Career Ready Connections

Welcome back! Big news! PDE and Career Ready PA will be holding statewide stakeholder virtual forums in November. Details are in the newsletter!

A new school year is here, and the leaves are beginning to turn. Be assured that the Career Ready PA team is here to assist with opportunities, resources, and updates in career readiness.

Don't forget that our Career Ready PA regional liaisons are here to support you with training and resources. If you don't know your region, you can use the regions map located on the Career Ready PA page.

• Resources are available at SAS for Career Readiness.
• Join our Career Readiness Learning Community. (PDE SAS login is required.)
• Career Ready PA is PDE’s source for guidance and resources.

Because of the stakeholder forums, the first Career Ready PA Coalition session will be held on Thursday, November 21, 2024, featuring Lehigh Valley’s Manufacturing Resource Center, known for the “What’s So Cool About Manufacturing?” contest held annually. The Coalition sessions will resume its regular monthly sessions in February 2025.

Each session also prioritizes updates in education and workforce. We look forward to hearing more best practices in 2024/25! Access to the presentations and recorded sessions can be located at the Google Share link.

Webinars continue to be offered and recordings are posted on the Career Ready PA Coalition website. Career and workforce readiness are integral to developing equitable access to career pathways for all Pennsylvania learners, through effective workforce training, aligned to workforce needs and departmental career readiness initiatives. Follow #CareerReadyPA to stay connected!

Partnerships to Pathways—Employability Skills in the Classroom

Principals, Counselors, Teacher Training

The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) is pleased to announce virtual stakeholder forums designed to assist districts in strengthening new and existing workforce to classroom career pathway connections. Topics include how to meet the expectations of the new Career Education and Work standards, highlighting Employability Skills, and its alignment to the Future Ready PA Index and stakeholder partnerships. This training supports PDE’s vision that “Pennsylvania learners will be prepared for meaningful engagement in postsecondary education; in workforce training; in career pathways; and to be responsible, involved citizens.” Training will be provided by PDE Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) staff and the Career Ready PA liaisons, as noted below, by Career Ready PA county regions. Register at Event Details (pattan.net) by Friday, October 25, 2024. Register only for the session associated with your county and region.

Sessions will be held on the following dates from 9 to 11 am:

Friday, November 1, 2024: Career Ready PA Regions 1, 2, 3, and 6

Friday, November 8, 2024: Career Ready PA Regions 9 and 10

Monday, November 18, 2024: Career Ready PA Regions 4, 5, 7, and 8

District training teams should include teachers, counselors, and a building principal. With an emphasis on K12 classroom to workforce connections, teams should include teachers from both elementary and secondary.

The goal of this training is the development of an action plan that utilizes stakeholder and workforce partnerships to expand the classroom to career connections with hands-on learning and employability skills to build schoolwide momentum for career readiness. Team members will be poised to provide support in the implementation of the action plan.

The Annual Conference on Integrated Learning: The School-to-Career Connection will be conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Education's Bureau of Career and Technical Education on November 6-8, 2024 at the Penn Stater Conference Center. For more information, please visit the Integrated Learning Conference (ILC) (pa.gov) webpage.

Just announced! The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) is pleased to issue this request for applications to fund programs that address the large gaps in CS and STEM career and technical education offerings and expand access to historically underserved students of all ages. Applicants may apply for funds in one of three tiers of grants, each with its own purpose and target audience. Visit the PAsmart website of the Pennsylvania Department of Education for more information on the grant and how to apply.

The PA Department of Labor & Industry posts upcoming grant forecasts. The Schools to Work Round 5 is forecasted to be available in November. Please check their website, Grants | Department of Labor and Industry | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , for detailed information.

The online training tools and tutorials for all online testing, including PSSA, Keystone, Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT), and the new PA Firefly are publicly available on the DRC Insight PA Portal. Links to the portal can also be found on both the PDE Website and SAS Portal.

Available in the Online Tutorials are a number of short videos to provide training and tips in using the test platform, including navigating imbedded accommodations, interacting with Technology Enhanced (TE) Items, using the testing tools, and accessing resources like the calculator and formula sheets. The Online Training Tools allow educators and students to interact and practice with sample questions in the test platform, including TE items, resources, tools, and accommodations. The items in the Online Training Tools are on grade-level and can be imbedded into classroom instruction. An upcoming update to the Online Training Tools will include more TE item types and an update to the English Language Arts and Literature open-ended interface that includes indent, outdent, and italics buttons.

These tools can assist you in preparing students for CDT testing, online PSSA and Keystone testing, and the PA Firefly benchmark by preparing students to interact with the test. Local educational entities may also wish to have students test the accommodations features, which include audio, magnification, and color chooser, to determine students’ assessment needs.

In addition to the Online Training Tools and Tutorials, a number of additional resources can be found in the DRC Insight Portal, including the DRC Insight Portal User Guide and DRC Insight Technology Guide and Video Tutorial. To find these documents, on the Portal Welcome Page, click on “My Applications” and “General Information”, then “Documents”. The Department will periodically provide new resources to assist school leaders during the transition to online testing. Those resources will be posted in the Portal, as well as on the PDE and SAS pages.

If you have any questions, please contact RA-ED-PSSA-KEYSTONE@pa.gov.

Virtual Field Trips to Explore Careers of the Future

Career Tours are free, interactive virtual field trips that inspire students to pursue careers of the future by exploring Amazon’s technologies. Tour whenever, wherever on Kahoot!

Explore Amazon Future Engineer at this link.

Join WQED Film Academy—in-person or virtually—to learn how to become a digital storyteller.

WQED Film Academy draws on its partnership with teaching artists and professional mentors to teach a curriculum of the basics of digital media arts – what we call SCALE: storytelling, camera, audio, lighting, and editing. The curriculum is more than 100 hours of hands-on and collaborative learning and uses the latest digital media technology.

Each class produces their own short film by the end of the session.

There are three sessions per year: Summer, Fall and Spring. Scholarships are available.

Upon successful completion of WQED Film Academy, students can apply to the Teen Film Crew. The Teen Film Crew gets paid while they continue to build their skills creating promotional videos for clients. The teaching artists work with the students as a team – just as they would in a professional agency.

More information on the WQED Film Academy is available at this link.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) announced its eighth annual Innovations Challenge, which encourages students to use their problem-solving, creative and strategic-thinking abilities to solve real-world transportation challenges in a competition among their peers. The Innovations Challenge is open to all students in grades 9-12, regardless of their school’s learning model.

For this year’s challenge, students are asked to develop a cost-effective, innovative solution that can help PennDOT more effectively increase awareness of seat belt safety and change behavior to improve roadway safety.

For complete Innovations Challenge details, visit www.penndot.pa.gov/innovation and scroll down to select the blue Innovations Challenge tile box. The submission deadline is Jan. 31, 2025.

For questions or more information, email PennDOT’s Bureau of Innovations at DOTInnovations@pa.gov.

The Coalition and Career Ready PA will be hosting a series of webinars highlighting career pathways, resources, and best practices. Educators can view our upcoming webinars and register online on our Eventbrite page. Recordings of the webinars, as well as materials shared during the sessions, can be found on our Career Ready PA Coalition page under Career Ready Webinars.

The Career Ready PA Coalition is happy to announce two 60-Minute statewide Zoom meetings highlighting Smart Futures’ Career Plan and Portfolio (CPP), a popular Pennsylvania-built career readiness platform. The Smart Futures CPP platform facilitates the seamless creation, storage, and reporting of digital CEW artifacts that are then portable with the student as they move between schools. The solution is more affordable and easy to implement than existing national products.

Smart Futures CPP platform is already being used by over 50% of schools in Pennsylvania, and yet there are many districts and schools that still don’t know this resource exists.

Two 60-minute Zoom sessions are being offered to help spread the word:

November 1 @ 1:00 pm

November 4 @ 9:00 am

These sessions are targeted to schools not currently subscribing to the Smart Futures. The tours are open to educators and administrators (Future Ready Leadership Team members) from school districts, charter schools, CTC's, Intermediate Units, and alternative education programs and are being offered at NO COST to participants.

Website: www.aiu3.net/CareerReadyPA