Meet Katherine Ware, Plymouth schools’ new technology director
PLYMOUTH – Katherine Ware works from a small office with a world of technology at her fingertips.
The local school district’s new technology, instructional media and library coordinator, Ware typically has six computers, plus an iPad and smart phone open on her expansive desk.
They are the tools of the trade as she oversees the vast amount of information disseminating from local schools for its students and staff. And over the course of the next year, Ware is committed to ensuring that all that technology changes the way educators teach and students learn for the better.
Born to missionary parents in West Africa, Ware grew up in northern New Jersey and has been a career educator.
She spent 15 years as a teacher and library specialist in schools in the Garden State and, more recently, on Cape Cod, before taking the job to succeed Julia Colby, the district’s technology coordinator for the last seven years. Colby retired over the summer.
Initially a high school English teacher, Ware spent the last three years as library media specialist and technology specialist in Chatham and Harwich for the Monomoy Regional School District.
Her first order of business in Plymouth will be overseeing the completion of the district’s roll out of laptop computers for every student in the district.
The need for remote learning during the pandemic pushed local schools (as well as most schools in the country) to provide students with their own devices for learning from home.
In Plymouth, that was accomplished by purchasing thousands of Chromebook computers, but also by allowing older students to use their own devices for schoolwork. That is changing this year as the district finishes distributing its own Chromebooks to each of its 7,318 students,
The school equipment has greater security and safeguards, Ware explained, and allows her and the district to update or add applications and software for all students at the touch of a keyboard.
Ware has ambitious plans for what students and teachers do with all that technology.
“Every school district was forced into one-to-one because of COVID and now districts are asking where do we move forward from this?” Ware said. She has been working with a group called New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning that focuses on higher order learning and thinking and on leveraging digital technology to transform learning.
She noted a project she completed with fourth-graders in Chatham as an example. As part of their state fair projects, students typically research a different state in the country and report on what makes it special. It usually includes tri-fold posters and maybe a sampling of favorite foods from the state.
Using technology, Ware was able to challenge the students to look deeper and report to a larger audience.
They identified a problem in the state, reached out to state officials to get their perspective, recorded Zoom interviews and then put it all into a Google slide presentation and published it on the school website. Ware even taught students how to create QR codes so their parents and others could access the projects while taking a photo at the fair.
Ware said she has started to meet with teachers in local elementary schools to look at new ways they use technology in their classrooms. By the end of the year, even kindergartners will be able to teach their parents something they didn’t know about their devices, she said.
“Your kids will be able to use a computer better than you can by the time we’re finished. I have them coding by the end of kindergarten. They can write 75 lines of JavaScript to design a computer game,” Ware said.
Ware worked with Colby over the summer to prepare for the new position. She said they think alike in many ways and looking at Colby’s plans was like looking into her own future.
Ware said her vision for local schools is to help students develop skills that will enable them to succeed and thrive in an evolving global society.
For students, it will mean using technology not only as learning tools, but to think in new and deeper ways, to develop new and creative ideas and broaden their learning .They will use technology to think critically about issues and share their thinking with those around them.
Teachers can expect to reflect on their teaching practices and identify how their students learn and share learning in ways that were previously inconceivable.
Ware said parents will begin to see a shift in how their children use technology to leverage digital and think critically, so they are ready for advances in technology as they move beyond the classroom and into the global society.
Ware is married to a teacher. Her husband works as a math specialist in New Bedford schools. They have one daughter, a seventh-grader.
Gloss