My Journey

My name is Kris Sheehan and I am an elementary school technology coach at The American School of Warsaw. I have been involved with teaching technology to children since 1986 when I started using the Apple II and Logo in Washington State with my third and sixth grade students. We had a few computers in the library and I managed to rotate them all through. I left education for four years to explore a different career option, but decided teaching was in my blood and returned to teaching.

When I moved to New Jersey and started teaching sixth grade social studies in 1994, I was thrilled to have an entire lab of Power Macs to use with my students. I did wonder where the floppy disks had gone, though, and had to ask a coworker how to turn the machine on. I had a great learning curve that year! This is also the year I started working on my Master of Arts in Computing and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Working with Macs with my sixth graders while working on my Masters in Computing and Education was an exciting combination for me as I was able to focus my studies on ways I could integrate technology with my curriculum.  My students benefitted greatly from this marriage.

After four years of working in New Jersey, I decided it was time to continue my move east and started looking for some international teaching positions. I had recently become engaged so my fiance and I started looking for a move to Europe. We were lucky enough to be hired to work at ACS Athens and started our international teaching careers there in 1998 and have never looked back. I was hired as the middle school technology teacher and arrived in Athens to a lab full of Dell computers running Windows 3.1. Not exactly cutting edge. I managed to make the learning as meaningful for my students as I could until we received a grant at the end of my first year and purchased all new computers and even got an Internet connection. My second year was much better, but we were ready to move on.

We were hired in 2000 to teach at The American School of Dubai and we had felt like we had gone to heaven. What a great school! I was hired to be the high school technology teacher and to help facilitate the use of technology at the high school. I was a little nervous as I had never taught high school before, but found the students to be fun and easy to work with. I was amazed at what they could accomplish!  I was given a lot of freedom in Dubai to use my ideas and experiences to create my own courses and course descriptions. In my eight years in Dubai, I created courses in Scheme and Java programming, desktop publishing, Web design, animation, and worked with students for independent study for the AP Programming class. I also worked with teachers to use technology in their classroom. At the time, we had one desktop lab and one small yearbook lab. Each teacher had a Macintosh desktop computer. We began using Blackboard and Atlas during my years at ASD and I became the trainer for each of these tools. In addition, I spent time training teachers in a variety of software applications so they could learn to use them with their students.

After eight years in Dubai, we decided to continue our journey to the east and ended up at Shanghai American School. Once again, I changed the age level of the students I was working with and got the job of elementary technology coach. After the initial adjustment to working with the younger students again, I really started enjoying my job and was thrilled to working in a school with so much access to technology -- and it was growing so quickly! After my first year, the entire school made the switch to Macs. What an exciting time! As a technology coach, my role had changed to working closely with the teachers and helping them to develop a program that would seamlessly integrate technology into their curriculum. It has been an exciting journey, having to draw on my people skills while trying to move each teacher forward at their own pace and level. Teachers have appreciated my sense of humor and kind approach to helping them with their journey. I have been working with the teachers in prekindergarten, kindergarten, grade 2 and grade 4. I have also conducted a variety of training sessions school-wide with my team of technology facilitators.

My latest project has been working with our new iPads in our early childhood program and I am once again going through a very large learning curve. This is what I love about technology. It is always changing and always exciting. After researching apps and figuring out the best way to set them up and distribute them to teachers, we were ready to go. It was a very exciting time, watching our students work with a tool that was age appropriate and so easy for them to use and to create with.

After my five years in Shanghai, my husband was hired as the high school principal at the American School of Warsaw. Alas, I was without a job for the first time since I graduated from college. I made big plans for my year - Google Certification, presentations at conferences, setting up my home, getting my kids settled, going to the gym, and maybe even a little knitting. About one week before I was to head off to Warsaw with the kids, I got a call from the tech director telling me that an elementary school tech coaching job had just opened up and asking if I would consider the position. I jumped at the chance to work in a school that was transitioning to MacBook Airs and iPads. What an exciting opportunity for me. Another journey begins...