About me

While the Internet and related projects consume a lot of my time, I am by degree an educator. Currently, I work for the Department of Instructional Technology for Tacoma Public Schools as a high school instructional facilitator for technology. "What do I do?" You may ask. Plain and simple, my job is to assist teachers to use technology to impact student learning. This role may fall on the managerial side, helping teacher better organize themselves digitally in the classroom or their gradebook. One great example is the use of SWIFT (Simplified Web Interface for Teachers). Further, I assist teachers to use technology directly as instructional tools. These tools include SmartBoards, document cameras and projectors. Finally, I work to see that all students are technologically literate by working with teachers to get technology in the hands of their students.

Previously, I was an instructor at the Tacoma School of the Arts, a new, innovative school in the heart of downtown Tacoma, WA. The school of less than 400 students has a tight-knit staff that collaborates on almost every project. I teach biology as well as algebra. During more flexible times in our schedule, I enjoy teaming with arts instructors on such projects as Animated Opera, a class utilizing the schools choir director, recording studio, and Macromedia Flash MX 2004; Guerilla Marketing, a class allowing students to compete for the marketing rights to a new "Best-Of" CD for the Spring 2005 audio recording class.; and the Experiential Museum Project, a unique opportunity for students to design, build, and share a museum project with local elementary students.

Web Design

I was introduced to the web before it had many pictures. Everything was fair game; what you put on the web could be used or taken by anyone. That was the culture. In college, I got my first webspace on the university server and began building sites that would hold information about my obsession with whitewater kayaking. After schooling I built my first website for Tacoma Mountain Rescue entirely in HTML, trying as I could to maintain a consistent naviagation feature. I was introduced to Frontpage in 2001 and Dreamweaver in 2003. Copy and Paste was a thing of the past.

I started to do work in Fireworks and Flash. Somehow I started exploring PHP and developed my first Intranets. I developed new skills as project needs or curiosities presented themselves.. Since then, I've added shopping cart software, picture galleries, and forums to websites. While I don't develop these myself, I am skilled at activating, connecting, and integrating them into websites. I've also dabbled in design with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I have always had small ones but has since starting dramatically changing the looks of my pages by exploring the power of CSS.

My work with Tacoma Mountain Rescue's website earned "Site of the Week" Award from Netfirms for the week of August 30, 2005. I continue to work with PHP and MySQL databases to manage the membership needs of the Unit.

Technology Instruction

On top of my school duties, I also work for the Instruction Technology Department with Tacoma Public Schools. As a Tech-Tuesday staff member, I have developed courses for district teachers including:

• Dreamweaver 1 - an introduction to the design of web pages.
• Dreamweaver 2 - learning to design consistent websites.
• Flash Animation - the basics of making objects move for the web.
• Excel for Elementary Educators - a class designed to increase the awareness of Excel's application in the Elementary classroom.
• Classroom Applications of Microsoft Excel - a course for secondary educators focusing on the impact of visual representations of real datasets on student learning.
• more courses