Meet @LZulli: He Grooms High School Students To Be SharePoint Experts #spc14

If I can go back to high school and pick my own teacher, it would be Mr. Louis Zulli Jr. – a teacher from  Centre of Advanced Technologies in  Tampa, Florida. He  spearheaded a fantastic magnet program that lets high school students develop SharePoint solutions for the school. Examples of these impressive solutions:

  • IOS, Android and Windows Phone  apps that leveraged SharePoint to display teacher’s assignments, school events and class times;
  • Silverlight-based application providing a virtual tour of the campus;
  • Integration of SharePoint with Moodle;
  • An Academic Planner web application allowing students to plan their classes, submit a schedule, have them reviewed, track of the credits of the classes selected and whether a student’s selections meet graduation requirements;
  • An innovative campus Hall Pass system that leveraged jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, XML, JSON, REST, List Data Web Services and features integration with IOS, Windows 8 and swipe card hardware.

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These 16-18 year old kids graduates high school with hands on experience not only in SharePoint, but have already build their foundation in project management, business analysis, requirements development, quality assurance, user testing and agile software development. Here’s a great video about Mr. Zulli’s work.

Lou’s story was showcased today at the SharePoint conference keynote, here’s a behind the scenes video for the production of the keynote segment:

I had the opportunity to catch up with him after the keynote:

Also, checkout his presentation from SHARE conference where he explains how the program started and he shows the solutions his students developed:

Kudos Mr. Zulli! Hats off to your great work and paving a promising future for these next generation leaders!

 

 

2 Comments

    Excellent real-life example of the importance of understanding software platforms. Most schools, colleges, and universities have an intranet of some kind, and yet few people know how best to use them. Like many websites, intranets often get launched without thought for their maintenance and development. Getting students involved is a stroke of brilliance.

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