At the start of the final day of the TCEA 2025 Convention and Exposition, I headed over to Room 18C on Level 4 of the Austin Convention Center, which is due to be demolished, and was thrilled to encounter Dr. Rose Irungu. Her presentation with colleague Sara Reed?

iPad Adventures for Littles. Dr. Rose had a wonderful way of explaining when and how technology is introduced at the appropriate moment for young learners, and reminded me of the SOLO Taxonomy as a tool to identify when to best bring technology into the picture.

I love how Dr. Rose spoke to creating foundational memories for students, such as the first touch of a leaf, before even thinking about looking at a leaf on a screen.

Listen to Dr. Rose Irungu share her thoughts.

As I suspected, Dr. Rose Irungu has a fascinating backstory, which I read here.

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Read the Interview Transcript

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Miguel Guhlin: “Hi, this is Miguel. I’m here at the last day of TCEA 2025 convention with Rose Irungu from Fort Worth ISD. And I believe that she’s going to be presenting on a topic that has long captivated the interests of technologists everywhere.

Something along the lines of how do you use technology with Littles? How do you use iPad with Littles? So how do you? How do you do it, Rose? But tell us first a little bit about yourself.”

Rose Irungu: “Well, my name is Doctor Rose Irungu. I’m from Fort Worth ISD. I’ve been in education for 17 years and now I just love helping teachers know how to integrate technology appropriately so that they are not still missing the fundamentals of teaching, but still being able to meet the 21st century skills. So how I do that is we focus on the strategy and not the technology piece.

So for example, if a teacher wants to teach maybe a unit on gardening, you know, instead of being so focused on what can the iPad do for us, let’s see what we can do with our eyes first, you know, and our hands and our fingers. And then once we’ve mastered that, now we can take the technology to enhance maybe for storage or for presentation or something like that.

But at the same time, we still need to be aware that our students are digital students, digital natives. So we do have to start teaching them those skills early enough of how to manipulate, not just to swipe left and right, but to be able to use to start typing, to start coding and things like that.”

Miguel Guhlin: “I was listening. You sparked two thoughts. But one of the first ones was the there was somebody talking about tech intentions or use or ed tech versus tech education. And it sounds like you’re really wanting to develop the students understanding their brain because of the eyes and, you know, the hands on piece before you get to bringing the technology and where they can learn the technology, but it’s not a using the technology to teach the kids.”

Rose Irungu: “Yes, absolutely. You cannot replace like if I let me go back to the gardening unit, you cannot replace the touching the leaf or the going out to collect the cell samples by looking at them on the iPad. So we can still do all those things. We have to just think about our end goal before we start putting the technology in there.

What do I want the students to achieve at the end of the day? And then technology becomes one of the tools in your belt to help achieve that.

So I want them to be able to know the parts of a plant. We have so many plants outside. They need to take that nature walk. And then as they learn, they can take pictures and then they can start to differentiate different shapes or different colors and all that. But the idea for us is to get the goal. What is my end goal for this standard? You know, and then once I get my end goal, then I can bring in the technology or I can bring in the other pieces that need to come in here.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Wow. The second thought that you sparked and everything you said sort of feeds into it, I think, is the have you heard of something called the Solo taxonomy?”

Rose Irungu: “No, I haven’t.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Well, it’s pretty interesting. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on it at all. But it talks about unistructural, multistructural, and it poses these levels where pre-structural is sort of that prior knowledge where kids really don’t have, I mean, they just have whatever they’ve been taught and beliefs and things. And then unistructural is they might have one idea, one fact.

And then multistructural, they might have lots of facts, but they’re not really connected and maybe experiences that haven’t found a way to connect or they don’t have an understanding of that. And then as you get up to the higher levels, you eventually get to extended abstract, where you understand the relationships between all of this.

And this is described by phases of learning. This is John Hattie’s work and the work of other researchers. And as you’re talking and sharing about the, you know, the field of the leaf, you immediately evoked that memory for me. And so I was just thinking about it in terms of AI. But also in all technologies, that’s the piece.

I see they’ve opened our room that we’ll be using at different times in the day. Dr. Rose, thank you so much for sharing your insights. It’s a pleasure to have met you today.”

Rose Irungu: “Well, thank you, Miguel. I appreciate you.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Folks, thanks for listening in. One of the last conversations at TCEA 2025. Take care. Have a good day.”

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