A Day in the Life: Helping Teachers with My Nerd Powers

If you haven’t been reading this blog much before, you may not know that I am a software developer. I went to engineering school and got good and nerdy. My skill set I wanted to use? Programming….but I didn’t want to be a code monkey creating pieces of massive software products. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be proud of what I did.

My junior year of college, my boyfriend (now husband) had a job at an awesome company and I wanted in too….but not just to work there for free m&ms and the pool. I wanted to work in the philanthropic division creating software for schools. Something that improved education. I stalked the job board until one day a student position came available. In August 2004 I started as a hourly employee doing whatever was needed. Mindless HTML? Sure. Printing off state curriculum standards to review? You betcha. No task was too small for me. My goal? Show them I have work ethic as well as skill.

Well I have now been working there 8 years since. I was hired with the same department as a development tester full time and a couple of years later moved to development. I love my job but more importantly, I love my product.

I know some of you are saying, “That’s great but what does this have to do with any of us?” Well I wanted to introduce you to the product I create. I know there are a good number of teachers reading here (homeschool too!) and I want you to have it. For reals.  It is supplied at no-cost to all educators within the US (for international inquiries, you just need a few extra steps). No catch. I promise. Still interested?

Meet SAS Curriculum Pathways!

www.sascurriculumpathways.com

SAS Curriculum Pathways is a tool for teachers composing of interactive, standards-based resources for grades 6-12 in the core subjects of English language art, mathematics, science, social studies and Spanish. We have been creating content for 15 years with a staff of teachers, designers and developers who all love what we do. It is all free with no catch. It’s our CEO‘s hope that teachers get as much cutting edge technology that they can…budget or not. I could go on and give you the standard jargon but I’m going to show you. These are just a few of our resources:

SAS Curriculum Pathways Stream Ecology

• Steam Ecology - Investigate how pollutants affect a stream’s temperature, dissolved oxygen, and inhabitants.
• Writing Reviser – An award winning tool to help your students revise their own writing
• Fraction Flash Cards (my handy work ) – Flash cards adding subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions.
• Misused Expressions – Study common misused words and phrases with Muggs the lovable pit bull
• Spanish Language Builder – A tool to help beginner Spanish students student grammatical elements.
• The Electoral College – Use primary source documents to craft an opinion on the electoral college’s role in electing the President.
• Then over the summer, we debuted an entire Algebra 1 course.

SAS Curriculum Pathways Writing Planner

Needless to say, we stay busy. So busy in fact, we just released a 3 beta products Saturday that I worked on.  Go check them out and let us know what you think!

So every day I go to work on something to help out the world’s heroes, teachers. I couldn’t be prouder. My love for education and technology in one. THIS is why I have the dream job.

What are you waiting for? GO SIGN UP!