Profile
Emilia Simoes
Director of Information Services
and Technology
San Luis Coastal Unified School District
Emilia Simoes, currently the Director of Information Services and Technology in the San Luis Coastal Unified School District (San Luis Obispo, California), has been making a difference for students and teachers in five states for over twenty years. Emilia delivers a positive and upbeat message to teachers and administrators about technology issues. She strives to focus conversations about technology on how technology can be a means to achieve educational goals. Emilia says, “My leadership style has always been a focused, gentle nudging of people surrounding me. I lead by example and like to see results in a timely manner to keep people motivated. I also like to have fun while doing my job and try to make the working environment for those around me interesting and enjoyable."
Emilia’s career in education has taken her across the United States. Emilia was one of two daughters of Portuguese immigrants, who grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. “It was my dad’s dream that his children would go to college. He passed away before he saw his dream fulfilled. I know he was there in spirit as we have both received our master's degrees in education.” Emilia spent fourteen years as a classroom elementary teacher (mostly in kindergarten and first grade) in three different states, California, Arizona and West Virginia. It was during her years as a classroom teacher that she first became interested in technology. “I began using an Apple IIe in one of my learning centers with tutorial software that reinforced math and reading skills for my students."
A few years later, she participated in a statewide technology initiative in West Virginia that utilized a model for using technology effectively in a classroom setting. Known as the West Virginia Study, the research associated with that initiative is detailed on the Milken Foundation web site. A significant aspect of the study was that the educational gains achieved by West Virginia’s learning technology program proved to be cost-effective. In fact, an analysis of effect sizes revealed that the implementation of learning technology was significantly more efficient than other popular interventions such as class size reduction.
Those early experiences launched her into a full-time career linking education and technology. In the years after the West Virginia research project, she worked as an Ed Tech Consultant for IBM and as a Technology Director in an Eastern Kentucky school district. Now she is right back where she started from, on the central coast of California, giving hope, inspiration and a smile to a new set of students, teachers and administrators. In her current position, Emilia has taken up the practice of sending out helpful tech tips, simple solutions to common tech problems, via e-mail. And in her closing signatures, she usually offers up an inspiring and/or humorous technology related quote. These messages of help and inspiration, with a dash of a cyber smile, have been well received by staff.
Emilia sees an ever-expanding role for technology in education. She says, “Technology will continue to have an increasing impact as teachers who were raised with technology begin to enter the profession. Many teachers currently in our classrooms have not had the level and amount of professional development and classroom assistance to fully integrate technology.” Moreover, Emilia notes that the teachers who are most successful in integrating technology and instruction tend to be innovative in all other areas of teaching as well.
When selecting quality web sites to share with other educators, Emilia looks for practical teaching ideas that include proven strategies that can be easily applied in the classroom. She knows that teacher planning time is limited, so she strives to find helpful field tested resources that have been developed by teachers “to make technology easy and effective for teachers and students."
The greatest challenge for technology directors and other technology using educators is to secure funding to keep technology updated and working. In addition, Emilia thinks we all need to keep working with school boards, central administration and school communities to communicate that teachers need assistance, support and ‘just-in-time’ training to implement technology well. Emilia is learning to change her expectations and be more patient with herself and other educators as we all strive to use technology to improve student learning.
While Emilia is focused on her job and works hard, she also strives to maintain a balanced approach to life. She adds, “I am working to simplify my life by reducing the clutter. I try to make time to watch the sunset and I consider each day and the relationships I have to be a blessing."