From Left: Instructor Chandi Queen from the People's Emergency Center's digital inclusion program, student Frank Cutler, State Rep. Tony Payton, Rasheem Jennings, William Brown and front row, Ethel Dawson and Karen Lee.

Five Frankford residents completed a three-day computer literacy certification program hosted during Philly Tech Week in partnership between state Rep. Tony Payton and the Frankford CDC.

The five residents celebrated with a small graduation ceremony last Thursday. The residents who completed the course were the following:

• Ethel Dawson
• Frank Cutler
• Karen Lee
• Rasheem Jennings
• William Brown

Among the topics learned over three days, attendees got a taste of basic computer comfort, common web tools, social networking communication and the use of email.

20-something Jennings was most excited to learn how to upload a resume.

“All the job applications I find want me to give a resume online, but I didn’t know how to do that until this class,” said Jennings.

Brown told Technically Philly he was excited to better communicate through Facebook and email.

“Now I know what a ‘wall’ is,” he said, laughing.

In January, the Frankford CDC opened up 10 computer workstations for residents. The computer lab came through a partnership with the city’s collaborative PhillyRising effort, Temple’s Computer Recycling Center and Aria Health, which operates the formerly named Frankford Hospital across the street.

“The CDC definitely plans on doing further workshops, thanks to the People’s Emergency Center,” said CDC spokeswoman Michelle Feldman. “We don’t have any dates set, but folks can give us a call at 215-743-6580 for more info.”

The event, coordinated with Technically Philly, was a pilot for future Tech Week events that will offer basic computer literacy training, something that senior centers, libraries and other community groups do independently throughout the city.

“It’s great to get our part of the city involved in Tech Week,” said Rep. Payton. “We were proud to be a part.”

The Frankford Gazette print newsletter [PDF] used a version of this story.

In the nearly two decades that the YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School, an education program for low-income youth, has been in Philadelphia, it boasts helping more than 1,700 students transition to post-secondary educational programs and train for jobs in construction, health care and technology, according to a recent profile from the Inquirer.

In May 2009, Technically Philly profiled the program, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary next month.

YouthBuild, which originated in the Bronx, now employs locally about 50 staff who help offer a second chance to 213 18-20 year old students on North Broad Street above Girard Avenue. The program is largely publicly funded, according to the Inquirer.

In addition to improving their own lives, the students also contribute to the larger Philadelphia community.

From the story:

“In the first three years of the program, 13 houses in South Philadelphia – YouthBuild was quartered in the United Community Services building at Sixth and Catharine Streets – were rehabbed for low-income owners. That number now exceeds 70.

To round out the picture, add to that the 2,500 computers that technology students have refurbished and donated, the 5,000 hours of care they have provided for residents in long-term facilities, and the thousands of hours of community-service activities they have performed.” MORE

The program will be celebrating it’s 2oth anniversary on May 9, 2012. Click here to learn more.

Instructor Jesse Parker taught the group while also helping participants individually.

The Philadelphia Opportunity Industrialization Center hosted its first public digital literacy training session last week in partnership with LIFT-Philadelphia and Comcast.

The lessons, which are free and open to the public, are meant to teach citizens how to use the Internet in a safe and effective way. Tuesday’s session on Internet basics and safety is one of five sessions OIC will be holding in the program’s North Broad Street headquarters above Girard Avenue. Classes will also be held in LIFT’s West Philadelphia offices.

“What the workshop is focused on is teaching folks how to safely navigate the Internet and how to learn some of the basics of actually being on the Internet,” said Eric Smith, program manager for the Digital Initiative at OIC.

Participants helped each other learn about the Internet.

The class also explored topics such as online chatting, blogging, social networking and WAN/LAN. Although many participants know about social web tools like Skype and LinkedIn, they may not have any online experience using them, said organizers.

“I came just to brush up on the Internet,” said Larry Rainey, a participant in Tuesday’s class. “I want to learn how to communicate online with my daughter in Florida.”

Step-by-step, instructor Jesse Parker took the class through a basic online training program while ensuring participants knew how to correctly use the mouse, mouse pad and keyboard. Students were able to read aloud and discuss the definitions of servers, clients and streaming.

“What’s great is that we have some of the participants from past computer classes who wanted more practice and more information,” said Joshua Whetstone, resource coordinator for LIFT.

OIC’s other training sessions include success through social networking and getting the most out of Gmail. The program is also hosting mirror sessions in West Philadelphia at LIFT-Philadelphia’s office.

“The best thing I learned today was that they have a free site to teach you. I didn’t even know about it,” Rainey said.

Girl Scouts from Esperanza Academy took notes on different careers presented by the AT&T Aspire program..

Global nonprofit organization Junior Achievement works as a partner with AT&T’s $250 million Aspire initiative, which has already given $800,000 locally.

Together, the groups brought 32 Girl Scouts from Nueva Esperanza Academy in Hunting Park and Germantown High Schools last week to AT&T regional offices in King of Prussia to hear about career opportunities in technology and business.

“We are so excited to be celebrating the 100,000 student mark with Junior Achievement and AT&T nationally that we’ve reached over a three-year program,” said Laura Yohe, program director of Junior Achievement in Delaware Valley.

Watch a video on last week’s student seminar.

Started in 1919, the model connects young students with business professionals and provides them with life skills to succeed in a global economy. With 120 offices in the United States and agencies in more that 112 countries, Junior Achievement focuses on the core areas of financial literacy, entrepreneurship and work readiness.

Junior Achievement expects to serve between 14,000 and 15,000 students in the five-county area in kindergarten through 12th grade. Within Philadelphia alone, the organization hopes to serve 9,000 students in kindergarten through 8th grades, providing a real-world connection to workers and skills students need to be successful.

“One of the great things about being involved in Junior Achievement is being able to work with people who have all different kinds of work experience in different industries,” Yohe said, “And one of the great things about AT&T is that the technology, the engineers and the computers are a great connection for students that are interested.”

[Full Disclosure: AT&T is the title sponsor of Philly Tech Week.]

Dean Harris

Every Saturday morning since January, a group of about 17 Philadelphia teenagers have been trooping over to a Temple University computer lab to learn about computer science.

The students, mostly from area charter and magnet schools, are largely college-bound and predictably excited to learn, say those involved. So it’s surprising that their teacher, Dean Harris, sees himself as unlikely role model, he told Technically Philly, but his track record as an innovative digital electronics technologist suggests otherwise.

So does the apparent respect of the teens, who are giving up sleep and Saturday morning cartoons to be in class with him and his co-teachers, leading Java Presenter and DRUPAL expert Tariq Hook, mechanical engineer L Dollio Durant and Harris’s son, Askia Harris.

To explain why Harris still sounds a little surprised when he says that he teaches Computer Science 101, despite the fact that he’s taught eight classes so far, begins when Harris was a teenager in Philadelphia in the 1970s, about the same age as some of his students.

His path — from lost kid to student to heavy technologist to teacher — is instructive in the city’s battle for digital access illustrated by STEM education.

A younger Dean Harris with a different era of technology.

With an absent father and a mother working a second shift, Harris says he had a lot of time and space to do what teenagers stereotypically do. Were it not for an influential friend headed to study technology at Devry University in Chicago, Harris says his life could have turned out a bit differently.

“Everything was osmosis,” said Harris. “The universe just pushed me there. I was a child of the 1960s and 1970s, a young black teenager just kind of finding my way, learning life on life’s terms.”

As it happened, Harris decided to find his way by following his friend from Philadelphia to Chicago, enrolling in Devry’s three-year engineering program. Though he left Devry early to pursue training and an entry level position at IBM, the decision ultimately put him on a career path that took him from IBM, to a project management role at DuPont to Bell Laboratories, the famed telephony research laboratory in Murray Hill, New Jersey — all while he was still in his twenties.

“Bell Labs: they had everything, but what they didn’t have early on was people who had a good handle of both hardware and software,” said Harris. “That was my in.”

Harris was able to lead projects at DuPont and gain an edge over some of the leading researchers in the field of telephony because, as he tells it, he was a rebel, but a teachable one. Though he was trained in engineering, Harris says he learned to program on a Heathkit, a pre-Microsoft version of the personal computer that he got access to thanks to a rebellious coworker at IBM who took Harris under his wing.

“I got saturated at IBM as a young teenager and that’s how I got into this whole digital electronics thing,” said Harris. “Of course I was young and impressionable and I’ve always been a rebel free spirit.”

After DuPont, Harris told Technically Philly, he became interested in the theory of computer science, as well, teaching himself from books and joining hobby clubs in the area.

At Bell Labs, he put that intensity to use building test equipment for a mini-computer called an application processor the Lab was building. Harris says that within three months he was leading the project.

Harris stayed at Bell Labs for about a decade — his longest tenure at one job throughout his career — working on various technologies, including digital PBX systems, early ethernet, AT&T’s PCs, modems and core processors.

By his 30′s and the 1990s, Harris had moved to Toshiba Labs, where he helped Toshiba develop the world’s first DVD premastering systems in partnership with Warner Brothers. The project won a technical Emmy Award in 1998.

In less than two decades, Harris’s work had covered telephony, computing,and video technology.

“All the stuff you see in Comcast? Basically all of that came from those places [where I worked],” said Harris. “Call me Triple Play.”

To Harris, the evolution of his computer science class is yet another link in the chain of serendipitous events he uses to tell his life story.

Dean Harris and other mentors with his computer science class.

Harris met Michelle Kuilan-Martin, the cofounder of minority youth mentorship program What It Takes Foundation, after a bad split with a business partner over a video production and consulting business they’d cofounded called Front Porch Video. Harris moved his side of the business to a spot at 4th and South streets and Kuilan-Martin happened to have the office space downstairs.

The What It Takes Foundation, which Kuilan-Martin cofounded with her husband Anthony Martin, connects young black males with high profile black male mentors and role models. Harris says Kuilan-Martin asked him to participate in a speaking event at Carver High School, an engineering and science magnet school.

“I tried to tell my story, in simple terms, and the kids came up to me and said, ‘I want to do what you do,’” Harris said. “So I said, ‘Let me come back and talk to y’all and let me see what we can do.”

Harris stayed in touch with the Carver students through What It Takes and went back to the school to talk to the students and their teacher about what they’d like to learn from him. Harris says he was a little shy to get involved with all of the bureaucracy of trying to set up a class through the school, so Kuilan-Martin put him in touch with Dr. Jamie Bracey of Pennsylvania Math Engineering and Science Achievement (MESA), a Temple initiative that runs engineering programs for urban youth.

Bracey helped Harris set up his computer science class through MESA, which helped Harris find class space in Temple’s College of Engineering building.

Harris says building the curriculum wasn’t too hard because he thinks computer science really could be taught in ninth through twelfth grade.

“I’ve mentored a lot of students in computer science and one of of the problems is that a lot of stuff could be easily done in high school,” said Harris. ” The problem is that you are waiting too long and there are too many prerequisites. The fewer prerequisites, the more productive a person becomes early on.”

Harris, who says he bases his class off of the Stanford CS 101 curriculum, is teaching the students JavaScript and showing them how to program for Android mobile devices.

His students range in age from 7th grade to seniors in high school, as well as a couple adults who he says found out about the class and wanted to join. Many of the students come from Carver, but Harris says he has students from the Harambee Institute, Central High School and other local schools, as well.

Harris says one of his students is now simultaneously taking CS 101 at Penn and has already built his own app. Harris wants all of his students to take a college level computer science class next year, but first he is having the student reverse engineer his application for the rest of the class so “the children will know how to go from idea to phone.”

“To me, that’s how most urban children learn — they learn by doing,” said Harris. ” Everything that they do well is learned by doing, whether it’s basketball or watching a guy gut a house. I can throw in the theory later.”

Aside from pushing his students to further their computer science exposure, Harris says he and Bracey are hoping to scale his class up by training high school teachers to teach computer science basics by incorporating it into the topics they are already teaching. The goal is to support the National Science Foundation and National Science Digital Library initiative, CS 10K, a national STEM-oriented program to add 10,000 computer science high school teachers in U.S. schools by 2015.

“I could take any algebra teacher and make them a Java 101 teacher, with enough tools behind it. I have an ecosystem of people who are in the field who could help out,” said Harris. “The bottom line is that it wouldn’t take much in three years to train a couple hundred local CS 101 teachers.”

Harris and MESA are hoping to secure NSF funding to support the work, as well. Harris says that this effort will be his new project for the next three years.

Harris’s technological expertise and network has put him in a position to architect a project that could go from a Saturday morning computer science class for curious Philly teens to one with important implications for STEM education throughout Philadelphia, as well as on a national scale.

Harris, who’s 54 and lives between the Logan and Olney sections of the city, says there’s a pervasive idea that it’s an impossible task to bring minority children up to speed in education. Whether you call it serendipity or talent, he’s living proof that conception is a myth.

“I want to break the myth,” said Harris.

In its new $250 million initiative program called AT&T Aspire, the company aims to help young and driven students to graduate from high school with the technological tools and skills they need to advance into a successful career.

AT&T unveiled their newest goals for the program recently, promising a five-year financial commitment to the program which urges proactive and successful schools to apply.

Apply here.

The program has helped Philadelphia-based organizations over the last year to succeed. With almost $800,000 going to local drop-out initiatives, programs such as Philadelphia’s Children First Fund and Let’s Get Ready at Penn have been positively involved with Aspire.

“Equipping our students to graduate ready for the workforce is an important issue for students, our company and our country. Without key college and career readiness skills, students miss out on significant work and life opportunities,” AT&T Pennsylvania President J. Michael Schweder said in a press release.

[Full Disclosure: AT&T is the title sponsor of the 2012 Philly Tech Week, which is organized by Technically Philly.]

AT&T has also worked closely with Mayor Nutter’s office to support his drop-out prevention reforms, contributing $35,000 dollars last year for a graduation coaching program.

The AT&T’s King of Prussia store will host 32 Girl Scouts today from Nueva Esperanza Academy and Germantown High School in a job-shadowing event, where participants will nationally celebrate the program’s success in reaching 100,000 students in the United States.

The students will also explore how AT&T uses technology to connect Philadelphia and why learning about science and technology is important for future jobs.

This is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods program, the capstone class for the Temple’s Department of Journalism.

Digital On-Ramps (DOR), a city-wide collaboration to use technology to improve workforce development led by Lisa Nutter, was one of 30 winners in the Digital Media Learning (DML) Competition held last week.

The winning proposal outlines the creation of a badging system which would signify various levels, or “on ramps,” of digital literacy and technical proficiency.

In the final stage of the DML competition, DOR was partnered with Pragmatic Solutions, a software development company that will help DOR execute the badging concept, according to an email announcement from Lisa Nutter, the mayor’s wife, who discussed the program with Technically Philly last month. The group will receive $200,000 to get them started.

According to the proposal, a standardized system would provide numerous employment advantages:

DOR would have the capacity to capture and preserve the effort that people put forward toward reaching their goals. These permanent, independently maintained, portable badges could be easily shared among prospective schools, programs, or employers.  Most importantly, badges would create systemic efficiencies, ensuring that people do not lose valuable time and effort if life-disrupting events cause them to start, stop, and re-start efforts to improve their lives.

DOR also plans to test the badging system on 900 students from two area high schools participating in the Philadelphia Academies, Inc. (PAI) Post-Secondary and Career Readiness (PSCR) Course, which teaches high schools students post-secondary skills.

Organizations contributing to the initiative include the Philadelphia Academies, Inc., Urban Affairs Coalition, Drexel University, the Philadelphia Youth Network, Pragmatic Solutions, and the City of Philadelphia.

The DOR initiative was announced last month alongside an IBM report commissioned by the city of Philadelphia that analyzed the digital literacy in Philadelphia. The report found that by 2030, an estimated 600,000 Philadelphians will lack basic skills needed to work in a technology-inclusive economy, as Technically Philly reported.

Digital On-Ramps with the help of Pragmatic Solutions will get “right to work on this on Monday,” said Nutter in the email. That’s today.

Digital literacy, the whisper seldom heard beneath the yell of digital access issues in Philadelphia, might be getting a megaphone.

A report issued last month by a partnership between IBM and the City of Philadelphia says that by 2030, an estimated 600,000 Philadelphians will lack basic skills needed to work in a technology-inclusive, if not then exclusive, economy.

That is the battle cry for Lisa Nutter, who is leading the new Digital On-Ramps initiative, a city-wide collaboration to use technology to improve workforce development, which was announced alongside the report.

“We have history in the city through programs like Wireless Philadelphia, where we’ve worked hard to get people hooked up around an inclusion agenda,” says the mayor’s active and public wife.

“But, inclusion to do what? Education to do what? What we’re really trying to do is allow employment and increasing skills to help define a learning plan. That becomes the carrot. ”

Read the IBM Smarter Cities report here

With the backing of federal stimulus funding, Philadelphia has been aggressive in its fight against the digital divide: recently having rebranded its Freedom Rings Partnership — which has plans to open or improve 70 computer centers in Philadelphia — as KEYSPOTS.

Some city officials tell us that they suspect that since the launch of its access programming in 2010, Freedom Rings has seen improvements to a 2008 report that said that 40 percent of citizens lack Internet access in the home. Comprehensive updated data is not available.

Now, it seems, leaders like Lisa Nutter are beginning to look to next steps: using access as a tool to improve basic literacy — and thus digital literacy — achievement.

It’s a solution that’s been posed before: Can Philadelphia’s poverty problem be solved with technology?

Nutter has fought literacy issues as President of Philadelphia Academies, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to providing college readiness and career-based learning experiences for public high school students.

“We started thinking about our role in helping schools use digital technology as a better way to reach and support young people,” she says of the origins of On-Ramps.

The drive, though, of the On-Ramps initiative has been helped significantly by philanthropy.

Last March, IBM donated a half-million dollars in consulting services to explore workforce development issues in Philadelphia. In October, a half-dozen consultants spent three weeks in Philadelphia, working closely with Nutter and her husband Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration, exploring the issue.

The result is a 120-page report, the foundation and framework of On-Ramps, which envisions an online portal that can provide education and workforce training, as well as online community and collaboration tools, and extensive listings of education opportunities to citizens.

The report is exhaustive. Even OpenDataPhilly is recognized as a possible entry point, where workforce development stakeholders could submit and share data, like the locations of services.

For now, the report — which can be read in full by clicking its picture above — and its broad series of recommendations offer a testing ground of possibilities, but with funding now being sought, it will remain a waiting game.

“If we want to seriously scale up effective practices, digital technology had to be a part of that strategy. There was no way we could replicate ourselves across this large community without looking at digital to deliver,” Nutter says.

“It is another tool in the arsenal.”

Five months after Comcast was mandated by a federal agency to institute a sweeping program to substantially improve Internet adoption rates for low income families, only 463 Philadelphia families have activated the service in the cable giant’s hometown, where more than 150,000 families are eligible.

A screen capture of the Internet Essentials report showing activations in top regions.

An internal report on Comcast’s Internet Essentials program issued last week shows 41,000 total activations across the U.S. from Aug. 16 to Dec. 22. The program, which launched in September, resulted from a mandate by the Federal Communications Commission as part of the company’s deal to acquire NBC.

Yet in Philadelphia, where 41 percent of citizens do not have access to the Internet at home — according to a 2008 report from the Knight Foundation — advocates are concerned about the program’s progress, and some experts say that a lack of support by the School District of Philadelphia is slowing its potential.

Because Internet Essentials provides discounted Internet access to families of students who qualify for free lunch at schools, the program appears to be seeing more success in cities where there is more school district buy-in, says the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition‘s Arun Prabhakaran, who is Director of Government and Strategic Partnerships. [Prabhakaran wrote about poverty and the digital divide here in October.]

In the Chicago region, for instance, where the Mayor Rahm Emmanual controls the school system, the Internet Essentials program saw more than 5,000 activations during the same period [pictured above].

“The mayor does not control the school system in Philadelphia,” Prabhakaran says. “When the school district is run by the School Reform Commission, and the SRC doesn’t necessarily report to the Mayor, you’re not getting that kind of system push.”

The School District of Philadelphia did not return a request for comment.

The Urban Affairs Coalition is working with the City of Philadelphia under the $25 million Freedom Rings Partnership funded by broadband stimulus grants intended to improve digital adoption in the city. The coalition advertises Internet Essentials to its constituents, but it does not not receive funding from Comcast.

Words from a local advocacy group that fights for low-income families were more critical of Comcast. Action United, which was formed in the state by former members of PA ACORN, last week called the Comcast program a “gimmick without real substance.”

“The simple fact is that there are too many hoops and obstacles still for anyone to believe that this program will address in any serious way the digital divide as it exists in low income cities across America,” the group said in a statement.

“Especially because this is Comcast’s home town, it’s kind of embarrassing,” says an Action United organization program director Elly Porter-Webb.

Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas pointed to the program’s significant progress across the U.S.

“This is a new program, but the digital divide has been around for a decade. We’re still really facing the challenges of relevancy and digital literacy. A lot of Americans don’t know what the Internet can do for them and why they should have it in their homes,” he said in a telephone interview last week.

Action United presented a nine-point proposal to Comcast in an early January meeting, before staging a protest in front of the Comcast Center later in the month, after Porter-Webb says the company failed to address those points.

The group proposed that Comcast institute specific goals and metrics for the program, a more active outreach strategy and a look at long-term viability for the program.

Comcast has so far committed to run the program for a total of three years, but Porter-Webb is worried that at its current rate, Philadelphia’s results will not add up to substantial change. “It’s only a three-year program and after first five months, we are a sixth of the way there,” she says.

Along with the report, Comcast announced several changes to the program last week, including expanding eligibility to students who receive reduced-price school lunch, which the company says makes 300,000 more households eligible across the country. It is also implementing a streamlined, instant approval process for students who attend schools with a high percentage of free school lunch provisions, which could help more easily connect Philadelphia citizens, Prabhakaran says.

The company also plans to increase bandwidth speeds for Internet Essentials customers, provide bulk purchasing for community partners, and expand its training efforts. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski praised the changes in a statement issued last week.

“We’ve met with nonprofit partners and listened to all kinds of feedback from them, our customers and elected officials, and more. We’ve made a number of changes to the program from the initial launch,” Douglas says.

“We can’t solve the digital divide all by ourselves. We need as many other providers and community partners to get involved to help connect more Americans,” he says.

Porter-Webb hopes to see that the metrics match the message.

“Their take is that ‘we’re the biggest, most comprehensive program that’s ever happened,’” Porter-Webb says.

“We acknowledge that, and that’s great, but let’s make it real. Let’s really do this.”

As you might guess, most teenagers in Philadelphia are, quite simply, not violent, flash mobbing ne’er-do-wells.

Like their counterparts elsewhere, they’re students, who like clothes and sports and friends. And they care a lot about how others see them.

So it might make sense that when organizers of the University Community Collaborative of Philadelphia, a youth leadership nonprofit housed at Temple University, were looking for a new outlet for the nearly 15-year-old group that its students wanted to create a news program to fight negative perceptions of themselves.

Not enough positive youth voices are being heard above the din of violent exceptions, the group argues.

Meet What’s POPPYN, a quarterly, half-hour online news show about teenage issues in Philadelphia: produced, starring and featuring the group’s participants. This month, the show’s sixth episode launched, focusing on global issues and how local kids are getting involved, and shorter segments are being produced every couple weeks.

“We highlight how young people are positively contributing to their schools, communities and organizations and their voices on local and national issues,” said Natalia Smirnov, the initiative’s media productions and communications manager. “Ultimately, we hope that POPPYN helps to change the perception of young people in the city as criminals, drop-outs, violent flash mobbers, poorly educated.”

Founded in 1997 by Temple political science professor Barbara Ferman, UCCP began as a community-based research project, adding youth programming in 2001 and beginning to focus on leadership development in 2006 and has done a lot of work to connect young leaders.

This year, with a small grant from the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development, Poppyn started with four college-aged young people who had been involved in past UCCP programming, said Smirnov.

“The original team had been frustrated with representations of youth in the media and wanted to create their own positive alternative,” Smirnov said. Each episode is created, produced and starring six to 10 young people, including students from public and charter schools and a smattering of college volunteers, many of whom have been involved with UCCP programming for years. The group, which finds its members through its own programming, is often seeking other interested young people.

No one involved in the project had TV production experience, but rather took an interested group of young people and found partnerships, including strong support from PhillyCAM, said Smirnov.

Smirnov offered a few ideas to help support their cause:

• Submit comments on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter: “It means a lot to our youth producers to to know that the show is being watched and liked and would be great to get some more public feedback.”
• Pitch ideas: Organizations that are supporting youth-led projects and activities can pitch their stories to us on whatspoppyn AT gmail.com.
• Host a screening: “We’re looking for teachers to host screenings in their classrooms,” said Smirnov. “We’ll come and do a workshop for free with them. We also had a lot of fun covering a Philly public school graduation last year — we did South Philly High School — and are looking for schools that want to have their school’s graduation featured on POPPYN.”
• Offer expertise: If you have background in video production or in dissemination, get involved by emailing whatspoppyn AT gmail.com.