Tech success brings District 204 superintendent to White House
The work of students, teachers and the superintendent in Indian Prairie Unit District 204 made it to the White House because of their success in one important realm: technology.
In May, a film crew from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology visited to film video clips for a series about "future-ready" schools where digital learning is advanced.
The district was one of nine across the nation selected and one of eight for which videos were produced, Superintendent Karen Sullivan said after returning from a Dec. 10 trip to the White House for a meeting about the Future Ready initiative and a kickoff of the national education technology plan.
The videos serve as examples for districts that aren't so far along the road of incorporating technology into daily learning as District 204, where a BYOT, or Bring Your Own Technology, program gets smartphones, tablets and laptops into the classroom and an online learning consortium offers a variety of classes.
The crew produced five videos from District 204, and one of them even made it to the projector screen in the Secretary of War room of the White House, where educators gathered on the same day President Barack Obama signed a new education bill.
"This was the proudest moment of my career," Sullivan said. "They showed three portions of videos to the group and one of them was ours. It was just really exciting to see our teachers and our students being shown in a video in front of this group at the White House."
One video focuses on Expanding Learning Opportunities, the online learning consortium among District 204, Naperville Unit District 203 and Wheaton Warrenville Unit District 200.
Clips show slow-motion shots of students pulling laptops from charging stations or logging into online coursework and educators explaining why the district didn't contract with a charter school to provide online education.
"We wanted our own teachers to be in front of our kids, even if it's behind the computer," Sullivan says in the video.
Other videos focus on personalized learning using technology, development of parental buy-in toward technology, building infrastructure for technology use through community partnerships and how the district's collaborative leadership allowed technological success to build.
Stan Gorbatkin, assistant superintendent for technology services, makes an appearance in one of the videos talking about how the district worked with partners such as OnLight Aurora, a nonprofit that provides Internet connectivity on the city of Aurora's fiber-optic network, to improve technology infrastructure while making budget cuts elsewhere.
Such partnerships save money "to ultimately benefit kids in the classroom," Gorbatkin says in the video.
Sullivan said she learned at the White House that the district's ability to leverage community resources when its own funding for tech was tight was part of why it was selected for the Future Ready series.
She wasn't able to see Obama during her day at the White House. Still, Sullivan said she left feeling energized about the future of incorporating technology. Next steps include finding more ways to teach computer science and coding throughout a student's experience in the prekindergarten through high school district in parts of Naperville, Aurora, Bolingbrook and Plainfield.
"In the new education bill, there is a strong focus on really trying to make computer science a stronger part of our students' curriculum," Sullivan said. "There's some really fun things that can help teach a student simple coding."