about Office alternatives.
• Introduction To Web Design And HTML. Dawson proposes teaching students the basics of HTML as well as WYSIWYG tools for creating and managing Web sites, covering social-networking tools and other Web 2.0 technologies for creating online content, and covering design principles for a variety of audiences. Considering it's vital that each business these days has a Web site, a student could make him- or herself more marketable when job searching if he or she can wear many hats in a company. Also, Web design could be a creative outlet school systems have been eliminating arts programs because of budget cuts.
• Advanced Web Design, HTML, And Scripting. Dawson's idea involves students looking at a broader range of HTML tags; developing pages with XML; using Cascading Style Sheets, Javascript, and PHP; and interacting with data stores to collect and display data.
• Introduction To Programming. Dawson recommends this course cover Integrated Development Environments, compiling/executing code, algorithms, basic scripting, LOGO, Python, Perl, C++, and Java.
• Database design and programming. Finally, Dawson recommends students incorporate Access, OpenOffice Base, and Structured Query Language to create data stores and applications.

Despite the economic crisis going on and jobs being cut left and right, IT positions are still expected to grow in the next decade, and President Obama's proposed job stimulus package includes IT specialists. Rather than teaching the same-old, same-old (I really could have done without a cooking course in high school, and dBase IV was antiquated by the time I signed up to learn it in computer science), our schools should be able to generate productive workers ready to enter the job market.

That being said, what tech skills do you think people should learn?