About

Jaclyn Wickham is a teacher-turned-technologist exploring the potential of technology to enhance teaching and learning. In her former role as a classroom teacher, Jaclyn increased student achievement and created personalized learning experiences for her students through the use of educational technology such as interactive whiteboard lessons, student response systems, and iPads. After experiencing firsthand the positive impact of technology in her classroom, she became dedicated to helping other educators implement and sustain successful adoptions of instructional technology.

As a professional development specialist and instructional coach, Jaclyn traveled to hundreds of K-12 classrooms in schools across NYC and the nation to deliver job-embedded professional development (PD), model instructional best practices, and coach teachers on how to integrate technology into their curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices--an experience that provided her with an intimate view of the challenges teachers face on a daily basis. During her experiences traveling to different schools and working alongside teachers, Jaclyn began to accumulate ideas for educational apps and digital tools to address some of the challenges she identified, inspired by her collaborations and conversations with the teachers and students she worked with on a daily basis.

As the list of ideas continued to grow longer, Jaclyn was inspired to learn to code, so that she could build working prototypes of the innovative tools she imagined for students and teachers. This quest led her to NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a graduate program which focuses on concepts central to interaction design, design research, web/app development, human-computer interaction, interface design, and ubiquitous computing. Here, she spent two years exploring new and emerging technologies such as virtual reality, tangible interfaces, augmented reality, and wearables, with a specific focus on their possible applications in education.

Jaclyn has presented at numerous technology leadership conferences on various EdTech topics including 21st century skills in education, differentiated instruction, digital citizenship, project-based learning, inquiry-based practices, game-based learning, and blended learning models. She is passionate about education reform, and is continually exploring innovative ways to design and create technology to solve some of the most persistent problems in education.