Cyber Talk Radio: CAST Tech, San Antonio’s First Tech Career Themed High School
CAST Tech - San Antonio’s First Tech Career Themed High School - Week 30 of Cyber Talk Radio
Show Summary
This past Saturday, April 22, episode 30 of Cyber Talk Radio hit the air on 1200 WOAI and iHeartRadio streaming. I was joined by Kelly Isbell, former principal at CAST Tech High School, to discuss the program at CAST Tech and what makes the school unique as San Antonio’s first tech career themed high school.
In the first half of the show, we kick off by having Kelly give us an overview of the new San Antonio high school, CAST Tech High School, and tell us how the school was created by local businesses and organizations (HEB, AT&T, TechBloc and more!) in the tech industry to fill the need for tech skills. The school will officially open in Fall 2017 and will be located on the Fox Tech Campus downtown. For the first year, the school had 270 applicants for 150 positions - they accept 50 percent in district (SAISD) and 50 percent Bexar County. The goal is to grow the school to 600 students in the program over the next 4 years. From a curriculum perspective, students will be in a project based learning environment. Example projects would include students developing an app that the City of San Antonio visitors could use to see everything going on in the city, developing a WiFi system that would be housed inside trash cans or develop a marketing campaign for a certain HEB promotions.
In the second half of the show, we walk through the student experience at CAST Tech, weekly schedule and personalization of the high school. What will the students school day and classroom enviroment look like? For a quick peek into what the classroom will look like, there will be three areas including small group teacher area, individual workspace and student center area for collaboration. How does this learning environment tie back to attendance? They will have an accounting period during the day to make sure students are in attendance. There is still a schedule to follow and accountability. The students’ schedule on Friday’s will be focused on going out into the field to experience real-life business situations. CAST Tech is still taking applications for teachers! To learn more about open positions at CAST Tech, go to the SAISD website under job openings/HR. For donations, go to the Friends of CAST site. https://www.satechbloc.com/CAST
Help support CAST Tech, a first of its kind school in San Antonio! To learn more, watch the replay here!
Upcoming episode – Saturday nights from 11:00 p.m. to Midnight -
- Episode 31, April 29: Cyber Warrior Network - Career Matching for Military Cyber Jobs
Listen to a replay of this episode or past episodes on a Cyber Talk Radio Podcast stream. Replays are available via the below podcast services:
Recent episodes – available to stream from our YouTube channel -
- Cybersecurity Legislation with Congressman Will Hurd
- PCI Compliance with Ray Sims of Decypher Technologies
- Mobile App Development Security with Jason Straughan and Anton Domratchev of Grok Interactive
- Creating a “Culture of Security” with Dr. Greg White of University of Texas San Antonio
- Cybersecurity Trends for 2017 with Stephanie Ewing-Ottmers, cybersecurity evangelist at Delta Risk
- CyberPatriot Program at McNair Middle School with Mike Maldonado, CyberPatriot coach and technology facilitator at McNair Middle School
- Developing Youth Cyber Talent with Debi Pfitzenmaier, founder at Youth Code Jam
- CyberPatriot Program at Business Careers High School with Juan Guerrero, technology certification instructor
- Open Cloud Academy and its Cybersecurity Track with Deborah Carter and Johnny Carrera
- Attracting Cyber Businesses to Bexar County with Commissioner Calvert
- 2017 San Antonio Mayor’s Cyber Cup Luncheon hosted by CyberTexas Foundation
- Codeup’s Approach to Developing Responsible Programmers with Ryan Orsinger
- Voice and Unified Communication Security with Mark Collier of SecureLogix
Have an idea for a topic or want to be a guest?
Contact Cyber Talk Radio via our request a topic or be a guest form.