Interview with Anna Colley Transcript

Sakinah Hunafa

FRIT 7739: Practicum in Instructional Technology

Georgia Southern University

Dr. Wofford

Fall 2021
Sakinah Hunafa: Some of these questions I know the answer to but they're par for the course.
The first question is the name of the technology coordinator that I'm speaking to now.
Anna Colley: My name is Anna Colley.
Sakinah Hunafa: Nice to meet you. Okay, my next question is what is your specific title?
Anna Colley: Local school technology coordinator.
Sakinah Hunafa: Okay, what type of degree is required for your position?
Anna Colley: A bachelor's degree is required, but a master's degree is preferred. Okay,
Sakinah Hunafa: Our next question, what are your job responsibilities.
Anna Colley: I opened up the job description. The first is technology leadership, overseeing
technology initiatives at the school level. The second is create and support digital age learning
environments, so supporting blended learning, for instance, and collaborating with teachers,
things like that. The third is promote digital citizenship. The fourth is facilitate instructional
planning to support teachers and differentiated needs of all students. Coaching and working with
teachers for lesson planning. Number five is assisting teachers and the effective use of
technology. Six, demonstrate professional knowledge and growth.
That's basically the things we do to stay up to date, right? Seven support effective
implementation and use of assessment strategies. Working with our testing coordinator to help
facilitate testing using technology. Number eight is providing professional development to staff.
Nine, following the professional standards and ethics of the Georgia professional standards
commission number 10, communicating and collaborating effectively. That includes not just
communicating within the school, but also some pieces of external communication, like the
school website. Okay. Things like that. Right? And then of course, other duties as assigned is
always the last.
Sakinah Hunafa: Yeah, so basically, i.e., things. Anything else they want you to do.
Sakinah Hunafa: Now, this question doesn’t completely apply right now. The question is,
“How were you meeting the needs of faculty and staff during the transition to remote learning
last semester.
Anna Colley: I'm starting in March of 2020, and as you know, we all of a sudden had to go to
remote learning very suddenly. Immediately. It was a kind of emergency triage of who needs the
most help. There were some teachers who were super tech savvy and were already using a lot of
blended learning and they were good to go. Maybe just a question here and there. Then, of
course, there are always those ones that are resisting it and have been saying for years, I'm not
going to learn this, I don't need to know this and suddenly thrown into needing it. There were a
lot of zoom calls. I did a daily newsletter, during the rest of 2020. With things you need to know,
tips, things to help you. As we moved into last year, we did concurrent learning, which was face
to face and digital at the same time. It was really a struggle. I think nobody ever wants to do that
again.
Sakinah Hunafa: I'm sure.
Anna Colley: They kept coming to me at the beginning of the year in August and saying, I don't
know how to do this. Tell me how to do this. My answer was that nobody knows how to do this.
We've never done this before it’s completely new. Yeah, let’s figure it out together. Luckily, the
county was able to do a grant per teacher to purchase some hardware. Some teachers were able to
choose what they wanted. Some chose an additional monitor. Some chose to use graphic tablets,
just various things. Then we kind of figured it out together. A nice thing at the high school is we
have such a big staff and such a wide variety of skills. I'm able to work closely with some who
are our highfliers and super competent with the technology and help them figure out what they
want to do and then use them as a model for the other teachers.
Sakinah Hunafa: Much like we do with students.
Anna Colley: Right, right. Right.
Sakinah Hunafa: That worked out really well. I was telling the same thing to some of my
former teacher, coworkers. Because when I was working at school, my daughter still goes to that
school, I would often talk to them about using the technology in different ways. A lot of
resistance. Some people are not necessarily resistant but were concerned about the technology
not working when they got to the lesson or other issues and that scared them. They just didn't use
it at all. What happened is when her school closed, nobody was prepared. Nobody was ready. I
could see it, both as a parent and as someone who used to teach there that you all were not ready
for this anymore.
Anna Colley: Yeah, I think a nice thing in Gwinnett. County is we had all the tools in place.
Yeah. And they had had several years where that had been out there and, you know, especially E
Class had been available, and they'd had a lot of training offered on it. Google Classroom had
been around for several years. The tools were there. It's just the ones that were reluctant having
to pick it up.
Sakinah Hunafa: Right, and all of a sudden, right?
Anna Colley: Yeah. Out of nowhere, out of nowhere, it was a shock. It was a shock to
everybody.
Sakinah Hunafa: The next one is how did you meet the remote learning needs of students and
parents?
Anna Colley: Our district model is that the LSTC is mainly supporting teachers. So I'm not
primarily technical support for students. The way we work it is that teachers are supporting the
students and the parent questions are to the degree that they can. When they can't, then they
would come to me. There’s not a lot of direct inquiries from students and parents, although last
year, when we started digitally, I did get a lot of phone calls and emails from parents. A lot of it
was the same thing over and over again, like they didn't have reliable internet. Yes, because I'm
just not understanding how to access something. That's a lot of that.
 I tried to push back to the teachers and say, “Hey, they're asking where are your assignments are
located?” I can't tell them that.
Sakinah Hunafa: Right. All right, that makes sense. Then it says, you know, what are your
typical daily activities for the job?
Anna Colley: One thing I really like about my job is that it's varied. There are a lot of different
kinds of activities. I pulled up at times, I have kept a log of what I did. I don't always have time
to do that. But sometimes I do that. And so that way, I can kind of have an idea of some things to
tell you. I do a lot with the school website. There has been a big push the last two years on
accessibility. Most things on the website run through me if somebody wants something posted on
the school website, it comes to me first.
I'm working tickets when people have issues. We have a technician at each school. And they
primarily work with hardware, like student accounts, and things like that. But I do all the support
for each class, Google, anything that's training, anything related to our student information
system, I do all of that. So that's a lot of my day. Then, I do spend a lot of time looking for
instructional resources for teachers, trying things out, submitting the vendor for approval to make
sure we're allowed to use that site, and then sharing that with teachers. Just glancing over my log,
this is from March. There's a lot of random things I do, like downloading. We get a set of files
from our school pictures vendor that has images for all the students and staff. It's my job to
download all those in the correct format and upload them into our student information system.
Then, I also send them to the person who uploads for school nutrition and the event planner.
That's a random thing, but it's something that I'm responsible for. Sometimes I'll get special
tasks. In the spring, I helped with honors night, they needed to collect information from teachers
about which awards were going to be given and all of that. I made a form to collect all that
information and organize that for administration so that they could organize that night.
Sakinah Hunafa: A plethora of activities that are basically across the gambit, a lot of different
things.
Anna Colley: Yes, yeah, it's good.
Sakinah Hunafa: I did notice that Gwinnett County has the technology support technician.
That's good, because that means the LSTC does not have to also focus on sitting in front of
computers and fixing them. You know have time to focus on other things as well, because that's
a whole another thing. That takes time and especially if you have a large school.
Anna Colley: Absolutely. Okay.
Sakinah Hunafa: All right. So next question, do you have a budget that you control? It’s a two-
part question? How do you make decisions for selecting resources for your stakeholders?
Anna Colley: I don't really have a budget. You know, media specialists are given a set amount
of money every year as a budget, we don't have that. At the beginning of the year, when they go
through open house and registration, they ask parents to make contributions for different things,
clinics, supplies, the art department, whatever.
One of the line items they can make donations for is technology. So those items go into a fund
that are earmarked for technology, and I have that at my disposal. But I wouldn't call that a
budget because it's not a set amount, right. It can be used for things that I may not be in charge
of, other technology kind of things. I guess I can request and have influence over purchasing
decisions for technology things even though I don't have a budget per se for that to come out of. I
can request that the school purchase something. For instance, we have a couple of subscriptions
that we pay for, for all staff here at the school level. That came through me.
Anna Colley: Usually, a teacher will bring something to me and say, hey, I think this would be
beneficial for the whole school and then I'm evaluating to see, is this really something that
everybody can use? Right? Worth the cost? Right, I will test it out, find out all the information
about the pricing and then I can submit it to administration, if I recommend it, to say, hey, we'd
like to purchase this. They may sometimes charge that two departments. At the high school,
everything is kind of broken out by departments. They might say, okay, each department is going
to pay a share of this, or they might take it out of the general fund, or they might take it out of
that technology fund if they have one.
Sakinah Hunafa: Okay, now that makes sense. That makes sense. When, when you're talking
about the subscriptions, you're talking about things like BrainPOP? Of course, not for high
school, but you know, things like BrainPOP, and things of that nature.
Anna Colley: We subscribe to Gimkit and Screencastify.
Sakinah Hunafa: Does your school have a technology committee?
Anna Colley: We do. We're required to have a media committee, as you probably know, and I
always collaborate with the media specialists to make that a media and technology committee.
We add to, whatever, where she would usually select, for instance, somebody from each
department or middle school or elementary school, it might be somebody from each grade level,
from the staff, and then we would also have parents, maybe an administrator, and a high school
level, you're required to have students on it as well. Then, here, I recommend additional staff
members to add to our committee that our people I know are invested in using instructional
technology.
Sakinah Hunafa: That's good to hear. It's nice to hear that there's not only buy in from you and
the media specialists, but also from teachers and students, because you get all the viewpoints.
Because the teachers, of course, have a different view of it, then you will have and of course, the
students have a very different viewpoint of it. It's good to have that representative from each
group. Yeah, that's really good. That's the first I've heard of that. I'm guessing maybe that's a
high school thing? I don't know, necessarily. But I think I don't hear that.
Anna Colley: I think for media committee, they're required to have parents on the list. I don't,
they're not necessarily super active. It depends on the school, I guess, and how much they
involve the parents in that process. Right? I know, with media, it's more preparing in case there
were to be a challenge, like a book challenge or something like that, that you must have those
contacts with parents and students at the high school level.
 Sometimes, the parents’ names are listed there, but they're not super active with making
decisions. But we try to keep them in the loop.
Sakinah Hunafa: So, it is on file, that they are somewhere there.
Anna Colley: Yeah. They're available, at least if we need questions or review of materials or
resources, something like that.
Sakinah Hunafa: All right. Next question. How are technology decisions made?
Anna Colley: Usually, well, it depends on of course, what, how important that decision is, if it's
something minor, I might just decide on my own. But for most things, I'm going to collaborate
with my team. My media specialist, my TST, if necessary, with department chairs or with the
administration, depending on how large of a decision it is or who it affects.
Sakinah Hunafa: All right. Next question. What is the best part of your job?
Anna Colley: I really like the variety. I am the kind of person that can get bored doing the same
thing, and so if I'm working on something and I get frustrated or bored with it, there's always
something else I can switch to and do something else for a while and then come back. I really
enjoy the variety and all the different types of tasks I love. There's a lot of problem solving
involved figuring out how to do things. I really enjoyed that piece.
Sakinah Hunafa: I noticed that too. The problem-solving part because I'm putting together my
digital portfolio for this, you know, graduate internship. I noticed I said, Okay, well I need to
learn how to do this. There are some things that I have to figure out how to do like you said, a lot
of research, things like that. Oh, really this whole time, I could have been doing that!
Anna Colley: Yeah. I think I have an advantage over teachers because I have time that I can try
things out. They're asking me what's the best tool to use for this particular purpose, they don't
have time to try 15 different things. Now they know I can go out and do some research and try
several different things, play around with it and see, you know, hey, these are the ones that I
think would work best for you or that kind of thing.
Sakinah Hunafa: I agree with that. I have a professional development workshop I'm currently
working on. With that course, there were several tools that I was trying out to see what the best
bet would be to offer to the teachers at the school. I was noticing the same thing, okay, try this
one out. No, not that one. Maybe it doesn't apply to everybody. Maybe it's not going to actually
benefit the majority of the people here. Then you could see that some teachers, there was a tool
that they used a lot of them have used, and they still want a professional development on it. I
said, Well, I see what you're saying, but at the same time, if I'm going to create a professional
development, I would rather target it to something that less of you are already using. So there's a
higher benefit than something you're comfortable with.
Anna Colley: Right.
Sakinah Hunafa: It's been interesting seeing that, and like you said, doing that research and
having the time to do it, because as a teacher, I never had that kind of time.
Anna Colley: You do always have the teachers to who will ask for professional development or
attend professional development on things that they're already very familiar with. I think maybe
that has to do with teacher confidence level, like, they don't know how much they know about it.
Sometimes you end up sitting in a professional development where a lot of people have never
heard of this tool, and then you've got four people over here who use it every day and write
people's questions, which is nice, because then they get a chance to mentor a little bit, but I do
see that trend, too.
Sakinah Hunafa: Right. Like you said, sometimes it's nice to have those, those mentor teachers,
especially if you have a collaborative activity, a Wakelet, a Padlet, or something like that. You
can have them kind of collaborate with each other or assist another teacher, I did notice that
though. I agree with you, you do seem to have a lot more time to think about the tools that are
out there and to really evaluate them. As a teacher, you are kind of just using what's in front of
you. You don't have time to look at anything.
Sakinah Hunafa: Okay, the next question, what do you find to be the most challenging part of
your job?
Anna Colley: I feel like I don't get into classrooms and collaborate with teachers on lesson
planning as much as I would like to. That's kind of a challenge for me. In a similar way, I have
coaching that I offer teachers, they can make an appointment, and come meet with me about
whatever. I think it's also been a challenge, getting them to utilize that. I have certain ones, I
think, a couple who came in early and got used to working with me. I see those folks regularly
and there are some that I've literally never sat down with. It's such a big school, unlike, say, at an
elementary school, where you have a lot fewer people that you're working with. It's challenging
to get out there to everybody and get them to utilize the coaching opportunities. One thing I've
tried to do to help with that is to go to department meetings, at least once a semester and just say,
hey, just a reminder that I'm here and this is what I offer and you know, this is what I can help
you with.
Sakinah Hunafa: Basically, there's no need for you to struggle alone. If you have a question if
you have something you need help with. I am here just to help you out. That was the last
question. Thank you!

End of Interview