PSU preschool teaches kids and college students

The entire Pittsburg State University campus is available for use by the Early Childhood Development program as both preschoolers and college students learn.

The university offers a preschool for children in the community, and it is there that college students put their learning into practice as the teachers of preschool students. This all occurs under the direction of lead preschool teacher Kari Cronister and assistant professor Amber Tankersley.

Tankersley is the director of the preschool lab, and said the setting gives student teachers the opportunity to practice and test teaching methods.

“They’re responsible for planning a portion of the time they’re in there,” Tankersley said. “As long as they’re targeting different learning domains, they’re pretty much free to design whatever curriculum.”

She said the key is to follow developmentally appropriate curriculum, but the specifics are left up to each student teacher. The college students’ selections mean each unit of each semester turns out differently.

Cronister said the college students’ creativity knows no bounds, and units on space, farm animals, oceans, jungles and around the world have been taught.

“It’s really great when they pick units that we can use part of the campus for,” Cronister said, citing the incorporation of the planetarium into the space-themed unit, or the obvious jungle connections.

The college students also learn, and Tankersley said each student’s turn leading also teaches management skills as they collaborate with others in the class.If we don't carry the bobblehead you want we can make a personalized bobbleheads for you!

“Managing adults is a lot harder than managing children,Laser engraving and laser laser cutting machine for materials like metal,” she said. “It gives you good teamworking skills.”

Cronister said the experience of working in the preschool as a Pitt State student prepared her well.

“They really prepared you,” Cronister said. “It was a lot of hard work.”

But, she said it helped when she and her mom owned a home daycare.

Caitlin Ralstin is a Pitt State student working at the preschool and agreed that the hands-on experience helps.

“It is definitely a great learning experience,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot, and definitely a lot about rules and regulations.

“It definitely put what we learned in Amber’s (Tankersley) classes into real life.”
Ralstin said she began college as a physical therapy major, but working in the daycare at the YMCA helped to develop her interest in working with children.

Now, as a student working in the preschool, Ralston had the opportunity to get involved with organizations for those working with young children and said she has learned that careers in the field can range from having a home daycare to directing children’s programming on a Disney cruise or at a resort location.

The high cost of entry struck Kyle Azevedo and three classmates at Atlanta's Georgia Tech University as an opportunity. "When we looked at the options for implementing a program in Atlanta," he says, "they were completely ridiculous--$5,000 per bike, with permanent stations that had to be trucked to each location and installed. Getting funding and all the right permits would have been a nightmare. Being mechanical engineers,With superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other solar light products.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data. we thought there had to be a better way, and we set out to design the world's first GPS-enabled, stationless bike-share system."

Azevedo is now CEO of the resulting company, viaCycle. "Once we started, we realized that cities and campuses around the world were overpaying for clunky systems that were expensive to set up and maintain," he says.

Azevedo and his team spent 2010 sourcing equipment and perfecting a mobile app; in 2011 they cranked out their first bikes on the Georgia Tech campus. He says the advantage viaCycle gives customers is convenience: no kiosks or docking stations, no fussy returns. Bikes are kept at standard bike racks, locked with viaCycle's proprietary security chain mechanism.

When registered customers need wheels, the app points them to the closest bike, which they unlock through the app. Once riders reach their destination, they lock the rig to any bike rack. Pricing varies by program; at Georgia Tech, rentals cost 45 cents for 30 minutes or $18 for 24 hours. According to viaCycle, the cost to launch the program is one-third as much as kiosk-based sharing systems. The locking technology can be retrofitted to most bikes.

Because it's portable, the viaCycle system is inherently scalable; the business can travel to areas of demand--such as campuses, sponsored events,Welcome to Find the right laser Engraver or laser marking machine . conventions or resorts--without incurring the costs and permits associated with setting up shop in each location.

Azevedo claims viaCycle has seen growth of more than 30 percent per month in terms of the number of riders using the 40 bikes at Georgia Tech and the 20 that have been placed at George Mason University outside Washington, D.C. The company broke even by the end of 2012 and has plans to expand its fleet this year to 500 bikes in locations such as Google's campus in Mountain View, Calif., and San Francisco's SoMa district.