Kurt Kohls has been educating students at the Elementary level in Fairfax County Public Schools of Northern Virginia for over ten years. Starting out as a second grade teacher, his passion for technology led him to the role as School Based Technology Specialist in the county. Now in his fifth year as an SBTS, Kurt has worked to integrate the newest practices in technology into the Elementary school setting.
Under Kurt's guidance, teachers at Chesterbrook Elementary in McLean, Virginia have created video and audio Podcasts related to the county's curriculum, which can be found on iTunes. Keeping current on useful technologies, Kurt also created presentation carts for the school. The components included upgraded Mimio capture bars, LCD projectors, DVD/VCR combo players, flexible document cameras, and sound output to the classroom amplification systems.
With a passion for video, Kurt presents "Tech Tip Tuesday" trainings on the school's news studio to the teachers prior to student arrival. When training teachers in live settings, Kurt records a video of the session and uploads it onto a server so all the teachers in the county can access it via the intranet. He also uses Mimio Recorder to create training videos for teachers to Learn more about the Mimio software when he is unavailable.
With a concern for the environment, Kurt has developed several programs at his school to go paperless. Attendance communication from the teachers to the front office has been submitted online for over a year using Microsoft's Excel. Newsletters to the community are sent out via e-mail, and only printed when necessary. Teachers check out for the summer using an on-line database and can continually update their info on the staff directory throughout the year. Finally, Kurt moved the thick staff handbook binder (80+ copies printed annually) to an on-line wiki. These systems provide greater flexibility for the teachers and save a lot of resources.
A leader in his school and county with technology integration, Kurt was nominated and received the Outstanding Performance Award for Support Employees in the fall of 2007. He presented at the Virginia Society for Technology in Education (VSTE) conference in Roanoke, Virginia this past February and he also presented at the National Educator's Computing Conference (NECC) this past summer in San Antonio, Texas. Kurt is this month's Featured Educator of the Month and, as such, is provided free tuition in the Mimio Masters program.