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 8

th 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.