ABOUT ME
I am a former school teacher with eighteen years experience as a successful English, Theatre, and Film Studies teacher. In 1997, I led the charge for technology integration with a 1:1 roll out program for middle and high school students at the Australian International School in Jakarta, Indonesia. This was the age of floppy disks and before Google Apps for Education. Mostly, students lugged the laptops around as fancy notebooks and typewriters. Since then, I and technology have come a long way.
What began as simple substitution where technology merely replaced what is done with paper and pen, soon evolved into "What else can I do with the technology we have?" "How can I further student learning leveraging this technology?" "What can students do with technology that they couldn't do before?"
Thus began my journey down the rabbit hole: MA Master's courses in film studies to help develop students' skills in visual narrative and multimedia production; fostering these skills in English formative and summative assessments; combining media and sound in drama classes and productions; and eventually returning to Grad School for a MS in Education Media Design and Technology from Full Sail University in order to completely transform my students' learning experience.
That wasn't enough. I needed to help other teachers transform their classrooms, so I left the classroom in order to take up the position of Digital Learning Coach at the Dhahran British Grammar School in Saudi Arabia, where I collaborated on the Secondary BYOD Policy, spearheaded bringing in Code Avengers to lead epic Coding Camps for the ISG District, lead inservice training for a variety of apps / platforms / pedagogy and worked with individual teachers to integrate technology into their classrooms. And now I am an independent instructional technology consultant and pursuing my PhD in Education: Instructional Design and Technology. Whew, it's been a wild ride.
But WHY? Why is instructional technology important to me? I believe that leveraging technology effectively provides great returns on empowering learners of all ages. When consuming content turns into creating content for an active audience, learners evaluate information, synthesize the most relevant and important, and publish original perspectives on this information on a creative platform.
To that end, I am the cheerleader of every parent, student, teacher, and administrator who is trying to navigate this fast paced world of technology life skills and technology integration in the classroom.
I look forward to working with you and your team.
Sandra Paetkau