New Digital Multi Media Program Coming to Brighton High School

is getting a new career technical education program, thanks to Michelle Costa, an 8-year veteran teacher who is busy designing a new social media course to create a Digital Multimedia Program for students.

The Brighton Area Schools Board of Education approved adding advanced web social media to the many courses students can choose from during its Jan. 23 meeting. The new course will join two existing classes - game development programming and web design - to round out the Digital Multimedia Program at the high school.

Costa created the web design class three years ago.

Web design will become the prerequisite students are required to take before taking advanced web social media. The web design course covers four different parts: creating graphics, manipulating photos, publishing webpages and learning flash animation.

The new course will take students to the next level - social media.

"It's always nice to have a next level for students," Costa said. "Social media is huge right now. It's one of the big things that are happening in technology that they should know about it. And not just for personal use to search around on YouTube, but to use for promotion of a business and understand how to publish a website online that has a connection to Linked In, a business Facebook page, a blog and all those different social media tools. That's the goal, the end result."

This year, Costa said she has had about 200 web design students and about 100 game development programming students.

Brighton High School Freshman Emma Roberts is one of Costa's web design students.

"I think it's going to be fun," Roberts said of the class. "I want to learn more about how to do stuff on a computer because I'm not very tech savvy.

In the same class as Roberts is Senior McKenna Moulton.

"I took the class because I figured it would be useful for the future," she said. "All the jobs out there have to do with computers these days. I want to learn more about Adobe and websites. I already know a lot, but there's more to learn."

The Digital Multimedia Program will follow all Livingston Education Service Agency (LESA) standards. Different parts of the standards will be covered in all three classes, according to Costa.

Costa said one key challenge in teaching these courses is keeping up-to-date on the ever-changing technology.

"The class I taught last semester is different this semester," she said. "For example, I joined Pinterest and that took me someplace else that took me someplace else again. Just keeping myself informed using all of this technology is important. I creating my own blog and then linked it to Facebook, then created a Linked-In profile and linked to that. It's about using all of the sources out there."

"I really enjoy what I do and I love teaching them (students) all these different things," she said.

Costa said she hopes to start the new course during the spring semester of the 2012-2013 school year.