Showcase 

Welcome to my Showcase!  This portion of my portfolio serves as a survey of my work in the field of Educational Technology.  Technology affords us the ability to reach many learners, many types of learners and cater the the diverse needs of learners, but only if we keep the experience of the learner at the forefront.  Content and Pedagogy are the priorities and Technology is the platform.  I hope that you find that my work has followed that model and demonstrates my attention to that ideal.  It is my hope that my work will serve as a vehicle for profound and deep learning.

Videos:

This video is actually one of my favorites.  If you remember the snowiest winter ever in Detroit during the winter of 2013, you may feel a chill up your spine watching this video.  I was attempting to trigger a feeling of paranoia that the winter would never leave us.  To get the full effect, you may want to watch this video in full screen.  Working on making this video helped teach me how to tap into the emotional side of learning.

This video to was created in an attempt to understand how misconceptions in knowledge happen and how the misconceptions endure over time.  Thinking about these misconceptions, especially ones that are generated from knowledge disseminated in formal schooling, resulted in this video about the rate at which objects fall.  Objects drop at the speed of 9.8 meters per second squared.  Even though this bit of knowledge is often common knowledge, many people still have misconceptions about how to apply that fact in real life situations.  Watch as we discover the truth for ourselves.

Text Lecture:

A Text Lecture is a digital static form of a classroom lecture that can be used online to allow the learners to attain knowledge from a teacher while not in the physical presence of the teacher.
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As an example of what Instructional Designers do, I've created this text lecture  based off of a webpage (What is TPACK?) on the TPACK.org website, with permission from the owner.    As you can see, I've used many common instructional design techniques all geared toward guiding the learner through the content, such as dividing the content, adding headings and visuals, and structuring the content in ways that align with the natural ways that users learn and retain material.

Please click on both images below and compare the original version with the re-designed version of the exact same content.

TPACK.org: What is TPACK?

Re-designed Text Lecture

Projects:

Dream Project

I created a website in 2014 detailing my dream of how technology leaders (before they were called technology coaches) could change the landscape of educational technology through stronger support for implementation of technology into classrooms.   Exposing teachers to technology isn't where most teachers get held up in the implementation process.  Many teachers stumble when they need to execute technologies, especially when their regular tasks are not removed from their already full day.  

It is funny.   Five years later, I still feel the exact same way.  Not much has changed in this area, at least not across K - 12 as a whole.  But, in 2019 as I read this dream plan of mine, I would change one aspect.  I would build in to the plan a slight alteration in the role of Technology Coaches.  Using a model closer to some higher ed models, I think Technology Coaches could take on some of the instructional designing in order to relieve some of the burden of creating the educational technology artifacts that teachers will use.  School districts don't require teachers to write their own textbooks, so why does our current model require teachers to create their own digital content?  Writing textbook type of content would probably be significantly easier for teachers than building, troubleshooting, updating and maintaining digital content.

Webinar
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​I, and three others, hosted a webinar discussing Assistive Technologies and UDL.  We used Google Hangout for the technology platform, and maintained an internet backchannel of Twitter and Titan Pad to field live questions.  The expert panel was comprised of three individuals with expertise in various facets of Assistive Technology and applying UDL principles.  The webinar, dated July 11, 2014,  is part of the MSU Bridge series where other Education Technology webinars can be viewed.

Please feel free to visit the Understanding Understanding website directly related to this video and the Understanding Understanding project.

Documentary Style Video
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I, and a group of students, wondered about misconceptions of historical information, particularly related to Christopher Columbus. We wondered about our own misconceptions and whether the same misconceptions are present in children today, despite easy access to information.  We wanted to know how teachers approach this historic content in school.  As a result, we became interested in the reactions individuals would have to discovering that much of the information they learned about Christopher Columbus was not true.  We discovered that many teachers choose not to teach the topic in their classrooms due to the disturbing aspects of Christopher Columbus's moral character, his treatment of the native people of the Caribbean and his motivations for making the voyages to the Americas in the first place.