After many years presenting for Apple and sharing stories on how Cathedral’s teachers have been taking advantage of the iPads to transform education here in San Diego, Mr. Matt Baier, Cathedral’s Director of Center for Innovation, turns the page on his teaching career for the title of Apple Distinguished Educator Regional Program Manager for the Americas.

Commencing on the sixteenth of March, Mr. Baier embarked upon his new career in the Bay Area at Apple’s headquarters located in Cupertino. Traveling back and forth for the remainder of the school-year, with kids in elementary school and a wife at home, Mr.Baier will not move from San Diego until this summer.

Mr. Baier’s years spent within the Apple Distinguished Educator program opened his options to careers with the company. This led Mr. Baier to apply for a job at Apple he found posted on an online community for Apple Distinguished Educators.

This “neat opportunity” Mr. Baier found himself applying for was driven by positive experiences he’d encountered with Apple. Mr. Baier admired Apple’s community of “people who are innovative, take risks, work hard, and are excited about transforming education. [Apple’s] not just about selling devices, it’s about asking, ‘How can we make education better?’” said Mr. Baier.

The job itself revolves around Mr. Baier working with teachers looking to transform learning in the classroom. “The challenge of doing something new,” Mr. Baier said, caused him to take up a job that works with teachers in classroom to help them learn about innovating education. Mr. Baier now has the opportunity to engage teachers in technology versus teaching in the classroom as he had been for years.

With his new career path, Mr. Baier is excited “about interacting with super awesome teachers and giving them an opportunity to share their stories and what they are doing that’s awesome,” he said. Looking forward to his new job in the Bay Area, Mr. Baier’s new beginnings come with a string of goodbyes.

“I thought I would be at Cathedral for the rest of my teaching career, never imagining that I would leave,” he said. He’s sure to miss the weather, food, and friends he made in San Diego, but Mr. Baier will miss the community of innovative learners he was a part of even more.

Watching the transition at Cathedral, from the tried and true methods of the past to the modernity of the iPads, excited Mr. Baier, who witnessed students’ reluctancy to use the strange tablets. This hesitance has transformed into an excitement to harness the power of technology in the classroom. As our iPad-integrated school continues to educate students while striving to achieve the seamlessness of technology in the classroom, Mr. Baier has begun to “see the students begin to take that ownership of their learning,” he said.

He hopes that his time spent at Cathedral has helped “teachers to feel empowered totake risks and not feel like they have to keep doing things the same way that they’ve always been done. Education can be more interactive, and kids can take ownership of their own learning. As educators, we can help find ways to connect what’s happening in our classroom to the real world, so that hopefully, the learning is more meaningful to the students,” Mr. Baier said.