Vanitha Chandrasekhar

Hi, I am Vanitha Chandrasekhar and I have been with the Long Beach Unified School District for over 25 years. I started as an elementary teacher and then moved on to middle school, worked as a Resource Specialist and Technology Elective teacher. For the past 15 years I have been part of the Office of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Development as the Educational Technology Coordinator where I oversee the training and district-wide implementation of instructional technology. My responsibilities include working closely with the Curriculum Leaders and Information Technology Services to support the school sites and their instructional needs with a recent focus on the integration of technology into the Common Core State Standards and preparation for the computer – adaptive Smarter Balanced Assessments. I grew up in India and lived in the Middle East before I moved to Minnesota and then California. I received my Masters in Educational Administration from CSU Dominguez Hills and my Ed.D. from the University of California, Irvine and Cal Poly Pomona Joint Program on Educational Leadership with a focus on one-to-one laptop programs. I was also fortunate enough to be the recipient of the Fulbright Memorial Fund Scholarship 2003 which provided me the opportunity to visit Japan for three weeks and visit educational institutions and study their teaching practices. Over the past few years I have been part of Superintendent Torlakson’s Educational Technology Task Force, Co-chair of the CUE Legislative Advocacy Committee and a Lecturer at University of California, Irvine in their School of Education. This past summer I completed and received the Leading Edge Certification for Administrators through the Orange County Department of Education and recently qualified as a Microsoft Certified Educator.  I truly believe that it is important to engage learners using diverse resources and digital tools and my expectation for this course is to learn about ways to use the online platform to provide opportunities for learning.