Janet Scannell intro

I'm participating in the Summer Institute as a parent and an educator.  I currently work in the Information Technology group at Bryn Mawr College. I taught K-12 teachers about technology for 9 years at Philadelphia Univeristy (formerly Phila College of Textiles and Science).  My educational background is engineering and computer science and the liberal arts.  I'm also an amateur clarinetist.

I really enjoyed working with those teachers and seeing the creative uses they made of the tools I introduced them to.  My favorite example of that was a time when I was doing a workshop showing Art teachers how to use Photoshop and gave them an image of an older child and a younger child working together and asked them to "crop" it (i.e. make the image smaller). I expected them to crop out the extra background but several of them (independent from each other) cropped the image so that all that remained was the four hands of the two boys that were intertwined in their joint work. It was a beautiful image and a great moment for me.

I am also the parent of twins who are entering 2nd grade at the CW Henry school. They are both science minded and the principal is interested in improving science at the school so I'm looking for ideas on how I might be a supportive parent to the school and the teachers.