Welcome!

Greetings!

Welcome to A Community of Practice, an education blog created to share ideas, research, and practices for creating community in digital learning. For those of you who I’ve not met yet, my name is Zack Cyphers. I am an education and technology specialist at the National Museum of the US Army. Everyone always asks, “where is that?” I’ll explain:  The Army is the only branch of the military without a national museum, and when construction is finished in 2019, the Army’s art and artifact collections will move into a beautiful new facility on Fort Belvoir in Virginia (down the road from Mount Vernon). Right now I’m helping to write and produce education programs, games, videos, tours, guides, and interactives, so that visitors will have some great experiences when the museum opens.

I studied film and media arts at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I taught documentary filmmaking to high school kids in a “second chance” diploma recovery program. My students shot a documentary about the high dropout rate in Philadelphia public schools. This experience led me to decide to become a certified teacher. I moved back home and earned my secondary teaching license in English and Communications at the University of Pittsburgh. 

My most recent classroom teaching job was in Germany working for the US Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA) - schools for our overseas military kids. I worked in two schools, one on an Army base in a town called Schweinfurt and one in an Air Force community in Bitburg. In my four years overseas I taught 7, 10, 11, 12 and AP English, and three levels of Video Production. I also supervised an after school homework club and a lunchtime Doctor Who club! When the school I worked in went through a “realignment”, I was going to get transferred to Japan, so I decided to move back to the US instead, where I took my current job at the Army Museum Project Office in 2015.

I’ve been a fan and proponent of technology in education for a while. I had some great PD opportunities while working for DODEA - I trained on Apple and Google technologies in the classroom, got to supervise a middle school STEMposium, participated in curriculum mapping meetings for my district, and was chosen to be a teacher trainer for my school’s adoption of Schoology. I’m proud of the fact that I used a lot of these tools to create a nearly paperless classroom.

I'm an anomaly in this year's DDLS cohort at George Masonbecause I’m not currently working as a classroom teacher. I've always been interested in what technology can do for education. Because the Army's new museum will be the center of a larger Army community, I'm particularly interested in how technology and digital collaboration can enhance informal learning in museum settings. The Army is interested in building a digital presence for its collection, a "museum without walls" that can be accessed by guests anywhere in the world. I know that the Army family has members all over the world, who all want to feel connected to something - home, the Army culture, American society, and family. I am curious about how digital interaction and collaboration can help connect members of this enormous family, and how the museum can position itself at the center of this interaction.