Catherine Hernandez
Reflection paper for Q-7366
Professor Phipps
October 14, 2005

I was pretty frustrated with the Miami-Dade County Public School district at the beginning, and I have to tell you that I continue to be frustrated. The process of examining my local district has given me two thoughts: First, there has to be a better district out there, and if I jump from higher education to public school, it will be in a different district. The second thought I have is that this role of Educational Technologist is a very important one. 

My background is in liberal studies. I love learning and literacy and education and knowing how people learn and how to help them learn better. I fell into technology completely by accident, and kind of stuck there. While I started out as a computer operator at an oil refinery, (long story), I was wise enough to realize that if I was going to be in “technology” I wanted to be in the education field. Tinkering with the widgets and wattzits does not interest me much. Knowing and imagining how they can be applied to help somebody learn, now THAT is thrilling. 

This process of making a bridge between the “tools” and “technologies” we encounter and using them to improve education seems vital. I passionately feel that our children are our future, as cliché as that sounds, but I know I am not cut from the cloth that will have me thrive in a class room filled with 8 year olds. I admire the people I know who have that talent, and want very much to help them be successful at their passion.

What have I learned? The most impressive component of this course for me has been the Staff Development process. I connected with that lesson in a way that surprised me. As I wrote the document that described my staff development plan, my mind was busy with the possibilities for how it could be implemented and the good the process might yield. Maybe I can improve MDCPS, after all.

Another thing that surprised me was how exciting it was to research the ways that Deaf students could be assisted by new technologies. Of course I know that the technical advances we have today can only help people with learning differences, but the possibilities are truly staggering. I recalled the thrill I felt all those years ago, when a student of mine who was in America from Korea with essentially no language, learned about 100 words over the course of a semester. He could sign and read them in English. I was thrilled. But he had some ability to communicate in his native Korean. Just image what strides we could have made with a Korean to ASL translation tool! 

I will close this reflection with an anecdote. In the middle of this class, one of my faculty approached me for my advice. He is sitting on a committee that is considering the possibility of adding a mandatory single credit course for new majors. The course would be an overview of the curriculum with the purpose being to give these students an idea of what they are signing on for in a Computer Science degree. He had the idea of making it a self-study course with streaming video lectures from “featured faculty” on their areas of expertise. About thirty minutes later, after I had completely rewritten his plans for the course, he walked away a bit bewildered. I was in a playground! I have never designed a course and until he approached me with his query (which really was: is this technically feasible?), I had never considered what sort of a course I would want to design. I was startled that I had so many ideas. It was as though flood gates had been lifted for a moment, and I was not Helpdesk Manager, but Educational Technologist. It was a wonderful moment of clarity. I felt certain that I was on the right track, after all. My faculty will come looking for the Helpdesk Manager again in about a month. I wonder what hat I will wear on that day.