Teachers from across Georgia and South Carolina committed a week of summer vacation to learn how to best prepare their students for future careers.
The Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center (GCITC) campus hosted a weeklong series of classes and workshops providing a classroom-ready cybersecurity curriculum.
“The goal of it is to help teachers who are teaching subjects related to cyber and IT, computer science, networking, all of these other subjects,” Danny Etheredge, Director of Training & Workforce Development at GCITC, told ABD. “Help them to start building a community that is sustainable. Then also help them create resources with each other in concert with industry partners that they can actually take directly into the classroom if they were to start teaching Monday.”
The goal of the five-day program was to strengthen cyber and IT education beginning in kindergarten and continuing through a student’s high school years.
Among the experts leading the workshops was Keisha Quick, a cybersecurity teacher with the Richmond County School System (RCSS). She is also the founder and owner of KLQ Learning Solutions, LLC., a company she started to give educators and professionals access to ongoing training in the cyber industry.
“Cybersecurity is not new to the area, but we have new ideas, we have new teachers, it’s always something new coming around,” she explained. “Just inviting our teachers to come in to get this training, it allows us to not only pour it back into the community but be able to prepare our students for what they’re going to expect when they get into these jobs.”
Quick said it is also an opportunity to show teachers that there is not a one-path-fits-all approach to mentoring their students. Drawing from her own history, Quick said she graduated with a four-year degree in IT but quickly realized it wasn’t enough. She had the knowledge, but not the hands on-experience.
“I had to go back to a program to learn it, and that’s what opened the doors for me, but I would never have gotten that experience or be able to tell someone had I not gone through it myself,” she said. Sometimes we get pigeonholed into following one path. When teachers can pull from people from different backgrounds, you can now tell your students you can follow multiple paths that you or your parents may be considering to get to the same end goal.”
Etheredge said the week-long sessions were a natural result of meetings he and his team have had with teachers. They wanted access to ongoing education in cyber and cybersecurity.
The free training program drew teachers from as far away as Metro Atlanta and Warner-Robins. It offered curriculum workshops, as well as workforce and industry-focused discussions, lesson development sessions, and emerging technology demonstrations.
Bracketed by Augusta University, Augusta Technical College, USCA, and Aiken Technical College, Quick said GCITC was in the perfect spot to be homebase for the sessions. But it is more than just the education components.
“We are a hub of not only the educational side but more so on the employer side, as well as just the different opportunities. We’re the only entity in this radius,” she said. “Some of them come from rural areas, and this is really the closest that they can come to get their education and their exposures.”
That, added Etheredge, is the purpose of GCITC.
“The mission of this is the workforce development, the innovation, the building of this region’s cybersecurity baseline and capability going from now into the future to continue to protect the citizens,” he said. “We can work with the industry professionals all day. But if we’re talking about building the workforce for tomorrow, it starts with the K through 12 teachers.”
