About
Education Code (EC) Section 52499.66, enacted in November of 2007, requires that the California Department of Education (CDE) select a California Career Technical Education (CTE) program, by competitive process, to design Web pages pertaining to CTE in California. These Web pages were to be placed on the CDE Web site by January 1, 2010.
Pursuant to EC 52499.66, the CDE held a competition, the winner of which would design the CTE Web pages, and Simi Valley High School was declared the winner. Simi Valley High designed and submitted it’s CTE Web pages in February of 2009, and what you see on this site is the product of their design work, with minor modifications to meet accessibility standards as required by law. The CDE thanks Simi Valley HS for their contribution!
Development of the CTE Website
The Career Technical Education website was developed by students at Simi Valley High School in Simi Valley, CA, under the guidance of web design teachers Stephen Caswell and Jeff Jackson. The original site was developed by Mr. Caswell’s web design students as their entry into a web design contest held by the CDE in the spring of 2008. The winner of the contest was invited by the CDE to develop a final version of the site.
Top-Down Design Technique Taught to Students
The CTE project was developed using a top-down design technique the students were taught for developing commercial web sites with project teams. The project began by considering the overall needs of the site.
At the time, it was felt that since developing and promoting CTE in California would evolve over a period of years, it was important for the site to focus on the CTE plan developed by the CDE. The students used the Executive Summary of the 2008-12 California State Plan for Career Technical Education as the basis of the initial site.
To design the home page, the student team divided the Executive Summary into its constituent parts: Background, Needs and Opportunities, CTE Delivery System, Goals, 11 Elements of Success, and Industry Sectors. For the 11 elements of success, the students created a working version of the graph in the Summary that showed the 11 elements, and also made each element a separate page. In addition, the students made each industry sector a micro-site, with the idea that each micro-site will evolve with its own program for CTE.
To implement the site, Mr. Caswell divided the class into teams as follows: Shauna Fletcher, Melissa Ingraham and Sydney Harper – Home page and CSS; Amanda Seghi and Kari Tucker – Inside page template; Larissa Alvarado, Brent Ruzicka and Rachel Singh – template implementation; Deelan Tapia and Eliott Stokes – Background; Cory Peterson, Thomas Pilkington and Curtis Davis – Needs and Opportunities; Tiffany Skinner, Daisy Velasquez and Tyler Arnold – CTE Delivery System; Daniel Bromberg and Melissa Carr – Goals; Tate Arneston, Chris Wheller and Nick Sykora – 11 Elements of Success main page; Joe Agustin, Vince Carlos, Kevin Neely, Brent Keys, Josh Wheeler, Kyle Cook, Brandon Klea, Connor Nagy, Alex Guthrie and Kenneth Jacobskind – individual Elements of Success pages.
Each team took the text from the Executive Summary and/or full plan and converted it into HTML. The home page team created the home page, including the CSS page used to format all text. The 11 elements team created a working model of the 11 elements graph. The inside page template team took the home page and used it to create an inside page template. The students then took the text developed by the other teams and dropped it into the template, creating three versions of text size to meet the needs people with limited vision.
Final Development of the Site
Simi Valley High was notified late in the spring that it won the CDE’s design contest and was chosen to develop a working site. In the summer of 2008, Mr. Caswell began working the CDE on translating the original design into a working site.
The final version of the site was completed by a new set of web design classes at Simi Valley High who were taught by Jeff Jackson. The new team focused on taking the initial code and making it more compliant with CDE web design standards. Key tasks included implementing all HTML using CSS structures, adding the initial content for the micro-sites for each Industry Segment, and developing a Javascript-based menu.
Students who worked on the final development included Anthony Becker, Dominic Ciolfi, Jaemeson Gan, Michael Lorenzo, Pauline Ohannessian, Sam Murphy, Jaqueline Battung, and Naoko Takeda.
The project was completed during the fall of 2008 and turned over to the CDE during the spring of 2009.
Education Code Section 52499.66