Features Education

No one will ever hear Devin Holzer clank down a hallway in a suit of steel so heavy it crushes the floor tiles under his feet. Nor will anyone see him suddenly shift his shape into an armored vehicle laden with weaponry for a never-ending fight against evil. Yet no matter how softly the district […]

When coach Marty Moyer’s barn burned to the ground, his wrestling team and a legion of his Indiana neighbors rushed to his aid to rebuild the structure as quickly as possible, working many hours without complaint. In times like these, it’s nice to know people and places like this still exist, says David Wolford, the […]

Imagine you’re an archaeologist extracting an artifact that’s been hidden in dirt for millennia. Gently, you brush away the dust. Laboriously, you use precision tools to pry it free, bit by bit. Tenderly you lift it, inspecting it from all angles. But you’re not in the sweltering, dust-choked standard of an archaeological dig site—you’re in […]

As a kitchen designer, he taught himself to conceptualize spaces based on how the materials would be installed. As a restaurant manager, how to multitask and prioritize. From being a bowling instructor, he learned the importance of communication. So whenever Darrell Cheney finds himself talking to students at Channelview Independent School District’s (CISD) annual Career […]

One hundred miles northeast of Amarillo, surrounded by the stark and limitless landscape of the Panhandle, sits the hamlet of Canadian, Texas. With a population shy of 3,000 and a downtown covering four square blocks, you can’t get much further from the big-city bustle of Dallas and Houston (or the big-city tax base). All of […]

While our college experiences are in many ways defined by buildings themselves—the gothic brick and modernist concrete, the teeming dorms and chock-full lecture halls—the technological infrastructures can be equally evocative. Without reliable internet, those memories can be colored quite differently. And not in sunny hues, either. Looking at the modern, arched opening of Ozarks Technical […]

In most school districts, in order for any new technology plan to achieve true success, the student experience—what they learn in the classroom and how they’re taught to engage with the world beyond—must be paramount. At its core, the initiative being undertaken at North Carolina’s Alamance-Burlington School System (ABSS) is really no different. The approach, […]

In “Inception”, the 2010 sci-fi thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the protagonist is forced to navigate a series of dreams, each more involved than the last. While that might seem like a strange analogy for an IT initiative, Drew Lane insists his school district shares something in common with the special effects blockbuster. “What we’re doing […]

Over a 25-year career in the Army, Colonel Don Welch confronted his share of challenges. Only, back then, the enemy was much better defined. Now, as the chief information security officer for Penn State University, a position that spearheads cybersecurity for 80 IT departments, Welch is confronting a threat of a different kind in the […]

There’s a myth about technology in Silicon Valley—and by extension, California—which suggests that any technology or trend sprung from the former must necessarily fan into the latter. Dan Borges knows better. Having plied the IT trade in everything from defense to pharmaceuticals (he counts Lockheed Martin among his resume bullet points), Borges has long recognized […]