Advisory Board

DyKnow is privileged to have a group of distinguished educators on the DyKnow Advisory Board. These education experts provide unique insights and offer input on product direction, company initiatives, and solutions for engaging and helping learners.

Dr. Charles Bostian

Dr. Charles Bostian is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), where he has been a member of the faculty since 1969. With Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. with the highest honors in Electrical Engineering, all from North Carolina State University, Dr. Bostian is a Fellow of the IEEE and co-author of two widely used textbooks in satellite communications and radio frequency design. He is also the author or co-author of approximately 50 journal and IEEE magazine articles. Among many achievements, Dr. Bostian established and co-directed Virginia Tech's Satellite Communication Group. He currently directs the University's Center for Wireless Telecommunications (CWT). His teaching has been recognized by 10 Virginia Tech certificates of teaching excellence, election to the Virginia Tech Academy of Teaching Excellence, and the William E. Wine Award. He recently received Virginia Tech's Graduate School's 2008 Outstanding Dissertation Advisor Award. Never the ardent advocate for technology in the classroom, Dr. Bostian initially was put off by the implications of a one-to-one computing program for Virginia Tech. However, after implementing DyKnow and tablet PCs, Dr. Bostian is a true believer in technology's benefit to teaching students of the technology age.

Debbie Rice

Debbie Rice serves as the Director of Technology for Auburn City Schools in Auburn Alabama. She provides the vision and leadership behind the successful plan for integration, utilization, evaluation and expansion of educational technology in all academic disciplines for the Auburn City Schools - which was selected in September, 2007, as a Smart Showcase District. Currently, she is leading an aggressive one-to-one roll-out across the district to include extremely well articulated scale and sustainability components. Rice supported the development of the technology plan for the Auburn Early Education Center, an innovative, technology-rich kindergarten school, which was awarded the Intel / Scholastic School of Distinction Award. She serves on a variety of boards and committees at the local and state level and has presented at various state and national conferences including NECC, CoSN, Intel's 2006 Visionary Conference and Intel's 2006 Atlanta CoDIF and 2007 ePIC conferences. She is currently enrolled in the Masters Program at Auburn University seeking her degree in Administration and Supervision of Curriculum.

Elizabeth Helfant

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School (MICDS), a JK-12 school of 1250 students. After receiving a B.S. in Chemistry from Davidson College in North Carolina, Helfant started teaching. She has been a teacher for twenty years, nine of which has been spent as a faculty member at MICDS. Helfant played an integral role in planning and executing MICDS's 1:1 program, using tablet PCs and DyKnow. She is currently aiding in the deployment of tablets for grades 7, 9 and 10 for the 2008-09 school year. As a strong advocate for technology, Helfant frequently blogs for Digital Learning Environments and participates in conferences pertaining to digital learning. Helfant has done presentations at the International Conference on Education, Midwest Education Technology Conference and will be speaking at Lausanne Laptop and National Education Computing Conference during the summer of 2008.

Kimberly Henninger

Kimberly Henninger is the Director of Technology at Saint Ursula Academy (SUA), an all-girl Catholic High School with 711 students in Cincinnati, Ohio. Henninger received her B.S./B.A. from Northern Kentucky University in 1982 and in 1999 achieved her Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer + I (Internet) certification. An alumna of Saint Ursula, Henninger started her work at SUA in 1991 and supporting the vision of the principal, Frances Romweber, has been responsible for the development of technology in the school. Henninger started introducing technology at SUA with small multi-computer networks in a few classrooms and moved on to develop an all-campus, five building wireless network. She operated in the beginning of her tenure as director of technology pushing administrators and faculty to see the value of integrating technology in the classroom. Now, working with a technologically savy faculty and a vast technology infrastructure, Henninger has spearheaded SUA's One-to- One tablet PC program. Her tenacity and passion for technology in the classroom and the availablility of pen-based technology drove the Board of Trustees to unanimously adopt the program. Henninger is a great advocate for moving schools into the medium which most twenty-first century students understand best - a digital one.

Dr. Julia Williams

Dr. Julia Williams is the Executive Director of the Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment and Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana. Dr. Williams has been involved in the fields of assessment and evaluation for the last ten years and has been active in the development and implementation of the RosE Portfolio System, a data collection and evaluation software used for the purpose of student learning outcomes assessment. Her articles on assessment, electronic portfolios, and technical communication have appeared in the Technical Communication Quarterly, Technical Communication: Journal of the Society for Technical Communication, The International Journal of Engineering Education, and both the Newsletter and Transactions of the IEEE Professional Communication Society. In 2005, she and a team of faculty from Rose-Hulman were awarded a "Tablet PC Technology, Curriculum, and Higher Education 2005" grant from Microsoft Research; the project investigates the impact of pen-based computing and collaboration software on student learning.

Dr. Vince DiStasi

Dr. Vince DiStasi serves as the Vice President - Chief Information Officer and Associate Professor of Chemistry at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. A 1988 graduate of Grove City College, he earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1994 from Indiana University, Bloomington. Currently, Vince is responsible for a comprehensive information technology strategic focus impacting all areas of the College. Building on one of the early and successful 1:1 mobile computer programs in higher education, he has led the focus and implementation of Tablet PC technology to enhance teaching and learning across the curriculum. He is an investigator in a research study "Measuring Effectiveness of Tablet PCs in Teaching and Learning using Adaptive Book and Collaborative-Immersive Technologies (AB/C-IT)" which is made possible from Microsoft Research through the Tablet PC Technology and Higher Education RFP. Vince also serves on the Higher-Education Advisory Council for Hewlett-Packard, the Jenzabar LMS Advisory Board, and the Pittsburgh Executive Advisory Council for the CIO Forum & Executive IT Summit.