Fake News Fitness is a learning unit with special web tools (Chrome extension, Drupal Commons site) used by high school teachers to help their students learn to detect disinformation. Below is a case study of two initial pilots, shared in the hope of attracting funding for further development.
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Many Computer Science teachers know the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich intro activity. Can students new to coding write down all the instructions to make a PB&J, with the proper sequence, complete enough that a robot following them would not make a mess? I've added to this by creating a faux programming language called babySister, using the syntax rules of JavaScript and an OOP focus. It is designed for the Baby Sister Operating System (BS-OS) ... basically, another human being willing to emulate a "Baby Sister" who is subject to the rules and constraints of the...
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I created an ADDIE-indexed Google Apps system to facilitate program redesigns, providing instructional design guidance and redesign project facilitation. A series of presentations and associated surveys were sequenced with Google Classroom to provide easy overview and access to programs converting from brick-and-mortar to low-residency (periods of online work between weekend workshops) and online offerings. An effort to include more competency-based instruction and formative assessment was part of this program redesign.
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As part of a technology-triggered organizational change solution, a 30-hour online course prepares teachers to support learner-centered 1:1 classrooms with Google Apps for Education. Teachers work individually, in "quads" (groups of four) and full cohort teams to explore and discuss readings, strategies, and key issues in light of current local practice and new opportunities presented. The course is crafted for tech-wary teachers who are not making headway on their own and need structure and supports.
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Building Social-Emotional Health is a Moodle course developed for Docs for Tots, an education and advocacy organization dedicated to supporting healthy development in infants and toddlers. Designed for early child care health consultants in NYC, the course ran June 29-August 17th, 2014. See Syllabus for a brief overview.
The course is designed for knowledge and skill transfer through activities that match performance environment needs, and for building an online learning a community through a progression from individual to group tasks. The Case Study includes a detailed exploration of how... more
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In the course of my graduate work, I developed this process for collaborative curriculum design, which I have applied to one course project and three fieldwork projects. For each performance objective, the process calls for the creation of an Activity Diagram to articulate components. Each diagram spawns development of a design document using Google form templates to prompt for articulating any design specifications associated with the curriculum. Form submissions are merged to design document starters, and these are moved to sub-folders where additional documents and resources are added....
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The Online Brand Camp was designed to help attendees of a one-day "DIY Brand Camp" summit sustain the learning community, overcome personal barriers, and deliver on the camp promise that successful brand development can be done largely in-house. As a scalable and non-local course offering, an online component offers an additional revenue stream to the host branding firm, and nurtures consulting leads.
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I was invited to analyze and provide redesign recommendations to support a professional development community for high school science teachers. For my analysis framework, I chose Activity Theory, and mapped a system including websites, professional development choices, an evolving community, and relationships. The potential of new initiatives would be constrained or enabled by these elements and their relationships. Analyzing these relationships would reveal points of leverage in the current system.
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Website Development [with Wordpress] a first-year online course and free web redesign clinic at a community college, used all open source tools and provided free hosting to students though Siteground.com for one year. This course updated one that framed web development as flat HTML, rather than database driven, coded-on-demand pages with open source applications.
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This video presentation describes a move from LMS "silo" to online learning "hub", incorporating a social learning envrionment (SLE) and a learning content management system (LCMS). To the degree feasible, I plan online course interactions to occur in a SLE outside the LMS, so that social network connections can persist after the course. I also use an LCMS as a clickable bibiliography so that students can access materials used in the course afterwards as well.
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I developed Technology for Teachers for the Marlboro School of Graduate and Professional Studies' Social Justice MAT program. A 30-hour course, it helped pre-service teachers learn the basics of classroom technology integration in Google Apps for Education environments. I redesigned the course to cover a wider range of topics with choice depending on student interest and aptitude, also piloting Google Classroom.
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The latest incarnation of my Tech Scouts curriculum was delivered through a community-based program, creating websites for local organizations. We incorporated current development practices, including using IRC to stay in touch, tracking time with an online system, and sharing development files with GIT Hub. Earlier versions focused on supporting IT in schools, but all involved IT community service learning. The curriculum builds independence, interdependence and entrepreneurship.
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This course design document described a Google Apps for Education adoption in-service series for school teachers, administrators and staff. Rather than focus on the software,participants would learn the skills and patterns needed to collaborate on document development in a “flipped practicum” approach: eLearning would convey skills and content to individual learners in online sessions, and Learners would later meet in person and online to apply this material in school-based teams to collaborate on a an update to the district technology plan.... more
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As coordinator of K-12 Projects for the Institute for Learning Technologies from 1994-7, I helped design and facilitate the Design Studio Cycle, a two-week project development seminar followed by an ADDIE sequence over the following year. I have adapted this model for my own practice, with different levels of involvement in teacher projects. I co-developed this project remotely with a 7th Grade Social Studies teacher. It combined Internet research strategies with role-playing of historical figures to debate slavery in a pre-Civil War context.
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I designed this simulation for an 11th grade Economics teacher. Students took the role of auto company CEOs, applying investment strategies in competition with each other (and, to their increasing surprise, Japan, which played by very different rules). Every morning they would read a news blog, meet as teams, and take new actions; the teacher would respond by creating the next morning's news blog, and informing each team of its financial status.
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This Spanish Cultural Exchange Project began by identifying an international classroom partner, securing mini-grant funding, and connecting via Videoconferences and forums. The first activity was teacher driven - creating Webquest projects for partner comment. The second was student driven - making videos about life in their respective schools and communities, shared over Videoconference for reactions. I have developed two other cultural exchange projects with teachers, one with students in Venezuela, and one with students in Oaxaca, Mexico.... more
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Students chose from among three poems, created Powerpoint presentations designed to accompany their interpreted readings, and performed the readings before the class (and videotaped). This was the most popular technology integration project I supported while at Taconic Hills, and it was showcased by the superintendent to kick off the following district conference day. This project hearkened back to work at the Institute for Learning Technologies in 1996, when students posted poems and recording readings developed with the Teachers and Writers Project in NYC.... more
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I designed this curriculum from scratch. Middle School students had been learning keyboarding and MS Word formatting; I added all MS Office Applications (including Excel), Web Development (Mozilla) and Programming (BASIC). Students met daily for 5-week rotations. I strove to integrate applications as part of inquiry projects, and give students local experiences of empowerment through social publishing. The course was very popular with students, and discipline was rarely an issue. The first year was 2001, and in their independent internet research projects, some students asked "Who is Osama... more
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In my 7th Grade English Class, we took apart display advertisments in magazines and television commercials, discovering how they use psychological techniques to redefine the products being marketed. Students then created their own products, brands, packaging, and advertising campaigns. On Open School Night, I ran the same TV Commercial analysis activity with parents that their students engaged in, and they were horrified at ways their children were being manipulated. These things are out in front of us, but until we learn to think analytically, we may...
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The poem is an astounding vehicle for revealing the self, unrestrained by traditional grammar and the demand to fully articulate (and thus narrow) thoughts so that they make sense to literal readers. This makes poetry a vulnerable form of expression. Students fear their work being judged.
My students decided that the safest method would be to keep their identities secret. Each morning I read their volunteered poems and did not share the poet’s name. If he/she wished to identify him/herself, it could be done after the poem was received...
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This Google Apps template was designed to help teachers and schools adopt Google Apps for Education (GAfE) for instructional collaboration and delivery. This module template is designed as a reusable learning object as well as an activity within a course. The module template includes clickable emulation of the Google Apps "Launcher" (top right) and a detailed menu (top right corner). Camtasia was used to compile video and captions.
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To help teachers develop necessary skills with Google Apps to design instructional units and classroom materials, Captivate Tutorials (following an overview / present / train / assess sequence) are used with online lesson plan versions (called SAMR sets) that incorporate spreadsheets, forms, and other Google Apps artifacts. The featured assessment analyzes errant clicks and recommends whether to proceed within Google Apps or return to the tutorial.
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This narrated slideshow, with some animations, provides the background to Going121, featured in the Instructional Design and eLearning sections of this ePortfolio. I include this piece as a sample of my thinking on organizational change support. This is a five-part presentation, designed for school administrators who are preparing for a 1:1 move: Avoiding 1:1 Plateaus, Removing Barriers to Technology Adoption, Transforming Instruction for 1:1 Classrooms,Addressing SAMR with Google Apps for Education, and Cultivating Communities of Practice.
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Organizations are increasingly converting Instructor-Led Training (ILT) to LMS-situated eLearning. I prefer developing eLearning for settings rather than individuals, situating the learning in site contexts and relationships between stakeholders and contributing to learning cohorts or communities of practice. In the presentation below, I customized a eLearning instructional process for a team that relied on a local file server rather than cloud groupware for development, making remote work or progress notifications difficult.
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This was used for a Webquest supporting a course for a Masters of Arts in Teaching program teaching pre-service candidates to integrate Google Apps for Education in their student-teaching placements (see Technology for Educators). As a way of experiencing and applying spreadsheet rubrics, students took on the roles of foundation trustees to evaluate three proposals as candidates for a funding initiative. In this tutorial, students are introduced to the rubric, and taught how to make copies and save them in the very convoluted file system of Google Classroom.
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An assignment for one of my graduate courses, this is an on-boarding training for new floor sales staff of a fictional regional hardware company called Wiskit. This presentation is a little rough around the edges, but included as an example of Articulate Presenter work with "choose your response" Role Play scenarios using stock characters from Adobe Captivate and a conceptual layout using Mind Maps (created with Inspiration software). My partner, who did the animated characters and some voice-overs, created the second half of the slideshow, below.
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This artifact showcases video development with Camtasia (and a little help from GoAnimate for cartoons). This is a trailer developed to promote a proposed Dreamweaver site management course to staff and faculty at UMass Amherst. I developed the idea for the training with an acting director of the Computers and Information Services department, who complained of the time he spent tutoring staff who break their Dreamweaver template systems. Unfortunately, the new director, once hired, is yet to be convinced of the need to bring on an outside freelancer.
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Produced for an Instructional Design course in Online Learning, this is a simply made slideshow is designed to be engaging, clear, participatory and effective at sensitizing customer service representatives to different aspects of their work. The focus for the assignment was to provide a stand-alone module that would stimulate active learning and result in attainment of concepts that could be tested in a performance environment. In this case, the task is to Identify the unhelpful customer service representative response from two examples and categorize it appropriately as unprofessional or... more
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Developed for a UMass Instructional Design course, this presentation integrates video explanations using top-right-corner buttons. Although a team effort, I did the bulk of the development, while my partner focused on the research, and we shared in the delivery. Because this is positioned as a "stand-alone" presentation rather than narrated, slides have more text than they would otherwise, and make use of timed animations as well as explanatory videos. Attention was also given to the design of breadcrumbs and sectional titling.
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Worked with a local temple to migrate their website from Joomla 1 to Drupal 7, using Google Apps for Nonprofits to distribute content development, information architecture and project management planning and collaboration. I used Drupal's Open Church distribution as a starting point, adding (among other things) Simplenews Content Selection and a landing page Panel system that displays the most recent content entry from various categories.
The highlight of this work was leveraging community development and planning. Community circumstances (a new Rabbi, years of administrative neglect)... more
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Drupal "distributions" are pre-configured sites contributed by the Drupal community. It makes sense to split an unwieldy public-facing site into sub-domains to support particular functions (for example, a project management site with Open Atrium, a forum site with Drupal Commons, a conference site with COD). The public-facing site for Going121.com is listed below, along with its two Drupal-based subdomains: Drupal Commons (emulating Lynda.com) and a custom Learning Content Management System.
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Via programs like Tech Scouts (http://techscoutsma.org) I work with students learning Web Design and Development to run Web Clinics. This website outlines our services and process for prospective clients and for new students to see how we make the sausages.
This website is made with Wordpress, and tracks the curriculum developed for a community college and used in a community program and a vocational school. The process makes deep use of Google document templates...
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As part of my Greenfield Tech Scouts program, students and I created this Drupal 7 site for Franklin Hampshire Youth Employment. I did the architecture, back end and theme adjustments for this site, with Tech Scouts designing the new logo, building the user manual and updating content. The new site included a full-featured job search system with the ability for employers to manage their own listings.
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Originally bid out as a service catalog, this project became much larger as EC's international technology reseller client expressed interest in using the site to manage contracts with school district clients. Though not visible from the outside, this site allows clients to choose "engagements" (clusters of service items tied to performance categories, platforms and training audiences) to build contract proposals based on number of schools and enrollments. The proposals can be printed out entirely as PDFs.
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This is a migration from a Drupal 6 site I built in 2007, featuring professional photography and a mobile responsive theme. For fun, click the "Meditation Moment", a Flash-based inspiration favored by students at local Bard College.
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This is a migration from static HTML to Drupal 7, using a modified responsive theme and featuring high-resolution images.
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In 2012 I completely redesigned this website, migrating from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. What had been a static site now featured member-contributed content (the "Research" section). I was teaching full-time and not seeking web development work, but this client was referred to me by Educational Collaborators, and was a perfect fit. I enjoy making community websites for nonprofit organizations that have a social mission. I have attached a reference letter from ACCIS' then-communications director, Marie Bigham.
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This is a Drupal 6 site developed for a ground-breaking educational project: teaching meditation to schoolchildren not only to support deeper focus and concentration, but to encourage them to share information about their experiences in the present with classroom teachers and peers to help schools develop healthier environments to support individual growth. Founder Maureen Burford is available as a reference contact.
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My company, Game Face Web Design, developed this site for our local Area Health Education Center, and used it as a model to market to other AHECs (though the federal government de-funded the program just as we launched our campaign, leading to only two spin-offs). Until the de-funding, Game Face continued to support the development of new sub-sites (health-match.org, a hiring portal, and a video archive.) CHAHEC's Technology Director, Michael LaMuniere, loved learning Drupal and was a very active co-developer for the project.
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I built this website to serve my educational technology consulting business. It features a blog (defunct) about my belief that the culture and structure of open source projects have a lot to offer public school organizations as they re-organize for the 21st century. The site features a technology planning guide for small schools and my K-12-focussed ePortfolio. It also highlights the various models of engagement I offer public and private school clients.
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This is the now-quite-dated website for Game Face Web Design, the development company I founded with students in my Tech Scouts Program. My student-partners chose Drupal for our development software, and we used Moodle to train clients to maintain their sites. I soon discovered that once they went off to college, the students were no longer able to meet work deadlines around midterms and finals, and hired adult staff (a graphic designer, a PHP/MySQL coder, an analyst / themer, a copy writer, and a Search Engine Optimization / Search Marketing specialist). This website offers our customer... more
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Ahh, the early days when web servers accepted home.htm and default.htm instead of only index.html! A colleague from way back then asked me to share some of the Technology Newsletters she remembered liking, so I put the site up for sharing. See below. I've also shared some earlier sites, made as a tech coordinator for individual schools.
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An organizational change solution, Going121 includes blend of consulting and online training (using course-based and personalized learning paths) to support principals and faculty in schools that give students portable computers. Designed to build both individual and team capacities, the solution also cultivates a Community of Practice by guiding the creation and curation of knowledge base websites and internal sharing of best practices.
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The Western Massachusetts Civic Hackathon had a burnout problem, as the organizing committee took responsibility for identifying, vetting and refining projects across the reason.
I proposed that Hackathon developers in major towns self-organize teams to surface and manage local projects before, during and after the main event. This approach was much easier to manage, and other Civic Hackathons across the country soon adopted it.
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This presentation connects the growth of the social web, the benefits and challenges it poses to society, the need to develop critical thinking and deep learning, and some pedagogic approaches that support student buy-in for student-centered, guided inquiry with technology. Goo.gl links go to collaborative documents within the school's Google Apps domain and are not public. After this presentation, teachers took a month to identify current uses of technology in classes, find connections between each others' work and state standards, and collaborate towards developing a technology curriculum... more
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Online and blended learning design should not be driven by the constraints of individual application types. Rather, designers should combine Learning Management, eLearning modules, and Learning Content Management as appropriate. The Small School's Technology Planner was Learning Content used to support the practicum model of technology planning support for K-12 school clients from 1994 to 2002. As part of an activity-based approach, this guide highlighted a small set of concrete strategies (e.g. full-stakeholder planning teams, technology turnkey trainers, design studio cycles) that... more
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Beyond the challenge of mastering a new learning management system to effectively present material, field assignments, and provide formative and summative feedback, new adjunct faculty must sometimes "reverse-engineer" a given syllabus to understand how objectives, activities, assessments, and measurement methods align by week. A document that summarizes these connections is known as a Course Map, as an instance of a Curriculum Map. Syllabi often do not include these tables (matrices) so they must be reverse-engineered.
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Going 1:1 school-wide means reliance on peer sharing. A GAfE model for cultivating knowledge and practice sharing is presented for tweaking and adopting, piecemeal or whole. Templates shared: four linked Site templates (CoP, Tech Tips, Integration Tips, Project Showcase), lesson/materials peer review guide, teacher ePortfolio+Blog Site template.
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In 2005, videoconferencing and Blackboard allowed teachers to share resources and work with experts from other sites. As an instructional tool, Videoconferencing enabled special education and technology coaches to help teachers design authentic contexts for classroom projects, interacting with the world outside. Online follow-up discussions through Blackboard allowed participants to communicate and share at their convenience, continuing the learning process between sessions.
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In my work with public schools supporting the adoption of instructional technology, I found that principal is the lynchpin of the process, if it were to extend beyond early-adopter teachers. I developed this technology planning workshop in 2004 and co-presented it with a regional educational service provider, and presented to principals from multiple school districts. A follow-up workshop provided support for technology planning efforts in each of my district's schools. In my second year, I drew on these plans and relationships in coordinating the district's technology plan, with action... more
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As part of an initiative to link technology projects to state standards, I ported a professional development model from previous work at the Institute for Learning Technologies to kick-start standards-based blended learning. A competitive RFP offered participation in a project development in-service courses. Each project could submit a budget for up to $5,000 for support purchases. 35 participating teachers developed standards-linked projects, and 10 submitted projects showcased in a regional conference.
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In 1996, IMPACT II launched a national effort to provide teachers with the opportunity to develop the knowledge and skills to influence policy locally, statewide, and nationally. The institute offered teachers across the country a forum for creating policy recommendations to affect the most critical concern of the profession--the quality of professionals entering and remaining in teaching. Staff included Ellen Meyers, Program Director; Sanda Balaban, Program Coordinator; and Bram Moreinis, Technology Coordinator. The attached survey analysis indicates how remote collaboration... more
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In this presentation to the Replit EDU community, I make the case for teaching students to flowchart before coding. Computational Thinking requires abstraction, pattern recognition, algorithm design and decomposition, and all of these are in play in the act of flowcharting. Much of this presentation is a "model lesson" designed for students who have coded before but not with the flow charting abstraction step. I use Lucidchart as my flowcharting teaching tool of choice for many reasons, which I share in the conversation with Replit's David Morgan.
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How can we help students feel safe and connected via remote learning? Online Restorative Circles build relationships and elevate student voices to help create a sense of well-being. Learn how we used Meet and Jamboard for fun morning check-ins and meaningful online circles. This video kicked off a Q&A presentation at MassCUE on February 10th, 2021.
Bonus content: a 5-minute Mindfulness Meditation my students find relaxing.
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Presentations to help faculty understand the importance of formative assessment... for their students (through peer evaluation) and for themselves (when they are developing courses). Students should get acculturated to a “formative assessment” culture early on, because this approach increases their engagement with a course. Every module (if not every task) should include at least one FA strategy, big or small. The “notification streams” from the course to student mobile apps should show FA at work.
view moreReflecting on a Coursera MOOC about Jazz Improvisation (taught by Gary Burton!) led me to imagine a design scheme for extending learning activities beyond a Learning Management System (LMS). Specifically, I would expect a course that was designed to initiate students into a knowledge domain (in this case, Jazz) to introduce what Activity Theory asks for: the Tools, Roles, and Community associated with participating in the course knowledge domain.
WARNING: Massive amount of jargon: not recommended save as a discussion starter among instructional designers.... more
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Reflecting on a course design project, I realized that SKA (defined as "entry behaviors" by Dick and Carey) was different than KSA (defined as "instructional objectives" first by Bloom and then by Mager). I also realized that if an "entry behavior" attitude was lacking, a course might not be able to solve the problem: it is sometimes necessary to consider changing the environment, so that new experiences could lead to new attitudes.
I posted these reflections to the Articulate Community, eLearning Heroes, on March 20, 2015.
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This narrated slideshow summarized my research analyzing the implementation of New Hampshire's decision to require all school districts to adopt ePortfolios. It was an unfunded mandate without centralized supports, and before its time (the state's Competency-Based Assessment initiative should have come first) - but despite all that, there was much to celebrate. I created this (hopefully entertaining) presentation for a graduate course on leadership, concerning organizational change initiatives. I learned a lot from it.
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This is a Camtasia presentation I put together to reflect on UMB's INSDSG 622: Curriculum Development for Organizations (SteveSchatz, Professor). This was the maiden voyage of the class. I apply Christopher Alexander's concept of Patten Languages (designed for architecture and the layout of objects in human space) to instructional interaction design (using Activity Triangles to define process patterns). This is complex language but the slideshow gives good examples that clarify it.
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As my resume introduction indicated, I became an advocate for Google Apps for Education in my last public school placements. I also promoted ePortfolio assessment, having once studied and then worked at the alternative school which founded itself on authentic assessment through portfolio roundtables, University Heights High School in the Bronx, NY. Joining these two topics led to "Googliing Towards ePortfolios", a blog post for Educational Collaborators which statistics showed became very popular very fast. I followed up with conference presentations on the topic.... more
This presentation proposed a program design to move a classroom-based English Language Learning program to a blended model, enhanced with mobile applications. Though the presentation components regarding blended learning models drew from materials develop by the Christensen Institute, most slides (easily identified by style) conveyed a complex program design for a 20-minute in-person presentation.
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Hack for Western Mass is a community Hackathon, where area coders, designers and other digital creatives develop projects requested by local nonprofit agencies that could not otherwise afford the work. In my second year, I joined the steering committee. We used Drupal as our website, Asana for project management, and Google Apps for collaboration, along woth many other tools.
The previous committee had experienced severe attrition due to burn-out, because a central committee took responsibility for soliciting and vetting all projects. I proposed a community-based approeach, where each... more
Download my resume, contact me via email using the contact form, or call (413) 829-0355. View Interview Presentation.