Most Iowa school kids are now on summer vacation, but Iowa’s First Lady is going back to school for a couple of days to take a computer class. “In the summer, teachers go back to school and we never quit going to school,” First Lady Christie Vilsack says. “That’s why I became a teacher so I could go to school for the rest of my life because I love it.” Vilsack is taking the class to keep her teaching license current. “In order to continue being a teacher as I have been for 30 years, I have to continue going to school,” Vilsack says. “Iowa law says I need to do that.” Most of her time in the classroom was spent teaching junior high students. Vilsack say during a tour of Iowa schools this winter, she realized computers had become an integral part of teaching. “I realized that if I went back to a middle school to teach that I wouldn’t have the skills that I needed, the technology skills that I needed, to really be effective in the classroom,” Vilsack says. She illustrated her lack of computer literacy on Thursday when she tried to surf on the Internet to show some junior high kids her www.christievilsack.org website. “What am I doing wrong, guys?” Vilsack asked her staff. She is trying to become more computer savvy. “I actually signed up for a power point class, too, and my travel schedule is going to make it so that I don’t get to do that one,” Vilsack says. “But I also have another on-line class that all teachers have to take.” She says while there are just two days in the classroom for her computer class, she’ll spent a lot of hours after that working on the homework.
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