My name is Patrick Timothy Sullivan. I was born in Los Angeles, California in 1979. We lived in LA proper the entire time I lived in Los Angeles. I began my education at a family own school called Baxter Montessori in the
Echo Park district of Los Angeles. I lived in Echo Park until the age of four when my parents, my younger sister Katie, and I moved to
La Costa in North County San Diego. The first school I attended in San Diego County was Carlsbad Montessori School on Pine St. in Carlsbad Village. In second grade La Costa Meadows Elementary School opened and I was a member of the first group of kids to attend the school. I continued going to La Costa Meadows until the summer before my sixth grade year. That summer my family relocated to Oceanside. There were no elementary schools close to our house so my parents enrolled us in
Fairbanks Country Day School, a school my mother was teaching at in Rancho Santa Fe. It was a small school and I wanted to be closer to home so I changed schools the next year and attended St. Mary’s Star of the Sea in Oceanside for seventh grade. Catholic school didn’t suit me too well so I opted to return to Fairbanks for eighth grade and a trend of school changing will start to become apparent from here forward. I began high school at El Camino in Oceanside. The rough edges of the school didn’t fit with my parents’ ideas of a quality education so I again returned to Fairbanks for the third and final time. I did my tenth grade schooling with eight other students. I wasn’t into the small classes or the lack of diversity and wanted to be nearer to home so I finally settled at Vista High for the last two years of high school. Coming out of Vista I was young and dumb and full of all kinds of aspirations involving doing very little at all, so I enrolled in
Mira Costa College and hung out there doing as little as possible for five semesters. I even managed to have a GPA one semester of 0.2. Don’t ask me what was going on; I really don’t recall. But I did my time and transferred to
Sonoma State University up in the lovely rainy North Bay Area. My sister and some of my friends were attending UC Berkeley so I spent most of my time hanging out down there. The drive, rain, and most of the people I met in Rohnert Park were tedious and switching schools was (and still is) obviously my thing so I moved back to Oceanside and enrolled in
CSU San Marcos. San Marcos was still very much a commuter school and North County San Diego an old bag of tricks for me. It fit my life well at the time and I finished up in four semesters with good marks and little difficulty. I think I was ready to get passed the undergraduate experience, and the time flew by. Before I knew it, it was 2002 and I was a BA of Literature and Writing Studies. I worked for a little while as a teaching assistant at Encinitas Country Day School, a Montessori based school. As I worked there I wondered what and where I would be next and finally just quit because I didn’t see myself progressing and stasis drives me crazy. I worked a myriad of odd jobs afterward until I finally decided that some more education would make me more competitive as a scholar of English. I began an MA program at
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It was a great time for me. I met a lot of new people and had numerous fun and new adventures. I think I became a much bigger fan of wine as a result of this excursion and now continue to be a coinsurer of the tasty beverage. I did two years at Cal Poly but didn’t really find what I was looking for from their program and I became a college drop out. I guess it doesn’t seem so bad when you have a BA already but needless to say I was disappointed in myself. So to help lift my opinion of myself I went on a serious adventure. My girlfriend Ashley and I moved from sunny Central California to the far east, Changwon, South Korea.
Because of my time spent at Fairbanks Country Day I was introduced to technology at a young age. In sixth grade I learned to touch type to a proficiency of 56 WPM. We used the early Macintosh models so I learned basic Hypercard and clocked a nearly insurmountable amount of hours on Sim City. I had quite a jump on the competition and could out do my parents by leaps and bounds at the age of ten. I was one of the original AOL users and learned how lame chat rooms were really fast. With the advent of the Personal Computer and their affordableness being the main issue, my parents were up and running with IBM and other PC's like Hewlett Packard, DELL, Sony, and so on.
Computers have remained a large part of my life since my early childhood experiences. I don't play online games. I don't know Html very well. I'm not an over achiever by any sense, but I know what I'm doing so to speak. I currently don't even own a computer so I really am at the mercy of which ever computer I happen to be using. Because this is most commonly the schools computers I am using all of the new software updates available.
I am a strong advocate of transforming our struggling educational system and a firm believer in the importance of educational equity and social justice. I am happy to be a part of CSU San Marcos's cutting edge ideology and involved in improving my knowledge and resource base for education.
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This article details the resources created by the SUSD Teacher and Student Community sites. These sites provide tools and resources to help students and teachers better communicate, collaborate, learn, share, and grow with the community at large. The goals of the sites are to be approachable, easy to use, efficient and technology rich. They will create tech driven workgroups; opportunities to discuss social, ethical, and legal issues; and create effective leaning environments. The sites are closed and closely monitored by employee- and teacher-defined access controls. The sites offer employee and student profiles with sophisticated access controls, blogging tools, secure file storage and sharing, podcasting abilities as well as flash-based players. This technology allows for a massive amount of information to be accessed and shared. It has potential to not only provide current and cutting edge resources but allows for broader communication and closer ties to the community.
What are some potential drawbacks to using technology in education?Some drawbacks to technology are the vulnerability of the online community. It becomes a major issue whether or not children are at risk of being exposed to something lewd or inappropriate when using technology. I think this is a major issue not only with education but also in the home.
