Jeff+Zemsky

It's exciting being a part of this PLP group experience. My own path in education has taken me through a variety of environments, some heavily technology-driven and some completely unplugged from the Internet. I taught middle and upper school Latin first in Philadelphia, where it was always fun to balance texts, discussions, and media-based instruction in the classroom. I spent two years in New York City, where I was constantly plugged-in as a graduate student in instructional technology - and holding onto a dream of creating an online poetry sharing site. But life then lured me to New Mexico to be the director of an incredible environmental non-profit foundation, Cottonwood Gulch, which works to unplug students from around the country and connect people to the land and to each other. In a lot ways, those wilderness expeditions presented an ideal classroom of mine: access to awe-inspiring input data (the Southwest's landscape) and a shared commitment to working as a team (the hiking group). Plus, the side of a white van covered in red dirt makes for a wonderful white-board!

I now live in York, PA, where I am Head of the Middle and Upper School at York Country Day School. In terms of teaching and technology, we are an interesting case. We are a small school, committed to highly individualized instruction and lots of professional collaboration. But this small school - where we can talk to all of our colleagues face to face every day - is part of the much larger York College of Pennsylvania institution, which provides all our technology infrastructure. This contrast can make technology as a whole feel even more impersonal inside our own building.

I am looking forward to working with everyone this year. It will be a fun challenge to reconnect with shared online learning, especially since I have been away from it in large part for the past 8 years. I know there are great surprises ahead.

Contact information: Jeff Zemsky Head of Middle and Upper School York Country Day School jzemsky@ycds.org