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Julie Bowline

Director of Instructional Technology


and Library Services
Adams Twelve Five Star School District
Thornton, Colorado
Interviewed by Bruce Barker on September 16, 2009

To find an instructional technology professional to interview, I emailed the


instructors from a district online course I took last year. One respondent replied
that she’d be out of town, but would I like to interview Julie Bowline - the new
director of our school district’s instructional technology department? Well, of
course!

Professional Experience
Julie’s career experiences have alternated between education and technology.
After college, Julie was an elementary teacher in Oklahoma for seven years. Then
she realized she could make three times her pay as a Cobol computer
programmer, which she did for six years. Her next career step was in child
development, raising her two children – a daughter who is fluent in French and
travels around the world (studied in Paris, taught ESL in Korea, now living in
Montreal), and a son who is currently a student at the University of Wisconsin. She
then earned a Masters degree in Computer Education in 1998, and taught 4th and
8th grades in Wisconsin and in a private school in Colorado.
Most recently, Julie found a way to combine her technology and educational
interests as an Instructional Technology Coordinator for Adams Twelve, and this
past July she advanced into her current position as the director of the department.

The Interview
Q. What are a few of the projects that you and your department have
been working on recently?
Before last year, I and the other IT coordinators worked with individual teachers to
integrate technology components into their lessons in order to increase student
achievement. Starting last year, we expanded our focus to pursue more systemic
change across the school district. Some of those projects are:
 We integrated instructional technology components into the district’s K-5
Language Arts literacy curriculum – matching up the Model Reading lessons
with United Streaming video components and creating a variety of literacy
activities on the computer for individual students.
 For NCLB, 8th graders’ technology literacy must now be assessed. The first
year, in 2007, they took a paper & pencil scantron test. A great way to test
technology, isn’t it? Last year we developed an inquiry-based assessment,
80% of which is a research project, and 20% involves producing a digital
product.
 Another big initiative was putting together a Highway 21 technology
conference for the district this past June. We brought in national speakers,
had a variety of breakout sessions, and all the participants were given a Star
Cart – with an LCD projector, document camera and net book!
 We’ve begun to offer professional development via online courses for district
personnel. We’re finding that we get higher participation in this format.
 We’re developing online courses for “credit retrieval”, so students who have
failed a course can relearn what they missed and get credit for the course –
allowing them to graduate on time.
Compared to a couple of years ago, when we were in a mostly reactive mode –
running out to help individual teachers, we’re now trying to think bigger. We’re
taking a more district-wide, systemic approach.

Q. What are important knowledge and skills needed for your type of
position?
Well, one important expertise is knowledge of Library Services, which I don’t have;
I’ve hired a coordinator for this area. You need the ability to communicate – both
the good and the bad. You need to honor the struggle. I meet a lot of people who
want what’s best for kids, but we may not have the money or resources to do what
they want. You need an appreciation for both sides of the house – the Information
Technology people who are more concerned about the machines (their security
and reliability), versus me and my group who are more concerned about the
students.
The other thing is keeping current. I read while I’m on the elliptical in the morning.
I keep up with my national organizations and various periodicals, like eSchool News
and ISTE’s Learning and Leading with Technology. There are some great blogs
about the field – look up David Thornburg, Ian Jukes and the Committed Sardine,
which boils down web changes, and David Warlick at the Citation Machine. I listen
to books on tape when I’m commuting.

Q. What are some personal attributes that are important for people who
work in this field?
You must be willing to listen. You can’t just go in and shove your ideas off on
anybody. It’s a job based on relationships – building the trust with a teacher that
the suggestions you offer are for the benefit of his or her students. Put the time
and energy into building relationships, so that when you go back in and say “I
really think you should do this”, they’re going to listen because you’ve shown them
that you understand what they’re doing.

Q. What kinds of frustrations and challenges do you encounter in your


job?
Change is slow, and goes through many levels of the organization. I came out of a
classroom where I impacted my students directly, in a system that was not so
regimented curricularly and allowed me a great deal of freedom. Now I see things,
and I want things to change, and just because I say so is not a reason for change
to happen. We have to have the buy-in; we have to have the stakeholders. You
need to build the capacity into the system for the change to happen. So it takes
very long sometimes for change to happen.
(*Interviewer’s Note: we discovered that we had both played the same “Change”
board game in our respective Masters programs – called “Playing the Game”,which
highlights the numerous critical steps and possible setbacks, the importance of
recruiting stakeholders, etc. when trying to lead a major change initiative in a
school district.)
A new challenge is the fact that our bond issue didn’t pass, so we have no refresh
money, and hence no scheduled cycle for technology upgrades. It’s hit or miss.
Adams 12 has been a very site-based district, and with technology that is not
always good. You’ve got to have norms and standards.
Politically-speaking, as long as I’m open and transparent, I have no trouble. I feel
that I’ve had the support of the administration and the superintendent. Though
with Mike leaving, I’m a little worried that the new superintendent will come in the
middle of the year and not have the same vision of 21st Century learning and
technology as a key tool for learning.

Q. Are there any online courses, web pages, or other tech products that
you have built and are particularly proud of?
One of my Masters requirements was to plan a virtual trip to Japan for kids, based
on a piece of literature. That grew into my teaching an online course on how to
build and run virtual field trips – at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. That
was in the 1990’s; now it sounds so ordinary. But I’m proud of that. I’m also proud
of our new online classes for the district. For the first one we developed, I felt like
Indiana Jones, with the big boulder coming up behind me; we were just barely
getting it done in time!

Q. How did you like teaching the online class?


I did not enjoy it very much. It was just such a sterile experience. And I was very
reluctant to go back into the online world, it really was. You really miss out on the
give and take between people; it takes an incredible amount of time for the class
participants to establish those relationships that you can do easily face-to-face.
Now, I’m a believer that there are many people who just want that knowledge, and
if they can only do it at home in their pajamas at night, that’s how they’re going to
do it!

Q. What do you enjoy most about your job (or previous jobs)?
I enjoy the ability to impact and change things for students. We’ve done trainings
and shown people how to do things with technology that are going to impact kids,
and we’ll help those teachers follow through. I do miss the relationships I had
when I was a teacher, which I don’t get with this job; but I feel that some of the
district-wide things we’re doing are still helping kids.

Q. What kinds of trends to you see in the near- and long-term future of
instructional technology?
We’re going to see more online learning among the student ranks, and we will be
offering more in our district. We’re associated with Colorado Virtual Academy, but
we don’t receive any money when students take those courses. The states of
Michigan and Alabama now require that students take at least one online class to
graduate!
We’ll see more collaboration among students across the district, country and
world. If we don’t restructure some of what we’re doing, we’ll continue to lose
more and more students. We need to engage those students who are bored, and
technology is one of the ways where they have greater buy-in, greater freedom of
expression, they can communicate, and it honors the kids.

Q. Do you have any words of wisdom for students of the field (such as
myself)?
Be contagious with your enthusiasm. Be willing to be a mentor to your peers and
students. Be willing to keep exploring the new frontiers of tech innovations, and
share them with anyone you can wrangle. In our district, if we have a few people in
each building that understand the value of technology in students’ learning, we
can really build on that foundation. But we really need those people who are willing
to be building leaders.

Reflection and Conclusion


I was surprised to learn that only recently has our school district begun to chart a
more systemic, district-wide course for integrating technology into instruction. I’m
not sure how we compare to other districts, but it feels like we’re far behind the
technological curve and playing catch-up, and losing bond issues will not help that.
Also, what I’ve been hearing and reading about the growth of online courses was
brought closer to home, hearing how more and more students are opting for online
learning opportunities; and if we don’t step up and provide them, we’ll keep losing
more students and the money that goes with them. Though it was interesting to
hear about Ms. Bowline’s feelings about teaching an online course.
Talking to Ms. Bowline was a great opportunity – both to learn how a person with a
similar background as myself (in both computer programming and classroom
teaching) worked her way to the top position in a large school district’s
instructional technology department, and to learn about the new vision and
direction for instructional technology in my district – which gives me ideas about
possible projects for my IT masters. I actually did a second interview, with one of
Julie’s employees – Jeremy Sims, who gave me a more techie view of the tools and
systems that they are using within our district, as well as the promising, newer
technologies on the horizon.

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