About / news-main / News-archives / January 13 / The Gevirtz School hires winter quarter Academic Technology Specialists (ATS) to aid faculty and students with instructional technology

January 22, 2013
For immediate release

UC Santa Barbara's Gevirtz School hires winter quarter Academic Technology Specialists (ATS) to aid faculty and students with instructional technology

2013 Academic Technology Specialists

UC Santa Barbara's Gevirtz School has hired its winter quarter Academic Technology Specialists (ATS) who will aid the school's faculty and students with instructional technology. The four ATS, who are also graduate students in the Gevirtz School, are Charlene Mangi, Sean McIntosh, Zuleyma Rogel, and John Warneke. The ATS provide consultation and support to faculty, TAs, and guest instructors in the GGSE's advanced, integrated instructional classrooms. The ATS also document their interactions, creating a reference to enhance and focus the GGSE's professional development goals, and help create data for possible research on classroom technology. As ATS John Warneke states, "The future of technology in educational contexts lies in a combination of material resources and the practical ability and knowledge of how to use it."

"We couldn't be more pleased with the skills these four students bring to this position," says Bill Doering, Director of the Gevirtz School's Information Technology Group. "They will definitely be able to handle the myriad duties of an ATS: the day-to-day technical help that must be provided, the ongoing outreach to students to help them with their needs, aiding faculty with the development of instructional technology, and the awareness that technology can not only ease research but also be a subject of research itself."

Charlene Mangi is currently a first year Master's student in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, on the School Psychology track. Mangi is passionate about educational technology, and thinks that many new innovations in this field can help bring about needed improvements, changes, and reforms in the education sector. Prior to starting at UCSB, Charlene worked for Aspire Public Schools, a charter management organization, as a project manager for tools that would help assess teacher effectiveness and provide feedback and professional development resources to teachers. Prior to this role, she was a middle and high school science teacher at an Aspire charter school in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sean McIntosh is from the Bay Area, where he worked in special education as a teacher for eight years prior to being admitted to the Department of Education's Special Education, Disabilities, and Risk Doctorate program. He is interested in the use of assistive technology, and technology in general, and how students with disabilities interact with it and with other people. He looks forward to helping students, faculty, and staff learn and grow comfortable with the many technological resources built in to the GGSE.

Zuleyma Rogel is a third year M.A./Ph.D. student in the Department of Education with a research focus area of Cultural Perspectives and Comparative Education. Her research focuses on parental engagement in education for low-income parents and underrepresented students in higher education. Rogel is thrilled to be a part of the ATS team and capitalize on her skills in teaching, mentoring, and tutoring by helping create safe spaces for collaborative learning in which both students and faculty can learn by doing. Rogel aspires to channel her experiences with ATS into her current work with parent programs by adopting technology as a tool to increase parents' intellectual/social capital and access to information.

John Warneke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Education. Under the tutelage of Betsy Brenner and Gurinder Singh Mann, his research interests include educational anthropology, cultural production, and Sikh and Punjab studies. In particular, Warneke is interested in how the idea of education, and its transmission in particular schools, is established and observed in the social consciousness of those who convey notions of Punjabi culture, in turn, offering a glimpse into an understanding of Punjabi social consciousness. To accomplish this, he examines the culture of the school as a lived reality, exploring how the day-to-day practices of the institution, presented in an educational and residential medium, reflect the foundational ideology of the school.

[The Academic Technology Specialists are available for interviews; contact George Yatchisin at 805 893 5789]

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