Welcome Back! by Mrs. Brown

Are you ready for the best year ever?  I hope so because that is what the year ahead promises to be!  This year, you will become an entrepreneur, a change agent, a creative genius.  This is the year of YOU.  How do I know, you ask?  Because I've got big plans.  Before I get to that, however, a few housekeeping topics that you should know about:

• This year we will be so busy building our dreams that we will no longer have time for in-class typing.  Therefore, please follow the directions below in order to practice your typing at home:
• Type to Learn Students can access the Type to Learn program from home in order to practice their typing skills. To install Type to Learn on your home computer, simply download it from the following link: http://ttl4.sunburst.com/downloads/
• The students use their last name and first two initials for their username the password is davis.
• Once the program has been downloaded onto your home computer, the account code to log in is 135321.
• We will continue with our iHelp job chart.  I will go over a refresher of the jobs on the first day of class. 

As for the year ahead, we will be building our own Tech start-ups!  There are many ways to become an entrepreneur.  My goal for this class is that it will inspire you to think about the many paths on which creating a business can take you.  Together, we will learn how to create a business model centered around an invention of your choice inspired by wanting to create a solution for a problem that has not yet been solved.  

Where do we start?  Well, we will start by reviewing successful entrepreneurs and their innovations.  By exploring what they have in common, we can begin to understand what it means to invest in yourself and take such a giant leap of faith in creating something of your own invention.  I look forward to creative brainstorming activities where we will discover our own passions that we want to devote our time to building and sharing.  

You may be wondering how technology plays a role in all of this.  We will explore different tech tools that will help us develop our "brand", stay within our set budget, invent a prototype and very importantly, market our brand.  With the help of technology tools, we will pitch our ideas to investors. Finally, we will reflect on our hard work and support each other through a peer critique process. Shark Tank anyone?

 I hope you are excited because it is sure to be an adventure!

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