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Laid-off IT pros head to the classroom

A government grant is helping 30 unemployed IT professionals in Georgia start new careers as high school computer science teachers, Computerworld reports. With a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing has launched "Operation Reboot." The program pairs a laid-off IT professional with an existing high school teacher for at least one year, "allowing the IT professional to learn the ins and outs of a classroom, and the teacher to get an education in IT," the college said in a statement. The IT professionals will receive an initial teaching certificate with a computer science "endorsement," an add-on that signifies special expertise. In essence, the IT pros get to team-teach with a business teacher who wants to learn how to be a computing teacher, according to a blog post by Mark Guzdial, a Georgia Tech professor and a researcher in computing education. "Both team teachers want to become computing teachers: One knows IT and wants to learn how to be a teacher, and the other is a teacher who wants to learn IT. The result isn’t just 30 new high school [computer science] teachers. It’s 60 well-trained teachers," he wrote…

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