Nortel LearniT

Student Internship Programs Bring 21^st Century Benefits

Many businesses can update the traditional model of student internships by having their participants use 21st century tools to document and share their experiences. This can be accomplished by connecting their real world experiences with their classroom learning. In this resource kit we share some model internship program activities, organization materials, and resources to enable businesses and other organizations to work with talented students. By mentoring them and tailoring assignments to their millennial skills this helps them make valuable contributions to the workplace and to their future careers.

Resources: The best of all worlds occurs when interns work collaboratively together and with the organization in skills-building and in growing world-of-work abilities. To replicate the internship experience in your locale, we share Starting and Maintaining a Quality Internship Program; a sample Intern Job Description - general; a Nortel LearniT Task Description - specific; and an intern time sheet.

Internships in Action: To see tasks melded with intern talents in action:

view (in following section) some technology-infused toolkits and activities
a video created by Nortel LearniT interns about their efforts (left)
a "Day in the Life" slideshow of interns working on a toolkit's video tutorial

Toolkits and activity descriptions connect you with documentation and background materials to use as models in extrapolating the ideas to your own environment:

Tech 'Splained: from Blogs to Video Phones to Social Networking and more! Quick steps to learning 21st century multimedia to use yourself and to connect with today's millennial students
Mobile Camera Toolkit - everything you need to know about using a mobile camera toolkit (with special projects)
Tri-Caster: Video Studio-in-a-Box - tutorial on a convenient video production tool
One Laptop Per Child
Creating Career Bytes Toolkit
Curriki - global curriculum initiative
A "Day in the Life" slideshow of interns working on a toolkit's video tutorial

One Laptop Per Child Initiatives: Interns contribute talent and great ideas to the One Laptop Per Child Initiative. Intern Matt presented a talk and demo of the XO's Mesh technology at the 2008 Nortel Technology Conference (NTC); read his blog. Interns created Networking Tutorials and Robert and Shen created the XO Student Tutorial.

Creating Career Bytes Toolkit: In December 2008, Nortel LearniT interns, working with National Institute of Aerospace Educator in Residence Sharon Bowers in a one week "sprint" created all the resources for a fantastic how-to: the Creating Career Bytes Toolkit. The brief Career Bytes video interviews of career professionals are a mainstay of Nortel LearniT's educational model. They are created completely by students. Learn more about the interns' work in creating the Career Bytes Toolkit and meet the interns who worked on it.

Curriculum initiative support: Interns worked also to begin uploading Nortel LearniT's educational resources to Nortel LearniT's partner Curriki. Curriki is a community of educators, learners and committed education experts working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world. Curriki is an online environment built in wiki technology to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Interns Liz, Amelia, and Rob from the Herndon office provided upload support; Dominic from the Research Triangle Park, NC, office provided key technical support and analysis, interfacing directly with the Curriki CTO in this effort.

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