Julia Fallon is the Executive Director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), where she has spent five years leading the organization’s work at the intersection of policy, infrastructure, and educator capacity.
Under her leadership, SETDA served as the lead contractor for the U.S. Department of Education’s 2024 National Education Technology Plan, the first time the association led that work in its 25-year history. The plan introduced three critical frameworks: the digital access divide, the digital design divide, and the digital use divide, reframing the national conversation from tools to conditions for learning.
Before joining SETDA, Julia spent 17 years as a state member representing the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, where she began her career in CTE before moving into education technology policy and implementation.
Her work centers on helping state and district leaders design systems that prioritize coherence over compliance, agency over control, and trust as a default, not something earned through bureaucratic process.
Julia is also a recognized voice on AI governance in education, advocating for guidance that reduces cognitive load rather than adding to it, and for treating AI as general-purpose infrastructure rather than a standalone program.
She holds that digital fluency is civic fluency, the capacity to participate and contribute to society, and that the goal of education technology is not to prepare students for tools, but to prepare systems for the humans they serve.
