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.
view moreePortfolio: Martin Bram Moreinis
ePortfolio Sections
Learning Expeditions are long interdisciplinary units where students travel outside the school and play real-world roles. This two-month Climate Crisis unit took our eighth graders to an urban park, neighborhoods with different property values and climate resilience, and (via videoconference) to cities and mountain towns in Puerto Rico. The Matrix includes lesson plans, slide decks, learning targets, and more.
view moreMany 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...
moreFake 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.
view moreI 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.
view... moreAs 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.
viewIn 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....
moreThe 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.
viewThis 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.
viewI 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.
viewThe 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.
viewAs 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.
... moreI 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.
viewThe 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...
moreIn 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...
moreThis 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.
viewThis 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.
... moreOrganizations 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.
... moreThis 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.
... moreAn 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.
... moreThis 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.
... moreDrupal "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.
viewVia 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...
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.
viewAhh, 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.
view moreAt the height of the pandemic, I was invited to help a new, innovative school form in Springfield, Massachusetts. The principal, who had just moved from Texas, had designed a targeted instruction model where content-area specialists would provide whole class teaching, followed by small group instruction by special education teachers, dual language instructors and other specialists. I had to very quickly develop strategies and training materials, as I was hired in late June and teachers would join us a month later, all coming from different parts of the country, and most...
moreBeyond 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.
... moreAs 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.
view moreIn 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.
... moreHow 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.
view morePresentations 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 moreThis 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.
... moreThis 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.
viewThis 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.
view moreDownload my resume, contact me via email using the contact form, or call (413) 829-0355. View Interview Presentation.