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Rita Oates

Oates Associates
President, Oates Associates
Bloomington, IN
About Rita Oates
How we can help students learn more so they succeed in life? When and where does technology come into that success equation? Rita Oates has been working on that throughout her career, in K12, higher ed, in for profit organizations and in volunteer groups.
Dr. Rita Oates directed ed tech in Miami-Dade County Schools, the fourth largest school district in the USA, for more than seven years. She was education editor of the first U.S. online service with color and graphics, VIEWTRON, which launched in Miami Beach. She was chair of the Ed Tech graduate program at Barry University and VP of education at ePals.
In 2010 FSTE (Florida Society for Technology in Education) gave her the Lifetime Ed Tech Leadership award, and she became a member of the CoSN Volunteer Hall of Fame. She was the Florida affiliate representative to ISTE. She has been a George Lucas Educational Foundation Faculty Associate.
She has written 15 books and more than 100 articles about ed tech, curriculum, school reform and parental involvement. She has spoken to almost one thousand PTA meetings about technology in schools, much of that under sponsorship of Microsoft. She and her husband wrote a column, "Kids and Computers," for more than seven years in the largest regional parenting magazine in the U.S. A skilled grant writer and trainer of grant writers, she helped her children's middle school get a $1.9 million grant, the district win more than $10 million, and other groups from $500 to millions to make their dreams come true.
Since 1994 she has led Oates Associates, an ed tech consulting firm that has had contracts with BBN, Scholastic, Microsoft, the U.S. Postal Service, CELT Corp., and many educational publishers and school districts. She and members of the Oates Associates team do research, grant development, PD for teachers and leaders, write articles, help make presentations at conferences, and work with leading universities to design new teacher education programs.
At ePals, as vice president of education markets from 2007-2013, she worked with state and national education leaders and large districts to successfully implement ePals LearningSpace, a virtual workspace, and free web 2.0 tools such as ePals SchoolMail, Classroom Match, and projects in schools in the U.S. and and abroad.
In summer 2013 she was a visiting professor for Emerson College at their campus in Leysin, Switzerland, in an intensive graduate course on innovation in education.
As a child she lived in Costa Rica and attended fifth grade with 41 other girls, in Spanish. Living in Miami, where "todo el mundo" speaks Spanish, she raised two bilingual children who are now young adults, working for the U.S. State Department and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.
She lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, and spends the summer and fall in Bloomington, Indiana, where she earned her master's and PhD degrees.
Follow her on Twitter @ritaoates
Find her on LinkedIn too.