ITP - 78: From Classroom to EdTech with Ryan Tannenbaum

Jacqueline: Welcome to the International Teacher Podcast. This is Jacqueline from JP Mint, and I'm here with Greg the single guy and Kent the cat guy. Hi, guys.

Greg: Hey.

Kent: Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you're at. JP Mint and the single guy—good to see you.

Jacqueline: And today we are joined by Ryan Tannenbaum in South Korea. Hi, Ryan.

Ryan: Hi. Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Greg: Hey Ryan, thanks for coming on. Ryan and I worked together in China a couple years ago. I'm trying to think—Ryan, you were part of the original OCAS, the OG OCAS, weren’t you?

Ryan: Back when we called it OCAS. We worked at a school that went through many transitions, but there was a very small group of people who were there for the foundation year, and that was me and about seven other teachers. Jackie joined halfway through the year. She came in to help set up the boarding program. Originally we were just an elementary school—elementary IB—and then we grew. We grew from about 300 kids to about 3,200 kids over time. I spent the beginning of that as a PYP homeroom teacher, MYP language arts teacher, IT tech director, and doing COVID triaging to keep the school running. It was an experience—fun.

Jacqueline: Yeah. And then the last time we saw each other was probably 2020 when I moved to Guangzhou. Did you move at that point, or did you stay one more year?

Ryan: I think I left in 2021. I had just had a baby. I was in Korea doing everything overseas.

Jacqueline: So that’s how Ryan and I know each other.

Greg: Quick question for you, Ryan—maybe not so quick. You’re someone who’s made a lot of transitions and jumps in your educational career, and we’re going to get into that. Can you tell us where you grew up and how you ended up in China?

Ryan: Yeah, not so quick, I guess. I grew up in Toronto, and it was fine. I knew from a fairly young age that I was ready to go somewhere. I always really liked Asia. I went to schools that were predominantly Cantonese—many of my friends were from Asia. I liked the culture. I went to university, studied English literature, finished, and then went backpacking for about a year and a half. After that, I was working in a pillow factory thinking, what am I doing with my life?

Greg: Did you say pillow factory?

Ryan: I worked in a pillow factory because it was easy.

Greg: How were breaks there? That sounds relaxing.

Ryan: It sounds relaxing, but pillows come in 500-kilogram bales of fluff that you put through a giant machine like a hair dryer, which builds up a huge amount of static electricity. If you’re not grounded, it’s like getting hit with a defibrillator.

Greg: Is that what happened to your hair?

Ryan: That’s where my hair went. It’s a good excuse.

Greg: I’m going to use that excuse.

Ryan: Then I went to Korea. A lot of international teachers start in hagwons or language schools. They take a wide range of people. I worked at three different schools there, moving each year. One way to move up is knowing when a position is no longer stimulating and it’s time to move. After three years in Korea, at my last school I was the head teacher. It was a bigger school—about 12 teachers and 800 students. I realized I wasn’t going to go higher in that system, so I decided to go back to Canada and get my teaching certification. At the time, in Ontario it was an eight-month program from start to finish. I made it into the last cohort at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. I got into a couple of universities but chose Lakehead because I was worried about getting police background checks done while overseas. They were the only place that responded quickly. It turned out to be a really good experience. It’s not a well-known university, but it has a large Indigenous population, and I got exposure to a part of Canada that really shaped my views as a teacher.

Ryan: I had a friend in China from Korea who was working at a school in Nanning, Guangxi. It’s a really unique part of China—if you’ve seen Avatar, that kind of landscape with karst mountains. It’s also an area with a large minority population—the Zhuang, the Miao, the Dong. I worked there for two years: first as an English and social studies teacher, then as English, computer science head teacher, and eventually principal. That was a lot for someone with about a year and a half of experience. I was around 30. We did well—we had a 100% graduation rate with our first cohort—but it was intense. Administration is different at each level. As you go up, problems become less frequent but more severe. In younger grades, it’s small issues. In high school, the problems can be much bigger.

Ryan: After that, I decided to move to another school. I wanted to leave the Canadian curriculum because it wasn’t always contextually relevant for students in China. I was trying to explain things like snowmobiles or Tim Hortons references to students who had no connection to that.

Greg: What’s a double-double?

Ryan: Two cream, two sugar in coffee. It’s a Canadian thing from Tim Hortons. But again, it just wasn’t relevant for the students. The next school I joined had a mission focused on local culture first—Chinese origins with global perspectives—and that resonated with me.

Greg: The school that you were principal at—was it a smaller school? Because when I think of schools in China, I think of 2,000 or 3,000 students.

Ryan: It was a smaller school. We were on a large Chinese host campus with thousands of students, but our international section was around 120 to 160 students depending on enrollment. Guangxi is one of the poorer provinces in China, so that impacted numbers. It was a smaller school, but a great experience. If you go to smaller or founding schools, they may be less resourced, but you learn a lot. You can’t coast—you have to build things. At my next school in Suzhou, there was also a lot to do, but in smaller schools you really wear multiple hats.

Jacqueline: That’s something I’ve seen too. In smaller schools, you might be the only person in your role, which gives you a lot of freedom to experiment and build programs.

Ryan: Exactly. In smaller schools, things are easier to move because there’s less institutional inertia. In larger schools, it can be much harder to make changes because systems are already established.

Greg: Yeah, we’re at a school right now where it takes forever to get anything moving.

Kent: Yeah, I was napping. Sorry, did you talk?

Greg: Hey Ryan, how many years did you spend in China in total?

Ryan: Six years.

Greg: So if I have the timeline right—three years in Korea, then back to Canada for teacher training, then six years in China. Were you married with kids during that time?

Ryan: During my first time in Korea, I met my wife. Then I went back to Canada for one year for teacher training. After that, I spent six years in China. We had our first child there—he was about 11 months old when we left. He was born in Korea, and then we returned to China during COVID, which meant quarantining with a four-month-old. That was an experience. We actually ended up in a large suite for quarantine, which was surprisingly comfortable.

Greg: I’m jealous. I had a tiny room during quarantine. So then you moved back to Korea with your family?

Ryan: Yes. My wife is from Busan, and her family lives nearby. I decided to go independent and start my own ed tech consultancy. Korea made sense because it was easier to establish ourselves. Life is very convenient here. Everything is close—markets, transportation, daycare. It’s much easier than Canada in many ways.

Greg: Do they have double-doubles there?

Ryan: No Tim Hortons here.

Greg: JP says there are some in Mexico.

Ryan: When we were quarantining in Shanghai, we ordered Tim Hortons once. The donuts came with pork floss on them, which was… an experience.

Greg: Wait—what was on the donuts?

Ryan: Pork floss. It’s like shredded, fluffy pork. Not my favorite.

Greg: That’s something. Let me ask you—how many languages do you speak?

Ryan: I speak English well and I can get by in Korean. I’m not much of a linguist.

Greg: Fair enough.

Jacqueline: Let’s shift into what you’re doing now. Can you tell us about your work as a tech consultant?

Ryan: Sure. When I was at OCAS, I moved into a tech director role. The school didn’t have much infrastructure or a clear vision for technology. I worked on building systems and supporting different divisions. I don’t have a formal background in tech, but I learned a lot in China because of internet restrictions. You have to build your own systems sometimes. I learned to run servers, write code, and build applications. I started presenting at conferences and realized there was interest in what I was doing. That led me to consider consulting. I connected with a company called Faria, which runs ManageBac—a system used in IB schools for attendance, grading, and curriculum. They offered me consulting work, which gave me a foundation to go independent. I started in 2021. The first year was about building clients and income. Now I focus mainly on data warehousing and integration for schools. That means helping schools bring their data together and automate processes so staff don’t have to manually move information between systems. I shifted away from analytics because it’s very school-specific. Instead, I focus on building systems that can scale across multiple schools.

Greg: So when you talk about data warehousing and integration, that sounds pretty technical. Can you break that down a bit for people who might not be familiar with it?

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, schools use a lot of different systems—attendance, grading, admissions, learning management systems—and they don’t always talk to each other very well. So what I do is help connect those systems so data can flow between them automatically. Instead of someone manually exporting a spreadsheet from one system and importing it into another, we build pipelines that handle that in the background. It saves time, reduces errors, and gives schools a clearer picture of what’s happening.

Greg: That makes sense. So you’re basically making life easier for schools and teachers.

Ryan: Exactly. And once the data is connected, schools can start to use it more effectively—tracking student progress, identifying trends, and making better decisions.

Jacqueline: That’s huge, especially for larger schools where data can get really messy.

Ryan: Yeah, and even smaller schools benefit because they often don’t have dedicated IT teams. So building simple, scalable systems can make a big difference.

Kent: So if someone’s listening and thinking, “Hey, I want to get into something like that,” what advice would you give them?

Ryan: Start small. Learn basic coding—Python is a great place to start. Understand how APIs work, because that’s how systems communicate with each other. And most importantly, focus on solving real problems. A lot of what I learned came from necessity—trying to fix issues in schools where there wasn’t an existing solution.

Greg: That’s kind of the theme of your career—seeing a need and figuring it out.

Ryan: Pretty much, yeah.

Greg: Before we wrap up, we’ve got to ask—do you have a police or immigration story?

Ryan: Nothing too dramatic, but I will say that navigating visas in China during COVID was complicated. There were a lot of changing rules and uncertainty. You had to be very flexible and patient. At one point, we weren’t sure if we’d be able to get back into the country after leaving, which made planning really difficult.

Greg: Yeah, that was a stressful time for a lot of people.

Jacqueline: Definitely.

Greg: All right, Ryan, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about what you’re doing, how can they do that?

Ryan: The best way is probably LinkedIn. I’m fairly active there, and you can find me under my name. I also have a website where I share some of my work and projects.

Jacqueline: We’ll make sure to include those links in the show notes.

Greg: Ryan, thanks so much for joining us today. This was really interesting.

Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Greg: And we’ll see everyone next time.