In this episode, we explore the thoughtful integration of technology in education, with a focus on supporting students with learning differences. We discuss strategies for evaluating and implementing ed tech tools to create accessible and effective learning environments. Dr. Joan McGettigan shares insights on balancing innovation with proven pedagogical practices, and the importance of collaboration between IT and Ed Tech departments.

Resources

• World Economic Forum job outlook
• Lower Student AI Literacy Predicts Higher Propensity to Use AI on Assignments (AIforEducation. IO)
• “How AI Vaporizes Long Term Learning” - Edutopia
• “AI Tutors: Hope or Hype for Education? Education Next
• THE 2025 Predictions: AI’s Impact on Education - The Journal

Phil, welcome to Talking Technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Kristina Lewellen,

Hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with Atlas. I am Kristina Lewellen, the

President and CEO of the Association of Technology

Leaders in Independent

Schools. And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey, and

I'm Hiram Cuevas, Director of Information Systems

and Academic Technology at St Christopher school in Richmond,

Virginia.

Hello, gentlemen. How are you today?

I'm in pretty good so, Hiram, you were on the road, right? So

yesterday you were in warm temperatures. Today, you're in a

snowstorm, and already, as we got on the pod to begin

recording, you had an electricity flicker. How cold is

it there? It's

19 degrees, according to my phone. But I do

want to wish a belated Happy birthday to my mom. We

celebrated her 79th birthday over the weekend. Awesome. Nice.

So it was all exciting town in Florida.

Happy birthday, Mama Cuevas, that's really

exciting. Happy birthday to her. And you

know, you got to love a long happy life with lots of family

coming down to Florida to celebrate with you. There's

nothing wrong with

any of that. Nothing wrong at all palm trees

and little bit of libation. Yeah. Which

never hurts. She deserves

it. Well, gentlemen, we have an exciting

podcast today. I'm really excited we're gonna dive into ed

tech a little bit more. You know that we go back and forth on

this pod. We talk about it and technical things. We talk about

ed tech things. Sometimes we profile individuals who have

done incredible work in our space. And I think today we're

going to do a bit of all of that. Today we welcome to the

podcast. Dr Joan McGettigan, she is the Director of Educational

Technology at the Windward school in New York, and so

joining us from probably pretty chilly temperatures, is Joan.

Hello, Joan, welcome to the podcast.

Hello all. I'm honored to be here. Love the

Atlas podcast. You all have the best people and have the best

conversations. So excited to join in today. Thank you guys.

We have a fan. You might be our first I

love this. As I mentioned, you are up in the colder part of our

country right now. How cool is it? Where you are? Well,

yesterday,

the wind chill was seven degrees.

That's single digit. That's pretty

rough. Yeah,

so I'm looking out on fields that are filled

with snow. We have campuses in Westchester, White Plains, New

York, but we also have a campus in Manhattan, so no snow there,

but White Plains is overflowing with snow and ice. Can

you tell us a little bit more about the

school? Are you a K, 12?

No, we are actually one through nine. So we

have three campuses. We serve a special population, students

with dyslexia and other language based disabilities. It's not

similar to other independent schools where a lot of students

could be lifers. You know, I'd say Christophers, they come in

and they stay at that school in Richmond for life, right? It's a

big deal to graduate, and you have this incredible community

here at Windward. Our intent is actually to get them out the

door. We want to be able to bring them in and help them

read, help them write, help with executive functioning skills,

and then successfully out place to the school of their choice in

usually, an average of three to four years.

That's really incredible. I can't wait

to dive into all the ways that technology supports that

mission, but first, let's pause and get a little bit of

information about you. Tell us about your background. You have

had a lot of different roles. You've approached this work

through different lenses. So can you tell everybody a little bit

about your journey?

I actually started off on Wall Street. I

was a research associate on tobacco and food companies of

all things, and through volunteer work at a school in

Harlem, fell in love with teaching so much my parents

dismay, I announced that I was going back to school because I

had never taken any education classes. So I got my master's in

elementary and masters in educational technology, and then

became this kind of role at Trinity Episcopal in New

Orleans, after three years, moved back to Connecticut and

became a classroom teacher at a public school in New Canaan,

Connecticut for about 10 years. And then ventured back into

technology, moved down to Florida so Hiram, love the palm

trees, miss the sunshine. And I was at a school, North bar

Preparatory School, which had no technology when I joined them.

And over time, we became one to one iPad program, pre K through

12 became an Apple Distinguished School, added a boarding

population of almost 500 it was really great community, and in

time, moved back to Connecticut, back into public school world.

This kind of role in Darien, Connecticut, for entire school

district, and then was looking for a place that was really

mission driven, and was fortunate enough to join

windward and helping students again with dyslexia and other

language based disabilities. So that's kind of my fast journey

over the past few years. That's

awesome. I can definitely recognize and

identify with the desire to be connected to the mission. Like

doing work in pursuit of a shared goal is really cool, and

we've definitely talked about that a lot, both within Atlas,

but also on this pod. Can you tell me what Director of

Educational Technology means for your school, what does your job

description sort of look like, or what does your day to day

look like?

Christina, it's a really interesting question.

Windward is a school that historically has never used that

much technology, if you look at all the research about the

connection between handwriting and comprehension. So for

windward to hire me in this position really was the sort of

leap of faith in eventually we're going to bridge the

curriculum and technology and see where we can use technology

thoughtfully, purposefully to really help students in this

world that is becoming more and more AI focused. You know, how

can we help our students to take advantage of that? How can we

use technology to help support their development of executive

functioning skills? So there's a variety of areas that I'm making

progress in working with the faculty, but I probably spend a

good bit of my time also doing things like curriculum mapping.

So we are using Understanding by Design as our framework, and

using a tool that I think you all agree is become increasingly

popular in independent school world Toddle so our faculty like

how easy it is to get the curriculum in there. Then once

we have that in, you know the ability to make those

connections for where technology can integrate in a really

thoughtful process to help serve this population is going to be

really powerful. So I know it might seem unusual that I'm

spending so much time in curriculum, but I think

historically, anyone in educational technology needs to

develop a pretty good comprehensive understanding of

what curriculum is across all subject areas and all grade

level areas, because how else can we serve those populations

if we don't understand how everything fits together, all

those puzzle pieces? Since you

took us to the big picture, let's stay

there for a minute before we sort of drill down into the

specifics of how your school uses technology to help those

students with that successful transition that you noted. But

let's stay higher than that and look at the World Economic Forum

recently issued a job outlook, looking at the types of

technology skills that we need to focus on looking at the

future of jobs. So this report, released in January 2025 gives

us some insight into what is happening and where things are

going. How does that influence this work that you're doing

around curriculum mapping? You

know, it's so interesting. Kristina, and if I

can take a leap back to the past, this particular report, I

look forward every year to it, because I think it's fascinating

to see how it has changed over time. I think analytical

thinking has pretty much stayed as one of the top core skills

over the past 1516, years. But I remember when I joined North Bar

Prep in Florida, we had a course required for graduation that was

mastery of Word, PowerPoint and Excel, and it was like this

standalone class, and it did not serve its purpose anymore, so we

moved that down to sixth grade. Designed a new class for.

Branding and digital communication so that students

would be better prepared. And that was really based on looking

at that World Economic Forum report on jobs and outlook and

thinking about our students really need to be trans,

literate. They need to be able to navigate, interpret, create

content, assess content in a variety of formats. And so I

think that was a shift that we all felt in technology was

helping our students gain these new skills and knowledge and

apply it in a variety of ways, versus this kind of stand alone

class. So when I look at curriculum mapping, I'm always

looking to see where can we fit those transliterate skills. UbD

approach always will ask us, what do we want students to

know? What do we want students to be able to do? And why does

that matter in understanding your why, as Simon Sinek always

pushes right, underscores everything. And so if we are

preparing students to successfully, in our case,

successfully out place to environments that are heavily

digital, we really need to look to this report and see where

does it fit in our curriculum, in a way that makes sense, and

in a way, and sorry to go on a bandwagon here, but I'm very

much in this kind of subtraction mode right now. I feel like

every year, schools add and add and add, and it's simply not

possible. And I think this is one of the reasons students and

certainly teachers, feel overwhelmed so much to do and

that simply is impossible. So if you know your why and your

mission, and you've drilled out and what is the essential things

that you want students to know and be able to do, then I think

it clarifies everything. So when I look at those top skills from

the World Economic Forum, analytical thinking, Okay, I'm

hip with that, resilience, leadership, creative thinking.

You know, it goes all the way down to empathy, curiosity. But

what fascinated me this year is, you know, the they do that 10

fastest growing skills by 2030 I think, was the cut off point,

and suddenly, this is the first year I saw a shift. And what was

number one was AI and big data. And I was kind of shocked, and I

was like, Where the heck did analytical thinking go? And I'm

looking at it, and I think it moved down to number nine. So

this influence of AI has this shift not just here, but around

the world. And as you all have experienced, and as ATLIS has

talked about quite a bit in the past year, is cybersecurity. So

you have these two things that have popped up to the top of the

charts, if you will, this really interesting change.

So John, you touched on so much. And one of

the things that really resonated, at least with both

Hiram and I, had to do with the paring back and looking at what

you're using and those different tools, and really coming back to

that, and it's a topic that we've discussed both on the

podcast and in general, and I have a question that relates to

that you mentioned the type of school that you are and the

student population that you serve, and again, the specific

issues that you are working to address within that population,

when It comes to those tools and when it comes to the choice of

those tools. Recently, ATLIS hosted a webinar that Chand or

Simon ran, and he was talking about using this dei lens for

evaluating the tools, looking at the from a very broad spectrum

in terms of looking at it with students that may be neuro

divergent, students that have different types of learning

issues, as well as a number of other different topics. When you

start looking at those tools, when you start trying to think

about the ways in which you're going to pick and choose those

things, how do you take the uniqueness of windward and apply

that to that vetting and evaluation process that you have

to go through, and what are you specifically looking at that

might be different than what a boarding or a K 12 college prep

standard curricular type school be looking at?

Well, it's interesting. So let me begin and

AI world, we have a few different tools that we're

piloting this year, before we think about what are things that

we want to put in play to actively support students, one

of those tools is school AI, the ability of our teachers to build

a custom chat bot to support our students is everything. Because,

as you may imagine, I. We rely heavily on direct instruction

and scaffolding, and so if we can build something within using

that tool in particular, it's really helpful for students to

kind of get just the support that they need and be able to

make those connections that help deep in their learning without

some of the other AI tools that are out there that are maybe too

helpful or misdirect students. You know, we set the agenda.

When you're building that custom chat bot as a teacher, you're

setting the parameters of exactly what guidance you want.

So we're looking at, how can this really help our students?

And we've done a little bit experimentation just to see how

that fits. For example, we did this with students writing

poetry which is not something that they would normally do in

our program, so additional scaffolding was helpful, and

then they were able to take that poetry, which is really song

lyrics, and then pop that into suno and have a song. And it was

a really engaging couple of lessons. And students were using

their analytical thinking, but they were also using a lot of

creative thinking, and it was kind of a powerful experience

that and then another tool that we were looking at, because

we're interested in, how can this be helpful? For example, in

math, and I don't know if you all are familiar with snorkel,

snorkel also allows you to provide those parameters. So

it's an AI tool that was originally built by former math

teachers, but you can apply it in other curricular areas as

well. So as the students are writing their work, you know,

and solving these mathematical problems, snorkel is looking at

it, and you the teacher, have set the parameters of where it

can step in and provide guidance. So you just finished

your problem, Hiram, and you submitted it, and stork Cole

came back and said, Hey, Hiram, great job. You got a lot of that

algorithm correct. But could you take a look at step three for

me? Remember, you want to blah, blah, blah. And so you would go

back in and you would take a look at it. And maybe you're

saying, Yes, I got that wrong and I'll fix that. Or you might

say, I don't understand. Can you help me? And snorkel comes back

and says, Oh, for example, you can do this, this and this. So

it's not giving you the answer, but it's giving you that

necessary scaffold to help you make the connection and fix any

errors you might have in either your understanding or in your

calculation. That's just an AI experience. Additionally, I

think the Microsoft Learning accelerators have been another

interesting piece that we've looked at. So reading progress,

we haven't tried the math progress yet, but reading

progress, if listeners are not familiar with it, and it's free,

available to everyone, you don't have to be a Microsoft school,

is that students have, in our case, it could be a word list,

but it could also be a reading passage. And students are

recording their reading. They can do it with video, but it can

just be audio as well. You the teacher, again, are setting the

parameters for all the things that you would like to know. So

just like in running reports, right, you are looking for

omissions, mis pronunciations, repetitions, where students

might stumble over a multi syllable word. So you're looking

at all of those different pieces, and it provides feedback

to the student that's positive, that's encouraging. And you all

know how difficult it is to get students to go back and do

anything a second or third time. No one likes how they sound,

right? And so students will play the recording. They're like, Oh

no, no, I I can do better than that, and I'll go back again and

again. And what's happening is it's helping in their reading

comprehension and also in how they're speaking and how they're

presenting. They have another learning accelerator that works

on just presenting that gives them live feedback as they're

going through their PowerPoint slide deck. It will say, for

example, would say to me, I gesture too much. It talks about

eye contact and pace of speech. So it's giving really rich,

robust feedback in a way that's helpful to kids. Search coach,

reading progress, presenter coach, you know, all of these

different learning accelerators, I think can be game changers and

in real time and in real time. Yeah, it's impressive. Joan, I

love everything you're doing. I. Say

this is an interesting time, because

windward is, to an extent, redefining assistive technology.

Bill and I, a few years ago, did an audit for the landmark School

up in Massachusetts, which is a very similar school to windward,

and we learned a great deal about the needs of their

technology program, just by the very nature of their mission,

and how proud they were when actually students left because

they were successful right in their program, to actually

become mainstreamed into their local schools, whether it was

local to Massachusetts or because they were a boarding

school to be able to go back home. And so I really have

enjoyed hearing you discuss the use of these tools, but in a way

that's not even labeling it as assistive but as a way to

accelerate learning in general.

Thank you. Hiram, I think these tools can

be a great choice for any school, and look at how much we

try and help students discern what is good and verifiable

information against what is not. And if you're not using

databases and you're just using search tools. What is the best

way to search? How can I use different limiters to help me

find the best information? And so I look at that search coach

tool, and it's great. It talks about things that maybe not

every classroom teacher does. You know? What does it mean if a

website ends in.gov where can I find good statistics? What are

ways that I can set terms that really help me? And because it's

adaptable to each student, you know, if you're having a

particular struggle, it works with you. It's not just spitting

out stuff in general, same for any of these things. So we, I

think I'd look to those kinds of tools. To your point that it's

kind of assistive technology, but it's something that can

elevate the learning for all students.

So Joan, staying in that realm of

assistive technology, and I think you're right. I do think

that it helps all students. I love some of the examples that

you've given, but specifically for a school like yours, does

win word have kind of like a big picture philosophy with some of

these assistive technology tools. And I'm just curious how

schools who maybe don't have learning differences as a

primary population. Can take advice from you in terms of how

to evaluate these tools, because, again, like Bill said,

I think that plenty of our schools are looking at AI tools

to be that resource and provide that immediate feedback for

their students in various capacities. But do you have kind

of a philosophy or policies or ways that you go about

evaluating these specifically to a student's strengths and

weaknesses. The

program here relies heavily on direct

instruction, so if you walked into different classrooms, you

would see students like really trying to make sense of text

that they're reading. They're using different kinds of symbols

to really reinforce that learning when they're doing

notes, this is very scaffolded learning. So it really starts

with writing by hand all of this information, and then being able

to transfer it into different kinds of frameworks. So if we

have an assistive technology philosophy, it's really looking

at what makes sense in integrating technology in a way

that is really purposeful, extremely focused, and is going

to support the program. So it's not going to give the answers,

but it's going to provide a scaffold, so that's really what

we look for. There's lots of AI tools out there, even Grammarly,

that will help correct a student's writing as they're

going along. But normally, by the time students are typing an

essay, for example, they already have kind of worked through all

of those things that you would depend on, Grammarly, etc, to

fix that's kind of the difference that you might see

between windward and sort of a more standard academic program

where students might be actually composing on a computer. We're

composing by hand

first. And I think that's really awesome,

that you delineate those steps. And I also think it makes a lot

of sense, because I've often said that while some of those

fundamental skills are necessary, and in your case, the

research shows right with the handwriting. We've even had a

neuro scientist on this podcast to talk about that kind of

thing. But what I. Often point out to heads and Business

Officers is that in the workplace, I don't care if the

team is using Grammarly, you know, I don't care if they're

using an AI tool to coach their public speaking skills. So if

that's the case, I ask provocatively, does it matter if

we teach grammar anymore, sort of like once the graphing

calculator came out. Was it important for us to know how to

do that by hand, or could we just turn to this tool that was

available to us? So I think that we're at one of those points of

capitulation in education, and you guys are approaching this

from necessity and in alignment with your mission for your

students, but I think it really brings some interesting food for

thought for schools who are in the general independent school

space and maybe don't have those special considerations to think

about, right? So Bill and Hiram, you guys aren't dealing with a

population of learning differences specifically, but

I'm sure that what she's saying makes a lot of sense to how you

guys are going about this too.

Yeah, one of the things that's come up a couple

times in this conversation, and it's something that we've been

thinking about and talking about and kind of trying to get more

information on Jen, is when you were talking about the amount of

handwriting that a student is doing and starting at that

point. And one of the things that we've been interested being

that we've been a one to one school for as long as we have,

being that the device that we've been providing this entire time

has been generally a MacBook Air or the some derivative thereof,

over the course of these years. And one of the things that we're

wondering is when it comes to writing, when it comes to note

taking, when it comes to people can't see, but everyone on the

call can. I'm holding up my Apple pencil. I have my iPad

here in terms of what it means to transition from pen and

paper, pencil and paper, into a digital note taking piece,

whether that is for actual note taking, whether that is for

annotation, what's that for? And that transition in terms of in

the connections that are made in the brain when you do that, and

what steps should we be taking as a school to think about that?

Because the device that we provide does not offer that type

of tactile interface, whether there is, and this is the

primary question that we're even trying to get to is, is there a

difference between pen and paper, or Apple Pencil and

digital tablet? Because again, the idea that you can get, like

that PDF from a teacher, those electronic pieces, and you can

annotate on top of those, you can note, take on top of those,

or you can write on top of those. And the way it's been

described to me is that if you're using a keyboard, you're

generally just processing really quick. You know, it's the idea

of note taking for speed, but once you put that stylus in your

hand, you're actually synthesizing all of that and

therefore making stronger connections between the learning

and actually what you're doing. But again, the difference

between pen and paper and this and that, what are you seeing in

those areas?

It's a really interesting point bill, because

I also have a big fan of iPads. I've got my Apple pencil and I

will just write away. And I never thought about it that much

before coming to windward, I would do sketch noting, and I'm

sure that if someone was looking at a scan in my brain, they

would see lots of different areas lit up. Because you're

right, you're synthesizing all that information. So it's

interesting, when you look at all the research, is something

to be said for the handwriting, but it's also having that

greater physical interaction. So we're, I think, changing devices

next year, and looking at writable Chromebooks. But in

that case for us, we're adding that film on top for iPads. It's

like paper like so there's a variety of them out there,

because it adds the necessary resistance for if you're doing

digital notes that you're better inscribing on your brain the

information coming in and those films range in cost anywhere

from 11 bucks up to really high quality ones. I think at 35 or

40 it's something about having that same resistance that you

would have on paper that helps better inscribe. This is why

people will even pay more money for those you know, those

tablets that are like the stone tablets that have even higher

quality paper, it just adds that necessary resistance where your

brain is actually taking in all of the information and

transcribing it in your brain. It's fascinating. We

have found with our students, they often go to

college, and they have, I would call a little bit more of a head

start, because we do a lot of handwriting in our English and

history classes, they are allowed to compose. Is an award

process or and we're convinced they're totally different

skills, yes. And in addition to that, what we have also found is

that the majority of students that our alums encounter at

higher ed don't have the endurance to handwrite anymore,

and as a result, they can't keep up if they're trying to do note

taking in the standard format. I love the fact that you're

actually creating multiple modalities of learning for your

students to equip them with a variety of information and

skills that they're going to need as they get older.

It's such a great point. And if I can relate

this back to something that we started at North borough prep.

We started off the one to one program in pre K. We started

like the reverse. You know, most people start like 12th grade and

work their way downward. We actually started with the

earliest learners moved up, so by the time it hit that six

through 12th grade mark to use your point, we started venturing

into digital note taking with things like good notes and

Notability. But what was a really interesting development

to me was looking at the research of Mary Ann Wolfe, who

has been at Windward, I think at Windward Institute, she's

presented two or three times on this idea of digital reading. So

note taking I'm with you, is handwriting and building up that

resistance. We have handwriting class. We have handwriting club

for those kids who join us later and maybe haven't had that

experience. So yeah, we work with them in getting that muscle

memory developed. But on the flip side, going from writing to

reading, you know, they're going to be placing into schools that

are heavily digital. And at North Broward, at that point, we

had become 93% digital textbooks, everything,

everything was digital. So at the high school level, they had

back airs and iPads. One was the work device, and one was kind of

like your backpack with all of your different books in it,

right? And it started off in the English department. They said,

Hey, every single app that we use, whether it's Kindle or

Apple iBooks, we also have IB curriculum there. These IB

textbooks, they all have at least five different colors that

you can use to annotate digitally. So we're going to

make that purposeful. Each color was assigned a particular thing

we did that consistently grades six through 12 in English,

right? So every year those kids were coming in and yellow means

this, green means this, blue means this. The other

departments were like, Hey, we can make that work. And I said,

you have to make it related. Though you can't make the yellow

like dramatically different, because the whole point of this

is to make that visual memory of what yellow means. So social

studies, science, they all started to align to what the

English department had done. And so when kids left us and went

into college, where so much of their stuff was digital reading,

they understood not only how to annotate and do the sticky notes

and really understand that process, but they understood the

reason why we were doing it is because Mary Ann Wolfe will tell

you, digital reading is different as adults, we scan, we

scan constantly. We're not taking in all the information.

We're not making those connections. It's like when you

start on driving on the Jersey turn bike, and suddenly two

hours go by and you're like, wow, I don't remember driving

down any of this, right? And so Mary and Walt is saying you have

to put obstacles in the way of students, and this idea of

digital annotation is one of them. So if you can slow them

down by using a purpose for all these different colors,

highlight colors, right? If you can say one of my requirements

is putting in these sticky notes for doing a summary. So, oh, on

each page, I want a two sentence sticky notes, summary of what

you just read, because I want to slow you down. I want you to

connect and really have a deeper understanding of what you're

reading. I'm not sure how any of that will apply to win word,

because obviously for us, reading is crucial, so going

through direct instruction and all of this, but I can see where

maybe in eighth grade before students naturally are out

placing to high school, that might be an area to explore.

Yeah, that's super interesting. And one of

the things that we talked about with Richard cullata of ISTE

recently. Be he was on the pod, and he talked to us about this

great analogy of when you're talking about younger kids and

technology, we sometimes are measuring the wrong things. So

he says, you know, parents will put a limit on screen time. And

say, well, they only get an hour of screen time a day. Aren't I

doing a great job, and yet, if that one hour a day is engaging

in really not healthy corners of the interweb, then that can be

problematic. Just like if you were to say that a child could

eat anything they wanted to eat for one hour per day, we're not

certain that they're getting their nutrients if time limit is

the only way that we're monitoring their engagement with

technology. This is something that I've noticed there are a

lot of questions around younger students and tech. So do you

have any thoughts or guidance? You know, I think a lot of

schools will at least kind of go down the path of scaffolding

toward their middle and upper schools, but when you're looking

at your lower school students, is there a way that you

personally think about technology and how we introduce

that in a healthy way to this generation of learners?

I'll go back again to North Bar Prep, where

we rolled out iPads with those pre K through grade five

students. First, it was incredibly interesting seeing

those teachers explore and figure out what makes sense

developmentally for this age group. So it really came back to

sort of that idea of trans literacy in being able to

capture learning a variety of ways. And so one of the things

that we did is we started on the road of digital portfolios, and

we actually gave ownership of that to students. The tool we

used was Book Creator, because it allowed them to bring

everything in the world. We were at Google App school so they

could embed things from Google Drive. They could record audio,

the video, photos. They started recording all of their different

learning. But one of the things that frustrated teachers, and

frustrated me as a former math teacher, is that trying to get

to what their mathematical thinking was in the moment. No

matter how quickly you turn an assessment back to a student, if

I say, Hey, Bill, I'm not quite understanding, like, why you

have this answer on number three, that quiz you took

yesterday, and Bill might say, I don't know that was yesterday. I

don't remember what I was thinking. So we started using an

app, which I know you guys know, explain everything. And so we

cave students like, Okay, you're in second grade. Here's your

math problem. You're going to draw a picture, and the whole

time that you're solving this, you're going to record and

articulate your thinking. And so again, I go back to how do you

get students to do anything more than once, students would listen

to the recording and hate it and do it again, we found like this,

really nice growth in their mathematical abilities, but also

something that is not normally mentioned or measured to Richard

coladas point is their articulation of their

mathematical thinking. It grew just from doing these monthly

assessments that would then go into their portfolio, so that

when it was shared with parents at the end of the year in

student led conference, parents could actually see the growth,

not just in their mathematical abilities, but in their child's

understanding and articulation of that mathematical knowledge.

And I think that's something incredibly interesting. So with

our younger learners, for example, I was just at a fifth

grade lesson talking about how they were going to present this

information, how they were going to make it their own. And it was

so interesting hearing those students, and I'm going to go

off on a little bit of a tangent here, but just to give you a win

word, kind of a win word adjacent like how a technology

lesson is a little bit different for us, these fifth graders had

just created an all about me poster in Word so that they

could understand how a document is formatted, how you bring

images in, how you format those images, all of that. So now

they're in a research project on the architect Maya Lin, the

teacher, took a screenshot of the word task bar and then a

screenshot of the PowerPoint task bar. And I don't know that

a lot of schools do this, but it was really interesting to me.

And she said, Okay, just like we do when we look at text, let's

break this down. How are these two similar? What does this do?

What does this do? And the kids were like, look, it's. The same,

you have this, and that's the same as this. And the purpose of

that is that. And they started making connections. And you

could see, like, the light bulbs going off all over the room,

because they were looking at, insert, oh, insert. Oh, that

means, like, you put something in. Oh, look, we did that and

worked with this. And, okay, here's PowerPoint, and we're

inserting and look, you can insert this and this and this,

like they started making all of those different connections. And

I just think that's an example of a more direct instruction

making that scuffle for them, but something that is incredibly

helpful. You know, those Microsoft Office pass bars can

be incredibly complicated for young learners. And so when I

think about those kinds of lessons and using technology

with them, I think, okay, how can we be helpful and

supportive? But going to your point, Kristina, about what does

it mean. Then, when they get home and screen time, you know,

every parent presentation I speak to that point, because,

again, it's not the quantity of screen time, it's the quality.

So if you have a child who's building a replica of

Williamsburg in Minecraft, you know, just because they just

learned about it, and they love Minecraft. That's an amazing use

of their time. And that might take three hours, but, gosh,

that's three hours of learning that's amazing, as opposed to

playing some kind of shoot 'em up game, which doesn't add any

depth of understanding or knowledge or skills. So

Joan, I was laughing when you said, explain

everything in terms of picking a tool. And the reason I was

laughing is because many, many moons ago, Reshan Richards, who

was the inventor, the founder of explain everything, is a friend

and a former colleague, and actually friend of the podcast

we've had him on. I want to kind of touch on that, because where

Sean and I worked together for a number of years, and we had a

very close working relationship. And again, it's kind of just

part and parcel of the program here at MKA. And you've

mentioned his name when we started out, kind of joking

around about our good friend Bernie McCormick, who is now

with you at Windward one of the things I'm very curious about is

if you could tell us about what your relationship with Bernie is

like, and how that relationship is really helping advance the

mission of what you're doing, given the nature of the school

that you have, but really at any school, that close working

relationship between the ed tech side of the house and the IT

side of the house is so important. Can you describe what

that's like for you there windward? Sure. Bernie

is our CTO and has a wealth of experience

before he came to windward, he was at a similar LD school in

Brooklyn, and just also personal experience with learning

disorders and dyslexia and how that relates to technology. So

he is a really deep understanding of the pedagogy

that's involved in that, and it's really interesting. I know

that you all have those really collaborative environments as

well, and sadly, a lot of schools do not. It's kind of

like a divorce, right between it and ET. And some schools don't

even have any kind of ET support. It's just it saying,

Well, this is what we can afford, so this is what we're

going to do, without having that kind of conversation of what is

the pedagogy? Why are we doing this? How is it going to serve

our students? How is it going to serve our teachers? Just to give

you an example of how Bernie and I work together, along with Lisa

Murray, who is our incredible Associate Head of School for

academics, we have these conversations about what is

going to best serve our students. How is the technology

going to work in a population of students who may struggle with

executive functioning. So what are ways that we can kind of

reduce some of like the multiple steps? So, for example, you have

using clever badges to log in when I first came to win word

students logged in and they had passwords that I think were like

27 characters. And I said, how can you use this with a

population of students who are dyslexic? That doesn't make any

sense, because at the time, there wasn't that kind of

conversation. This is before Bernie came. There wasn't a

conversation between the IT and et side, you know, it was

saying, No, we have to have that because of security and this and

that will know that does not serve the mission of the school,

does not serve our students. So Bernie changed that, and now

we're on board with clever and that's going to make that small

piece. Is so much easier for our students. What was anywhere from

a five to eight minute delay in getting any technology infused

lesson off the ground just because of the difficulty of

logging in. Suddenly, that barrier was removed, and that's

what the two sides should always be talking about. You know, I go

back to the Heath brothers, my favorite authors in the world.

And actually, Dan Heath is going to be at ISTE this summer. He

just came out with a new book called reset, which had just

started and is wonderful. But before that, they had a book

called Switch. And all of us deal with change. Change

management is something we talk about in technology all the

time. So in switch, they said there are three things, and

they're not the inventors of this. They just pulled the

information together in a way that makes it really relatable.

And they talk about, if you imagine bill sitting on top of

an elephant, Bill is the driver, so you have to direct the driver

or writer and give crystal clear actionable steps. And then the

elephant, you have to motivate. And the elephant is kind of like

our emotional side. You have to give the clear understanding.

You have to connect emotionally. And then, most importantly, you

have to shape the path, which means removing the barriers that

don't make any sense. So yes, we have to do all sorts of things

that drive people crazy, multi factor authentication, etc, that

serve the purpose of security at the school, but there's no

reason to have an extremely long password that makes it

impossible, especially for students who are dyslexic, to be

able to type that in and achieve success. So I think that's the

perfect marriage between the two sides. Looks at how can we

remove the barriers? What are the hardware and software that

best serves our community, and what are ways that we can

operationalize all of those things and make sound decisions

based on pedagogy that makes sense for our school. I

love that. Before we start wrapping up and

let you get about your day, I do have a question around the

reasons why you pursued the T lists. So you got T list

certified, and I love that, especially because of your ed

tech background. So what were some of the considerations for

you as you considered sitting for that exam and going through

all the prep for it?

It's a really excellent question. I think it

really stems back from when I was at North Broad prep, very,

very unusual. My position actually oversaw. It usually

don't have academics doing that.

Wow, yeah, that is super weird. Yeah, super

weird, right? Guys, have you ever heard of that? I don't

think I have ever heard of the IT piece reporting to the Ed

Tech piece.

I can only think of maybe one, but I couldn't name

it, if you asked me.

But you can understand Kristina, right, that

I came into that position. And granted, I did have sort of

unusual background, that back in New Orleans, when we were

putting a huge addition on to Trinity Episcopal I was up in

the ceiling running wires. Okay, so maybe not all et people have

run ethernet cables through their ceilings, but I felt like

I did not have a solid understanding of everything on

the IT side, and I felt like that kind of hampered my

ability. So this was before Bernie came on board, and I was

walking into this situation of those really long passwords and

and the infrastructure desperately needed upgrading all

of these things. And windward is very aware of this, and they

wanted to be proactive and make all these changes. I felt for my

knowledge base, while I might understand the ET side pretty

well. If I could understand all of these other components as

well, it would help my working relationship in partnership with

the IT side. And I think that T list certification really does

help with that, because it makes you think of operational things.

It makes you think of policy things. It brings all of these

different aspects in and going through and listening to your

past podcasts, the webinars, all of those different resources was

really helpful. So for example, because of the program, I

created a tech advisory council here, and we split up into three

different parts because we have a lot to accomplish, but one of

those was bringing all of these different policies that we had

out there, digital code of conduct, etc. Acceptable use

policy and assistive technology policy, all these different

pieces into one cohesive document that would also have an

AI policy component and that T list certification clarified by

thinking and helped me understand how to create a

structure that would help make that happen.

Thank you for sharing that. I love that

that was the reasons behind why you pursued it, and in a weird

way, I think that your answer is the first I've heard where

there's a piece of the students in that answer, right? Like you

mentioned the passwords being too difficult. Basically, you're

like, Yeah, I got the T list because my students deserve this

experience with somebody at the helm who knows how to address

really long passwords, for example. So I love that this has

been such a pleasure. I'm so grateful to you for coming in

and bringing your perspective to our community. I'm so glad that

you have those letters after your name, you're such a stellar

representation of everything that we were trying to

accomplish with the T list program. So thank you so much

for joining us today. It's been really incredible. It's

been my pleasure to have a conversation

with this brain trust. So thank you. I've been long time fans,

particularly of Hiram and Bill, and followed all of the

different advice. So you don't know the impact that you have on

people, right? But I want to let the two of you know from going

to the ISTE conference before it was ISTE when it was ne CC, I

think love it. They've had a big positive impact on my career.

We're a tight

community. Look at you guys, our fan. Thank

you our first and number one fan.

You have many fans. Kristina Alice serves many

purposes, and it does it in a way that's exemplary. So I thank

you,

Dr Magette again, thank you so much once

again for your time. My pleasure.

This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

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