Jacob Lopez Digital PortfolioFrom a young age I have been fascinated with computers. As a child I would build simple circuits and did some basic robotics. In 6th grade I started building computers and then in high school ran a small computer repair business for families of students at my school, neighbors, and other people that heard about my work. I also attended my high school’s Engineering Academy and won the robotics and electric motor design competitions in that program. With this passion I went off to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to study Computer Engineering thinking it was the obvious and best choice for me.
While attending Cal Poly I got involved in student mentorship through my involvement in the Week of Welcome Program (the largest volunteer student orientation program in the country) and the Summer Institute Program that targeted first-generation college students where I taught a summer class for incoming freshman. Here I discovered a second passion that exceeded my first- education. It was after discovering this second passion that I decided to switch gears to pursue education after having completed many of my engineering courses, including completing the calculus series left engineering on the Dean's List. Needless to say this was a difficult decision but one I made with no regrets. After graduating from Cal Poly my wife and I decided we wanted to travel and try teaching abroad. I spent a year and a half teaching English abroad in Costa Rica. Here I had some amazing opportunities to be the private tutor to the head of the education department for UNESCO Central America while at the same time being a teacher in one of the high school programs he had created in his role. I also taught classes for engineers at HP and Intel in San Jose, Costa Rica. Once I came back to the US, I returned to IT to put my wife through school while she got her Masters in Education and her teaching credential- the plan being we would switch afterwards so she could put me through a master's program in education as well. During this time I began working in IT, schools specifically, in a combination of technical support and ed tech implementation and pedagogy. I discovered that this was the perfect blend of my two passions. I have been at BUSD now for the last 5 years and it has been an enormous pleasure to help lead our district from being a campus of hit or miss wifi and half filled computer labs of donated computers to one having a successful 1:1 program in grades 3-10 as well as 1:2 program in grades K-2. It has also been amazing to work with inspirational teachers, such as the ones that are having third graders design and create personal webpages, or pushing the envelope to personalize instruction for their students using blended learning techniques They are bringing video editing into the classroom in educationally impactful ways, and have led their students to enter and win local student video competitions. In all fields, but particularly in IT, is important to always be learning as things in technology change so fast. It is also important to always be learning of better practices and ways of doing things. In this effort I have been presenting at Google Summits for the past three years to share some of the amazing work we do in BUSD as well as getting free attendance to these conferences in order to learn from other educators in the technological field to further my learning. This last year I also presented at a CUE conference on using Chrome effectively and at CERA on “Advanced Data Analysis Techniques on Cohorts and Using Regression Analysis to Predict Performance” that has led to some back and forth pro bono consulting on my off time. Locally, I co-founded an EdTech community group with the IT Director of Old Adobe Union called ITeratED. This group meets monthly at the Sonoma County Office of Education with an average attendance of 15-20 IT staff from around the county. In this group I also publish guides on server setup, network management, data processing management, and computer programming for task automation that are used in other districts throughout the county and as a part of the documentation for our set-ups at BUSD. On the district level, I work with a team of teachers, classified staff, and administrators to set direction for technology at BUSD. As a team, we also plan and run technology trainings. This group publishes newsletters for the teachers and showcases some of the amazing work our teachers are doing in our district ( click here for a sample). The group also runs an annual 3 day Technology Summit attended by educators throughout the county. The work of these teachers has been inspirational and has led to visits from multiple outside agencies, including Google’s Education division and neighboring districts. In terms of specific outside trainings, I have also completed my ACSA Innovative Technology Administrator Certification and have received grants to take courses to become a Cisco Certified Network Professional and a Certified Wireless Network Administrator this summer. In my free time, I’m completing a course from the University of Michigan on Python for Database Management to automate more of our data flow in the district and expand off some of the programs I have created. These programs include the nightly automated email creation for students using Python and GAM and the nightly enrollment into special programs for intervention using Python Google Scripts and Gdrive Command Line. On the fun side, George Barcenas (a Media Center Specialist at Meadow View), Erwin Espino (the Technology Coordinator for BUSD), and I publish a podcast in our off-hours on educational technology called Frankentech. The podcast focuses on how you can mix and mash tools to create an ideal EdTech environment for students. We also talk about some of the more philosophical aspects of technology and how it is transforming the educational landscape. We also discuss how we can best prepare students to use these powerful tools effectively while remaining critical consumers of content in an age where technology is increasing access to both information and misinformation. |
BUSD BadgesBUSD is using mozilla open badges to verify competencies in our staff and students and create reward systems around. Below is our current collection of badges and each has embedded verification codes linked to the open badge database. The badges below are linked to my certifications.
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