On building trust, strengthening community, and connecting the people and ideas that move education forward.
INTERVIEW | by Victor Rivero
For more than two decades, Jenn Womble has helped shape one of education technology’s most influential annual gatherings. As Conference Chair of FETC, she has earned a reputation as one of the field’s most respected and trusted leaders—not only for guiding the conference’s continued growth, but for cultivating the relationships that make it matter. Equally at ease with classroom educators, district and state leaders, technology executives, researchers, nonprofit organizations, entrepreneurs, and industry partners, Womble has a rare ability to bring people together, draw out the best in leaders, and unite them around a shared mission: improving teaching and learning through thoughtful innovation.
‘…a place where ideas are exchanged, partnerships begin, careers are shaped, and the education technology community comes together around a shared purpose. ‘
Known for her tireless work ethic, collaborative spirit, and infectious enthusiasm, she has helped make FETC more than a conference. Under her leadership, it has become a place where ideas are exchanged, partnerships begin, careers are shaped, and the education technology community comes together around a shared purpose. Whether convening conversations, building relationships, or helping others succeed, Womble has long been one of the people who quietly moves the profession forward. In this conversation, she reflects on leadership, the evolution of FETC, the changing landscape of education technology, and the opportunities ahead for education.
For readers who may not know your story, tell us about your path. What first drew you to education technology, and what ultimately led you to FETC?
I’m the daughter of a computer engineer and an educator, and I’m a product of a university lab school. So maybe this was always going to happen. However, I had planned to become a lawyer. Then, after graduate school, I took a substitute teaching job, walked into a high school classroom, and canceled that plan entirely. I spent the next 17 years in Leon County Schools teaching AP Psychology, World History, World Geography, and Law Studies—both in a low-SES high school and a wealthy suburban one—to every kind of student, from dropout prevention to gifted and honors. The daily creative work of instructional design never stopped being fulfilling.
Because I didn’t come out of a college of education, my district required me to take additional coursework and attend every professional development session offered, from bloodborne pathogens to differentiated instruction. That turned out to be the luckiest requirement of my career. It’s where my respect for professional learning was born. I joined every committee I could out of wanting to understand how the whole ecosystem actually worked. Eventually, as a National Board-Certified teacher, I led beginning teacher mentoring and intern training, served on state assessment committees, and ran action research and professional development for the district and state.
‘I joined every committee I could out of wanting to understand how the whole ecosystem actually worked.’
Somewhere in there, I became the teacher other teachers came to when technology showed up in their room and they didn’t know what to do with it. That wasn’t a job title. That was just what happened when I got curious about a tool before anyone told me to.
That curiosity turned into something bigger when Intel selected me as a Master Trainer for Teach to the Future, and I ended up training more than 1,200 teachers across our district in how to actually use technology to teach. I chaired our district’s Technology Education Committee, wrote the technology competency standards we adopted, and wrote the grants that funded the work. And I realized the thing I loved most wasn’t the tools. It was standing in a room full of educators and watching them get excited about a new way to reach kids and improve teaching and learning. One teacher changes what’s possible for 150 students a year. Train the teachers and the leaders who support them, and the math changes entirely.
My first FETC presentation was in 1994, sharing an online credit-retrieval system we were building. FETC found me again because of that instinct to share and connect in 2010. What’s kept me here for 15-plus years as Chair is that FETC isn’t really a conference to me. It’s the one week a year our entire community—including teachers, superintendents, researchers, entrepreneurs, state leaders, and industry partners—shows up in the same room to swap what’s genuinely working, celebrate learning, and walk out ready to lift their schools.
I didn’t leave the classroom. I just found a much bigger one.
You’ve led FETC through remarkable changes in education and technology. Looking back, what experiences have most shaped your leadership, and what have they taught you about the role educational technology should play in learning?
The through-line has always been strategy and community, and I mean those as one idea, not two. Strategy without community is just a plan nobody trusts. Community without strategy is a pleasant gathering that doesn’t move anything forward.
‘Strategy without community is just a plan nobody trusts. Community without strategy is a pleasant gathering that doesn’t move anything forward.’
So the work, as I’ve come to understand it, is intentional dot-connecting: pulling research, edtech companies, district leaders, national trends, and policy developers into the same conversation early enough that what gets built actually serves a real classroom and a real student. That timing and relational intelligence is the whole game. A year too late, and you’re reacting to a product decision someone already made without an educator in the room.
When FETC was founded in 1981, IT directors were trying to figure out how to get hardwiring into schools. The challenges are increasing in scope and size; now, everything from cybersecurity to instructional design leveraging AI needs a solution. The mission hasn’t moved an inch: provide high-quality modern education to every child. Regardless of the technology, student well-being and academic success sit at the center of everything I do, and that never wavers. Being constantly curious helps uncover new solutions and connect people to possibilities.
Founding the State Network Alliance taught me that lesson at scale. Watching state-level edtech organizations—each doing extraordinary work in isolation—start sharing their playbooks with one another instead of rebuilding them independently showed me what’s possible when you invest in the connective tissue and not just the content. Every one of those organizations has grown as a result. We are genuinely stronger together.
‘Every one of those organizations has grown as a result. We are genuinely stronger together.’
Building the STEM Excellence Awards taught me something different: recognizing the schools already doing it right is one of the most strategic moves available to you because it hands every other district a real, working model instead of a theory. In education, a proven model is how scale actually happens. Those schools became national references, and that’s worth more than any written framework; elevating what is working on the national stage encourages scaling.
Serving on Florida’s K–12 AI Education Task Force right now, alongside researchers, superintendents, and technology leaders, has reinforced something I’ve believed since my own classroom: technology’s role is never to replace the relationship between a teacher and a student. It’s to remove what’s standing in the way of that relationship. Every tool I’ve ever gotten excited about has passed one test: Does this give an educator more room to teach and a student more room to learn?
The tools change every year. That test hasn’t changed once. AI is no different.
One of your greatest strengths is bringing people together. FETC has become a place where teachers, district leaders, researchers, entrepreneurs, and industry partners connect in meaningful ways. What’s your philosophy on building community, and why do those relationships matter so much to education?
My philosophy is simple to say and hard to do: relational intelligence has to lead, not follow. I don’t treat community as a nice layer on top of the “real” strategic work. It is the strategic work.
When I’m designing FETC programming or building a content partnership with CoSN, NASEF, Future Ready, or CAST, the question I’m asking is: Which conversations aren’t happening yet that need to be, and who has to be at the table for that conversation to go anywhere?
‘Which conversations aren’t happening yet that need to be, and who has to be at the table for that conversation to go anywhere?’
A few years ago, I wanted attendees to experience an entire strand of sessions conducted completely in VR. To make that happen, I had to assemble vendor partners, curriculum providers, connectivity and device specialists, school leaders, and educators—and then bring in teachers from Optima Academy to actually lead the sessions. Four days of a live VR classroom, synchronized in real time, for thousands of teachers and district leaders who had never seen learning look like that. Not one part of that was possible alone.
That’s why I’ve spent as much energy on the State Network Alliance and our national partnerships as on the stage itself. A keynote can inspire someone for a day. A relationship between a rural district leader and a researcher who will answer their texts changes what’s possible for kids for years. I’ve watched partnerships that started in a hallway at FETC become statewide initiatives. I’ve watched teachers arrive as attendees, come back as presenters, then as advisors, and eventually become the people I call for advice myself. The real magic happens in the hallways.
The reason it matters is structural. Education doesn’t scale through mandates. It scales through trust and proven models, adapted to local norms and culture. If a district leader trusts the person recommending a strategy, and a teacher trusts the leader who brought it to them, the work sticks. Break any link in that chain, and even a beautifully designed program stalls. Leadership is the key ingredient in every integration, far more than the product.
So when people ask what I actually do, the honest answer is: I build the trust infrastructure that lets good strategy travel from a research paper to a classroom without losing what made it good in the first place. And the golden thread through all of it is a mission to positively affect the lives of millions of school-aged children in this country.
‘And the golden thread through all of it is a mission to positively affect the lives of millions of school-aged children in this country.’
Education technology is entering a new chapter. As AI advances, budgets tighten, schools demand greater evidence of impact, and technology faces increasing scrutiny, what gives you the greatest optimism, and how do you believe the field should evolve to best serve learners and educators?
Last year at FETC, a drone show flew above our audience—entirely coded, designed, and performed by six students from St. Vrain Valley Schools. Not a vendor demo. Students. That’s not a preview of the future of education; that’s a CTE program already running. I am constantly searching across the country for district projects that need to be amplified and scaled.
This is the most exciting time I’ve seen in this field. Education and technology are on the front pages of newspapers, and that attention is pulling researchers, policymakers, leaders, families, and practitioners into the same conversation about how learning gets redesigned and impacted with technology. The world is talking about the future of education on a global scale. It’s also a calling to the next generation of educators: We need your creativity, your knowledge, and your technical fluency, and the profession has rarely been more interesting.
What gives me the greatest optimism, honestly, is that this moment is forcing our field to be responsible. For years, excitement about a new tool was enough. Tighter budgets and real scrutiny mean districts are finally asking the question they always should have asked: Does this actually help a student learn, and can you show me? I welcome that. We have more than 30 years of edtech research, journals, and databases—rich and robust research that district leaders look to in making decisions. Our children deserve technology grounded in human development and cognitive science, backed by evidence, and safe to use. This moment will separate the educators and companies doing real work from the noise, and that’s healthy for all of us.
‘This moment will separate the educators and companies doing real work from the noise, and that’s healthy for all of us.’
On AI specifically, I hold two things to be true at once. I’m genuinely excited by what I’m seeing in practice: teachers finally able to provide the personalized feedback they always wanted to give every student, with real-time insight into what each child understands. That’s a real equity gain. And teachers are becoming builders, creating tools for their own classrooms instead of waiting for someone to solve their issues.
But that optimism has to travel with healthy skepticism. AI wisdom has to matter more than AI usage. Education is the largest economic driver in America. Students, educators, and parents need to understand how these systems work and their economic and cultural impact, how their data is being used, and how to critically evaluate what comes out the other end. This begins with conversations differentiating commercial technology from educational technology used in schools. Data privacy, ethics, and human oversight are not guardrails we bolt on later. They belong in the strategy on day one.
Where the field needs to evolve is toward transferable skills and competencies over tool skills. The AI platform a district adopts this year needs to build skills students will take into the workforce and into the future, regardless of their career choice. I’ve watched enough tool cycles to know that pattern cold. What doesn’t expire is a student’s ability to think critically, express metacognition, ask a good question, and evaluate information they didn’t generate themselves.
Build curious thinkers, not just users. That’s the conversation I’m trying to keep at the center of every room I’m in right now—with the Task Force, with webinar audiences, with District Administration readers, and on the FETC stage.
Looking ahead, what impact do you hope your leadership will have on education, and what kind of leader do you hope you’ve helped others become?
I hope it’s simple, and a little invisible, the way the best community-building usually is. I hope that years from now, a district leader can point to a partnership, a program, an implementation idea, a connection, or a piece of guidance that started as a conversation at FETC or through the State Network Alliance—and that it’s still helping students. I’m not looking to have my name on the outcome. I’m looking for the outcome to still be running and impacting learning!
‘I’m not looking to have my name on the outcome. I’m looking for the outcome to still be running and impacting learning!’
I also hope I’ve modeled a kind of leadership that connects people and demonstrates that the best ideas come through synergy. You can convene people, ask the right questions, and then uncover solutions by amplifying a variety of voices and practitioners.
If there are leaders coming up behind me—district technologists, state edtech directors, teachers stepping into bigger roles—who feel like they never have to choose between being strategic and being relational, that would mean more to me than any award. You can be both. I’ve spent decades continuously reading, learning, and adapting to the evolving ecosystem to better connect solutions to schools and amplify what works in education.
Alright, wow and thank you, Jenn! Here’s one more for extra credit: After all these years, what continues to inspire you to do this work?
Honestly? It’s still the moment a teacher walks off the FETC expo floor or out of a workshop completely lit up because they just found the thing—the tool, the idea, the person—that’s going to change what’s possible for their kids next fall. I’ve watched that exact moment happen for 15 years, and it has never once gotten old. It’s better than any Christmas gift!
Experimentation keeps it fun! Helping adults find new ways of learning and enjoy the process is invigorating! Over the past few years, I have developed Expo Hall Tours at FETC to model how to communicate with companies, explore products, and connect education influencers and buyers. What started as an experiment to teach expo hall behaviors and increase floor traffic has grown to ten fantastic tours that attendees can’t get enough of each year! Listening to the needs of those you serve and being willing to experiment has been the secret to success.
But it’s bigger than that now. I became a classroom teacher because I wanted students to become curious, lifelong learners like me—people who love figuring things out, not just people who can pass a test. Everything since, from Master Trainer to FETC to the Task Force and board leadership, has been the same mission wearing a bigger coat.
Strategy and community aren’t work for me. They’re just how you scale a love of learning past one classroom, one district, one state, until it reaches every kid. That’s still the whole job. Everything else is how we get there.
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Victor Rivero is the Editor-in-Chief of EdTech Digest and Executive Producer of EdTech Digest’s Future Focus Forums (F3), bringing together edtech companies with top U.S. school district technology leaders for the most effective way to get feedback on new and existing products. Write to: victor@edtechdigest.com.
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