ITP - 025: EdTech Leadership and Career Growth

Matt: Welcome to the International Teacher Podcast with your host Greg, the single guy and Matt the family guy. We're recording episodes from around the globe to tell you about the best kept secret in education. That’s right, it’s teaching overseas. We’re glad to have you.

Greg: I’d like to welcome our guest right now. He’s coming to us from the U.S., and Tony DePrado is not new to the scene. He has been overseas in several countries. You’ve been in Korea, Shanghai, and Dubai, as well as teaching in the States. I’d like to welcome Tony DePrado to the show. Welcome, Tony.

Tony: Thank you for having me.

Greg: First of all, Tony, can you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now? You’re back in the States after going overseas. Are you teaching right now?

Tony: Well, I’m not teaching. I’m a Chief Technology Officer, or what they usually call a Director of Technology. So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m full administrative here. I don’t do any teaching at all in the U.S.—just all the fun stuff, managing all the things no one wants to talk about and all the things that are boring.

Greg: Yeah, I have a problem with my printer. Can you help me out?

Tony: What you need to remember—first, you always want to choose the best tool for the job. The best tool is always a hammer, and anything can be a hammer. So those are the rules for fixing printers. That’s from Office Space—take it out to the middle of a field. I’m sure you’ve probably busted up a couple of printers overseas like I have.

Greg: Yeah, yeah. Can we talk a little bit about your history and what got you into international teaching? You were overseas for several years.

Tony: Sure. Before I got into international teaching, I actually did professional-level video production and multimedia production. Back in the day, I used to make programmable CDs and DVDs and stuff. I did a variety of freelance work, and I was kind of on the edge of when streaming on the internet started.

I was streaming stuff in 1999, which was really, really hard. So anyway, I was basically working nonstop for about three years. I had finished my master’s degree, and I was burned out. I had always wanted to travel, and I always wanted to go to Japan because I had worked with an exchange program for a long time.

So the first thing I actually did was move to Japan and start working—not in an international school. I just worked constantly. I had multiple jobs. I did a lot of weird jobs because I wanted to study Japanese for three years while working. Eventually, I was working in public schools there, which was strange, and still doing tech work on the side. I had all these weird contracts going on.

Then I had a friend I did my master’s degree with, and he was like, “You really should just work in the international school scene if you want to stay overseas.” I was like, “What’s that?” So he explained it all to me, and I got hooked up with Search Associates.

I was not a good international school candidate. Even with a decent skill set, one of those skills was not making a resume. I couldn’t present myself well. If you skipped everything I wrote and just looked at what I could do, you’d be like, “Oh yeah.” But if you actually read it, I was all over the place—completely disorganized.

So I didn’t know anything about recruitment, and in July—which obviously means no one has taken a job, right? It’s like whatever’s left—some school in Dubai reached out to me and said, “Hey, would you be interested in moving to Dubai and helping us build a secondary school IT department and curriculum?”

I talked to the principal on the phone. He said, “Look, we need to do programming, robotics, and all kinds of weird stuff, and you have a lot of weird stuff on your resume. We don’t want to teach Word processing or PowerPoint. We want to get into some of this other stuff because we’re trying to expand the school, and we need something that’s attractive to parents.”

I was like, “Yeah, that sounds cool.” So then I literally looked up Dubai on an image search. That’s really the level of decision-making I had back then. So that’s kind of how it started.

Greg: Isn’t it interesting that a lot of us—I mean, I’m just like you—when I heard about international teaching, somebody said, “Go to Iowa,” and I was like, “What do you mean go to Iowa?”

Tony: Yeah.

Greg: And then with your talk about the fair—that’s in Iowa—the UNI fair—and you’re talking about social, social, social. It’s like the best kept secret.

So you spent time in Dubai and you actually went into IT director, did some comp sci teaching, and all that kind of jazz. Then from Dubai?

Tony: Then from Dubai, I ended up in Shanghai. Even after all that time, the situation was exactly the same. I was in my car in Dubai, just left a conference at the American school nearby, and my phone rang.

This guy was like, “Hey, this is so-and-so. I’m the head of school at a new school in Shanghai. We’re building out our boarding school, and we need somebody that has some really weird skills because we have all these challenges.” He was straight with me. He said, “Nobody really wants this job. It’s going to be tough.”

I was like, “Well, I’ve never really thought about moving to China.” And he said, “If you want to be on the forefront of the next generation of what’s going to happen on our planet, then you need to understand China.”

He explained the whole setup, and the school was incredibly unique. I didn’t even realize at first that it was the first officially licensed foreign curriculum school in the country until I got there. We were inspected all the time—constantly audited.

They told me, “We’re an experimental school, and the government can shut us down at any point.” And I was like, “Why am I working here?” But at the same time, there were no restrictions in terms of curriculum innovation. It was an IB school, not a testing factory.

You could send kids from anywhere in China to this boarding school, and we even had foreign students coming in to study IB with Chinese students. It was a really complex and unique environment.

From a technology standpoint, it was incredibly challenging. You had content restrictions and government oversight at a level that was very different from places like the Middle East.

That’s how it happened. I just picked up the phone, and he was honest that the job would be tough. Most candidates didn’t want it.

Tony: You know, it wasn’t horrible, but it was intense. We had to rebuild everything. The housing situation alone was a mess. We showed up and were told to stay in a hotel near the school, and it turned out to be terrible—but we didn’t realize we had options because we didn’t ask. That was one of the first lessons: don’t assume anything about how systems work in a new country.

We spent two weeks barely staying in the hotel and instead just exploring the city constantly. That actually turned into a great experience because we got to know a huge part of Shanghai very quickly.

The job itself required a complete rebuild of the school’s network. I told faculty it would take six months before things felt better and another full year before things were where they needed to be. It was a year-and-a-half plan just to stabilize things.

At the same time, I was building out PowerSchool, working with vendors, dealing with government regulations, and managing infrastructure limitations. That first year was one of the busiest of my life.

But once everything came together, we could focus on real innovation—robotics, engineering clubs, VR systems. Students were building things constantly. There was a real payoff.

Tony: After Shanghai, I went to Korea. That happened almost the same way—through a phone call from someone I knew. They needed someone quickly to help build out systems and leadership structures.

I ended up doing both technology leadership and serving as a high school vice principal. It was another example of how jobs come through relationships rather than applications.

Tony: That’s something I always tell people. My jobs didn’t come from sending out applications. They came from people who knew me or knew someone who knew me. Even the Dubai job came through a conversation with a recruiter who made a call on my behalf.

Once you get that introduction, you skip a lot of barriers.

Tony: I see people get stuck focusing on reviews or random advice online. They’ll say, “This job looks perfect, but I saw one bad review, so I’m not taking it.” That doesn’t make sense. You have to focus on your own goals and your own research.

Tony: That’s part of why I created my newsletter, Pancake on a Stick. It started during the pandemic when people were struggling to find jobs. I wanted to create a fast, direct way to connect teachers with openings.

It’s simple: a list of jobs. No fluff. If something speaks to you, you apply. If not, you move on.

Tony: The name comes from a ridiculous story from my family. My dad left an embarrassing voicemail when my brother was in college, talking about going out for “pancake on a stick,” which isn’t even a real thing. It became this inside joke that spread among his friends.

So the name stuck, and it makes people laugh—which is kind of the point.

Tony: The newsletter isn’t about social media. It’s about direct connection. I’ve found that email and smaller communities are more meaningful than large, noisy platforms.

Tony: I also do a tech podcast called ITBattle with a colleague. We talk about real issues in school technology and try to give people language they can actually use to solve problems in their schools.

Greg: Tony, this has been great. Thanks for coming on the show.

Tony: Thanks for having me.

Greg: If you have any questions, you can reach us at [internationalteacherpodcast@gmail.com](mailto:internationalteacherpodcast@gmail.com) or on Instagram at ITPXPats.

Greg: This is Greg, the single guy.

Matt: And Matt, the family guy.

Greg: We’ll see you next time.