Rural and small school districts have an incredible opportunity to leverage their agriculture classes to offer invaluable career skill development for all students. The Association of Illinois Rural and Small Schools Rural IL CTE Project team recently explored this opportunity through a workshop for Ag educators with the Illinois Learning Technology Center (LTC) at Regional Office of Education #28 in Atkinson. This workshop introduced teachers to the basics of computer science and coding to incorporate CS skills into their curriculum. This workshop is an early step effort in expanding access to critical career skills for students using existing rural school assets.
The Rural IL CTE Project has conducted state-wide research into the challenges and opportunities in rural districts to grow career education programs, and a double-sided reality exists. On the one hand, most rural and small schools in Illinois offer agricultural education (Ag Ed). This makes good sense as agriculture is a major industry in these areas. However, on the other hand, digital technologies and skills are an everpresent and growing demand in every single economic sector, yet rural schools are currently the least able to add this programming for their students. Rather than adding an entirely new course and attempting to recruit a highly specialized new teacher, rural schools have the ability to utilize the unique curricular flexibility of Ag Ed to incorporate these essential skills.
This was the inspiration behind a burgeoning collaboration between the Rural IL CTE Project and LTC to incorporate computer science skills into Ag Ed as part of the LTC’s efforts to expand CS and STEM learning. Growing the concept, LTC created a workshop that trains Ag educators on very easy to use and understand ways of incorporating CS skills to collect and analyze agricultural data through Microsoft FarmBeats, the micro:bit microcontroller, and the free-to-use MakeCode website. For the event at ROE28, LTC was able to train nine teachers using these tools. During the workshop, the teachers were able to learn how to physically configure the micro:bit to become a light, sound, temperature, moisture sensor. Then, they learned how to code the device to recognize, collect, and record this data for analysis. By the end of their day-long event, all the participants felt confident in their ability to train students on basic CS skills using the device and FarmBeats curriculum, even after starting from a place of little to no exposure to these skills at all.
As part of its continued efforts at offering technical assistance to all rural and small schools, the Rural IL CTE Project is hoping to share the success of these workshops with more regions across the state and expand the capacity of rural Ag Ed courses to offer even more invaluable skills for all students. Anyone interested in hosting an LTC FarmBeats Workshop is encouraged to reach out to Rural IL CTE Project Director, John Glasgow (john@airssedu.org) to learn more, and to directly contact the LTC to set up a workshop by emailing Sarah Phelps and Emily Pool (sphelps@ltcillinois.org, epool@ltcillinois.org).
