Influence of Technology in Education Arena

Sophia Mendoza, Director of Instructional Technology Initiative at Los Angeles Unified School District

Sophia Mendoza, Director of Instructional Technology Initiative at Los Angeles Unified School District

Sophia Mendoza is an education leader with over 20 years of experience in the field. She started as an elementary teacher, and is currently the director of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the International Society of Technical Education board member. She has received various awards and recognitions over the years.

In an exclusive interview with Education Technology Insights, Mendoza talked about her journey as an educator, the path to her current position, and her key roles and responsibilities.

Can you talk about the journey you have had over the years to become an educator?

My journey with Los Angeles Unified School District started as a kindergarten student. Growing up in the town of Pacoima in the northeastern San Fernando Valley, I did not understand the importance of technology until my third grade. It was pivotal when my third-grade teacher brought Radio Shack’s TRS 80 to the classroom. This was the first time I learned I could be a creator with technology. Opposed to this experience, technology was absent in junior and high school education. It was not until high school that my mother noticed that technology was inaccessible. So when her office decided it was time to upgrade their computers, my mother asked her employer if she could have it. She brought home the old computer, which opened up another opportunity for me to learn technology.

While choosing a career, I decided to give back to my community and started working in LA Unified’s after-school programs for tutoring children. I became so inspired by this program that I immediately changed my major and started teaching in an elementary school in my hometown as soon as I graduated. As a fourth-grade teacher, I began my teaching career at the local neighborhood school in Pacoima. Although it was when America Online became popular, technology was still inaccessible in schools. To give my students the same opportunity, I took out a line of credit at the local electronics store, purchased a PC, and ordered a dial-up service at my house to explore internet with my students. So, my early experience as a technology educator was to become a learner first.

Can you talk about your path to the director of the Instructional Technology Initiative at Los Angeles Unified School District?

To make a greater impact on the education system, I earned my credentials to become an administrator. After this, I was immediately selected to become an assistant principal at a local elementary school. Here, I brought numerous positive changes to the community and advocated for the use of technology to support the adaptive needs of students with disabilities as well as create and sustain a more robust system for the individual educational plan. Then, I became an assistant principal at another elementary school in Hollywood. It was extremely rewarding as I was able to apply my skill set in communication, collaboration, and community building. I was promoted to become the principal of a larger elementary school in the Hollywood region, supporting students from Latino, African American, Russian, Armenian, Filipino, and Chinese communities. My goal was to ensure that the families, educators, and students had everything they required to thrive.

One of the most successful changes I brought in as a principal was personalized learning for the students. At the time, our district was piloting a new math digital program with personalized content to help students and educators develop their skills. Leveraging digital tools and resources was the key instructional strategy that changed the game for us. From there, I transferred to become a principal at the school where I started my career. That is when I started utilizing this tagline about my leadership ‘bloom where you are planted.’

Our educators at the time were dabbling in personalized learning and Ed-tech space without me coming in and influencing it. One of our preschool teachers utilized around five tablets for language acquisition, making students record themselves. She made students utilize the tablet for science experiments as many of them did not have access to technology at home. My fifth-grade teachers contacted big tech companies and persuaded them to consider donating old computers to the school. With this effort, three of our classrooms had at least five PCs connected to the internet. My second-grade teachers were leveraging technology to portray student growth and progress through grade books and impacted the families as they could now visualize their children’s progress. My role as the principal was to continue providing such opportunities. By leveraging technology to transform teaching and learning, we caught the attention of the superintendent of schools at the time, and our district made a very large investment in technology in about 100 schools, including underserved communities. Our rebranded instructional technology initiative now supports students across 1300 schools to tap into professional development resources created to leverage instructional technology.

“The focus is not just about providing professional learning opportunities; it is also on creating a strategy to meet people where they are on the continuum of learning.”

It’s been roughly eight years since I have been working as the director of the instructional technology initiative for the Los Angeles Unified School District. The uniqueness of my role is that I belong to the division of instruction. Most directors across the nation report to the information technology division. So one of the major reasons I’ve had so much success over the last eight years is the connection to the division of instruction.

What are your current key roles and responsibilities?

There are three big district-wide initiatives that I lead. The first is the adoption and implementation of the ISTE standards as our base and framework. The second is digital citizenship, one of the ISTE standards for students. Even before the ISTE standards of 2016 were published, digital citizenship was at the forefront of the technology integration in LA Unified. Although the narrative for digital citizenship was safety, security, and privacy, we go beyond that and make a turn into empowerment. The third is computer science education, which was added to my portfolio in 2017. When I was asked to lead the computer science education efforts for LA Unified, I looked at the data and found it was primarily offered in higher socio-economic parts of the city. As my leadership is based on social justice education, I center my work on raising consciousness about inequities and social, environmental, economic, and political situations. I interviewed principals of the schools that were offering and not offering computer science in high schools. That’s where it struck me. We have to start working on the hearts and minds of our educators through an anti-racist lens when bringing computer science education across LA Unified. Another piece that stood out profoundly was that it was absent in elementary and middle grades. This motivated me to strategize a movement to start teaching computer science in early grades. I reached out to some of the gold-star computer science educators in the world and started code.org, sharing my plans for how computer science can be taught to our youngest learners.

Advocacy has also been a big part of my journey in this role over the last eight years. I advocate for adequate funding to offer professional learning opportunities at the state, national, and local levels. Making my voice heard with other coalitions has been the key to spotlighting the work happening here in LA Unified. We received several awards and numerous partnerships.

Is there anything else you want to highlight in this article?

It is not just about providing professional learning opportunities; it also ensures you have something on your strategy to offer folks to meet them where they are on that continuum of learning. And most importantly, devices and applications come and go. What does not is our sound instructional practice that can meet the needs of our very diverse learners.

Another big piece to all of this collective work is that our superintendent saw the importance of digital citizenship, the ISTE standards, and computer science, so much so that he included it in his strategic plan published in June. So far, I have not noticed digital citizenship or ISTE standards in other school districts’ strategic plans. I think we’re the first to include it in our plans.