Gulf County teachers trained by FSU Panama City’s ASCENT program earn 127 technical certificates

Jessi Ammons, a Gulf County teacher, attended “T3” Academy training this summer, part of the FSU Panama City ASCENT program’s ongoing mission of expanding technical certificate opportunities for Panhandle primary and secondary school students.

A week after attending the T3 (Teaching Techology Together) Academy and earning her own certificates, Ammons then taught a group of Franklin County students at the Moving Education Institute (MEI) in Apalachicola. These nine students, who attended Ammons' class during summer camp at MEI, each earned a certificate in Google Slides, with one student achieving a perfect score on their exam.

Ammons is currently moving on to training the same group of students in Google Docs, a digital word processing tool.

Her story is just one small part of ASCENT’s T3 Academy success story in Gulf County, where the FSU Panama City-based program worked with 37 teachers June 2-6 and 9-13, during their summer break. Teachers met from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily at Port St. Joe High School, where they were trained and certified in Google Digital Tools, including Docs, Sheets, Slides, DigComp (overall Digital Competencies), Adobe Illustrator and WordPress web design.

Those teachers earned a total of 127 technical certificates over the two weeks, qualifying them to teach their students the same technical skills.

“This was an excellent experience with a great outcome that also provided a tremendous learning opportunity for the ASCENT K-12 team,” said Brianne Biddle, program manager. “This was our first out-of-town teacher training, and we hope to implement this model in other counties moving forward.”

Initially a 6-year program, FSU Panama City’s ASCENT has been expanded to a 10-year, $23 million project partially funded by Triumph Gulf Coast Inc. It is designed to contribute to the development of a strong, regional workforce in cybersecurity and innovative technologies.

Triumph Gulf Coast is a nonprofit corporation that oversees the expenditure of funds recovered by the Florida attorney general for economic damages to the state from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Triumph grant provides matching dollars for funds raised by ASCENT.

ASCENT projects focus on increasing the interest of K-12 students in engineering, computer science, information technology (IT) and cybersecurity fields; expanding undergraduate degree programs at FSU Panama City to include IT with a specialization in cybersecurity; and delivering non-credit customized training courses and testing to meet the workforce needs of community partners.

For more information, visit the website PC.FSU.edu/ASCENT.

ASCENT’s T3 Academy focuses on supplying hands-on learning experiences in IT where teachers can develop or enhance skills that will be passed along to their students. The goal is to develop a sustainable environment where students become more aware of the fun and exciting opportunities in IT, as well as helping students overcome challenges in learning IT.

“The success of this training was made possible by working with Gulf County beginning last September,” Biddle said. “The team met to determine what Gulf County needed to support the implementation of a more robust CTE curriculum in their school district.”