This week we talked with Ari Flewelling, a tech coach in Southern California. We discuss the highs and lows of being a tech coach and who and what inspires her!

Ari has had a long love affair with technology, often teaching herself how to use it along the way. When she became a teacher there was no question that technology would be there for her once again. That dedication and passion for technology in the classroom eventually led her to a position in edtech. Now as a Staff Development Specialist for her district, she helps inspire other educators to use technology. She’s also a Google Education Certified Trainer and Innovator and is the former President of the Inland Area CUE affiliate.

Find out more about Ari on her blog, EdtechAri and follow her on Twitter.

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What kind of training did you go through to become an edtech coach?

Ari:

I went to Boise State University and earned a Masters in Educational Technology but in regards to being a coach, a lot of that was learned on the job working with other coaches and seeing what worked well for them and seeing what fit my style best.

I think coaching is separating yourself from the situation and focusing entirely on the teacher. When I work with the teachers it’s me not speaking, but listening to what they want and what they need. Then at the end of the session coming out and saying ‘ok based on what I heard you say here’s option A, B, C which one do you think will be the most useful for your classroom’. Then they’ll say ‘option A’ and I’ll say ‘great here’s what we can do to move forward with that’. It’s always based on their content, their context, and their personal style because I may get the same request from two teachers that have classrooms next to each other but ultimately those results might be different because of those 3 things.

I feel like you’re a tech therapist, you listen to their problems and come up with a solution for them to move forward.

Ari:

Yeah, very much so! There are things I can pull out of the hat because I know they work but then it’s also about giving the teacher the room to explore and experiment. If I magically fix their problem they’re not going to be able to duplicate that same thing. However, if we look at it, problem-solve together and look at data to see if this actually did what we wanted it to do, that’s going to be a much more valuable experience that they can hopefully pass on to others on their campus.

What for you is the hardest part about being a tech coach?

Ari:

I think sometimes it’s difficult being based out of a district office because you aren’t as connected to a school site as you’d like to be. That distance can be difficult to deal with because you don’t know the day to day happenings of what is going on at a school site. That can influence my ability to help because I don’t know the details of that particular school’s schedule if it’s block or hour by hour. Smaller things like that can be a bit of a challenge sometimes.

I think also if teachers don’t have access to one-to-one technology or access to technology exactly when they want it, that can be a bit of a barrier but that’s ok. It then becomes a matter of me doing a model lesson and showing how it would work. Or having a conversation with a principal about seeing if we can reschedule how Chromebooks are distributed on a monthly basis, things like that. It can be difficult but it’s always a good challenge and it’s a good conversation to have with teachers. Sometimes we get so focused on what we think it should look like that we don’t realize there’s a number of different ways we can get to the same goal with what we have.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Ari:

Helping teachers find solutions to their problems. For example, I’m so stoked this special education teacher wanted to make this form to collect data for IEP’s but every time she downloaded the data it went into a spreadsheet. But the spreadsheet is difficult to read and hard to print. She wanted it to go into a Google doc and she had this laundry list of things she wished she could do. I was like, give me 24 hours so I took her list of things and I tested some different things out. Some of the things I tried didn’t work so then I reached out to this great group on Twitter and Voxer called TOSA (Teacher on Special Assignment) chat. It’s coaches of all subject areas, grade levels using the same hashtag or chat group to talk through things and I put this teacher’s question out there. Someone suggested trying Docappender and I looked it up and it did exactly what this teacher wanted. We were able to get 95% of her wish list accomplished and then the other 5% we were able to figure out. I was like, YES! It’s moments like that, those are the best things. Then seeing the look on the special education teacher’s face when I showed it to her and watching her share this product with other teachers on her staff; that was great.

Those two things- helping teachers solve problems and seeing teachers teach each other about it. It’s a stupid phrase but that idea ‘I want to teach myself out of a job’. Having all of these teachers have the confidence and the skills to be able to experiment and try and do this stuff on their own, that’s awesome!

Who do you look up to as a role model or inspiration in your role as tech coach?

Ari:

I don’t have any one person because there are so many people out there doing great things. I’ll look and I’ll see the Educolor movement that’s amazing I want to do more of that. Or I’ll see the #Ditchbook movement and what it’s doing to redefine student work and what students are doing at home and I want to do that too! Seeing all these amazing people on Twitter that are sharing what they are doing, I’m like yes I want to do that! There’s not one person that is a lone shining light of inspiration but it’s the edtech community that you find out there on the internet. I always say the way I do my job wouldn’t be the same without Twitter, Twitter helps me be my best self when it comes to this profession because of the people I meet and the people who push me to be better.

Does what inspires you as an edtech coach differ from what inspires you as an educator? 

Ari:

I don’t know I’ve never thought of them as different but I can see different sources of inspiration from when I was in the classroom versus now. One of the big ones is the community of people that are working in edtech and trying to drive the conversation of what our students can do and what they can create. I think edtech is helping make our students more competitive. With that in mind, I think something that is important in education is enhancing critical thinking, collaboration and creativity and moving away from memorization. This type of work is a great platform for social justice in our country and I think technology can help fuel that as well.

I think you’re right about that but how do you make sure that everyone has access to technology, I know that’s a huge question to ask, but I feel like that’s a large part of the social justice piece the fact that there’s huge inequality among who has devices and who doesn’t?

Ari:

That’s true. Definitely, in our district, we are doing what we can to combat that, we have a program where students that are on the free and reduced lunch program are also eligible to get hot spots to take home. We actually provide one-to-one devices for our students at the middle school level and we do encourage that device to become a family device, that way parents can use it to pay bills, look for jobs and things like that. We want technology to empower the whole family.

Also, when we want to do something with technology it has to be usable on any device. I’m not going to recommend something to a teacher that only works on IPad; it has to work on a phone, laptop, desktop, Chromebook. One of the big reasons we’re focused on phones is because not all our students have laptops at home. Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide laptops for all our students yet but most students either have a cell phone or have access to one. If we can communicate with them through that mode of technology, it’s a start. It’s something that we’re continuously looking at and hoping to make better for our community.

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Recommendations from an edtech coach

Any recommendations for a book?

Yes! I’ve got a long list for you:

• Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact by John Hattie
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck
• Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
• Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching (7th Edition) by M. D. Roblyer
• The Art of Coaching: Effective Strategies for School Transformation by Elena Aguilar

Good podcasts to listen to?
When it comes to podcasts I don’t necessarily listen to a lot of education-centric podcasts. I feel like we’re asking our students to be global citizens so I want to make sure I have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on globally. I like to be well informed so I can bring that into the classroom when I work with teachers, which is why I’m a huge fan of NPR. I’ve been liking the It’s Been a Minute Podcast. It’s a good for an overview of what is going on in the world, they dive deep while also making sure to keep it entertaining.

Then Invisibilia and Code Switch are also great podcasts. I think we live in such a diverse country that it’s important for educators to listen to diverse stories. When students come into the classroom, teachers are never going to fully understand where that student is coming from if that student is a different race, class, ethnicity but it’s important for teachers to at least expose themselves to different types of stories. I think that’s crucial, and everybody should do that but especially educators.

What’s a blog you recommend?

I read the Google blog because there are so many darn updates to Google that it can be hard to keep up. Then, I love TeachingChannel.org that is by far one of my favorite go-to websites if I’m looking for information about pedagogy, up and coming trends in education or good instructional videos.

Another, that I think is super important right now is the Teaching Tolerance website. Their big thing is that they want to provide resources for teachers for addressing diversity in the classroom and they’ve come up with some good information based on current events.

What’s your favorite piece of technology in school or for schools or classrooms?

My favorite piece of tech in and out of schools is the smartphone. Laptops and Chromebooks are great but I feel these little computers we have in our hands can open us up to so much. Our students can use it to record, take pictures, draw. There are so many different mobile apps we can harness in and out of the classroom. I think it’s important for us to look into ways we can take advantage of the technology our students come with in their pockets.

I know it’s complicated because when you start dealing with cell phones it’s like are they texting or not. But if the lesson and content is engaging they’re not going to have time to text. We want to make sure we teach our students how to be engaged in rigorous work because they don’t ban cell phones at your job, it’s up to the students to learn to self-regulate. There’s a lot we can do with them for education but it’s also an authentic opportunity to teach digital citizenship and behavior management. It seems like it can be a powerful device if we open ourselves to it.

Interviews