Mattea Garcia

  Mattea Garcia is an instructional technologist with a passion for math and technology.  Through her work, she focuses on #techquity and big picture ideas to better the students of her district.

Mattea Garcia is a Professional Learning Partner for Student Equity and Opportunity for the Denver Public Schools.  In her current role, she supports several departments with providing quality professional learning for staff members. As a part of this support, she provides professional learning for staff members around adult learning and strategic use of technology. This includes the coordination of Google Tools and supporting Schoology course design. She received her K-12 Instructional Technology Master’s degree from the University of Colorado-Denver.

Math & Technology

At Mattea’s core is her love of mathematics.  She graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from Michigan State University, after which she moved to Colorado where she became a math teacher, first at Aurora Public Schools and then Denver Public Schools.  While teaching, Mattea pursued her Master’s degree, in K-12 Instructional Technology, which she says enhanced some aspects of her instructional practices, but not all.  This is due in part to the limited capability of technology to handle math syntax.   As she has always been a bit technology inclined, her degree gave her focus and a terminology toolkit to tackle non-subject specific areas of concern such as student engagement and homework completion.  Through her podcast, Math Tech & Teaching, Mattea discusses math teaching techniques and her general teaching reflections.  

Assessment

The area of assessment is a passion of Mattea’s.  Through her website, she offers resources for formative assessment or evaluation during the learning process.  One app she describes is an app for annotating pictures.  Having students annotate the chain rule on derivatives allowed her to provide near real-time feedback to her students.  This contrasts with a summative assessment where students are assessed at the end of a particular curricular unit.  She describes the perfect assessment app as not just automating the grading of assignments; the app needs to show her what the student was thinking at the time an action was taken.  Digital badging is another type of assessment that Mattea has presented.  Incorrectly applied, digital badging is simply a sticker for accomplishing a particular goal.  However, if the metadata is properly taken into account, such as the project, picture, or what was done to earn the badge; then digital badging can augment or possibly replace professional portfolios and resumes.

#techquity

Having worked in several high needs school systems, Mattea has experience with adjusting her technology priorities to meet the needs of her students.  An example of this involved a student population who did not readily have internet availability, nor were they acclimated with a broad technology toolset prior to her having them.  As most of her students, in this case, had internet access strictly on mobile devices, she adjusted her technology use so that the websites,  applications, etc. were all mobile friendly. This is all a part of a Mattea’s big picture thinking when evaluating a piece of technology.  She asks the hard questions such as ‘What are the unintended consequences?’ if a piece of technology cannot do this, this, and this. It is very important to Mattea that technology is implemented with all students in mind.

Supporting Staff

In her current role, Mattea provides professional development support to non-teaching, student facing, staff at Denver Public Schools.  With the spread-out environment of a school system, it is often difficult to support the staff that is helping students with their technology needs.  Mattea assists in finding innovative technology solutions to support the staff without the need to have a consortium of all the staff for in-person training.  She also facilitates bias & equity training, which thanks to her work, now follows a hybrid model of both in-person and online components for instruction. You can read more about her approach to this work on her blog post here.

Thoughts for New Educational Technologists

Mattea is fortunate enough to have experience on the student teaching side and the administrative side when it comes to education technology.  When looking to use an educational technology degree, you want to consider your career focus, whether it is K-12, higher education, or the private sector.  Mattea describes a vast distinction between K-12 and higher education.  She suggests that if you seek out a position in a K-12 environment that you seek out a school-based position.  In a district that has a student-centered philosophy, this will allow you to see how all of the moving parts of the district benefit the students.  Mattea prides herself in understanding how school districts work and this has helped her with her recommendations on project implementations. Knowing who the end-user or ultimate audience is and how they will benefit from a particular action or project, will be very helpful in whatever role someone decides to choose in an organization.

With regards to advancement, a degree like her K-12 Instructional Technology degree opens the door to numerous opportunities in her work environment.  Denver Public Schools is a very large organization (roughly 90,000 students) with numerous units that could benefit from someone holding this sort of degree.  

Check out her website for more information.    

Written by: Thomas Stockwell April 4, 2017