Where I'm At Now

A little bit about my background...

I graduated with a B.Ed. from the University of Alberta's Faculty of Education in 1984. A science geek, I majored in Biological Sciences, and minored in Physical Sciences. Wherever I ended up teaching, I knew I'd be teaching science.

After a bit of a bumpy beginning to my teaching career, I finally settled in a county west of Edmonton. Hired at a community school for K-9 students, I taught science to all of the Grade 7, 8, and 9 students, as well as a computer option to the Grade 7 students. It is here that I first saw the tremendous potential for computer technology to engage and support learners.

Looking back, what I taught my students about computers wasn't well-matched to how they actually used them. The curriculum consisted of units on computer hardware, keyboarding, and programming in BASIC. Listening to their informal talk, I realized that most of my students used their home computers for gaming; only a few used them for schoolwork.

At about the same time, some of my colleagues and I started to use computers ourselves. We created spreadsheets to track and calculate student marks, typed and saved lessons, activities and tests to floppy disks, and played around a bit with the Apple Macintosh program HyperCard. I quickly saw how regular use of my new Macintosh Plus would save me time down the road, after I created and organized my teaching materials in digital format. This was going to be much better than storing paper copies of everything in a large filing cabinet!

Fast forward ten years, and I'm now teaching at a high school. At that time, high schools were not Macintosh friendly. I worked on my Mac at home, and brought activities and tests to school to be edited and then printed. However, the amount of time I was spending on format conversions was onerous. The Mac had to be replaced, if for no other reason than to save me time. As a result, I entered the world of the PC. About the same time, I started posting text-based notes for my students on the internet, through the Edmonton Freenet. I had no idea how quickly I would come to spend most of my work day on the internet...

Fast forward another ten years, and I'm no longer teaching in a public school setting. The first part of my transition came with a secondment to Alberta Education. I accepted a position managing digital learning resource development for the LearnAlberta.ca project, where my first task was to coordinate the posting of a series of simulated physics labs programmed in Java. A later project resulted in my managing the creation, acquisition and licensing of a number of digital learning resources used to support the teaching and learning of Biology 20 and 30. I was tremendously excited by the ability of the new media to clearly illustrate complex ideas, ranging from nerve impulse transmission to photosynthesis. How could students fail to be excited about their learning, using these fancy new resources?

The second part of my transition came with a subsequent move to Vancouver Island. I spent part of a year working at Vancouver Island University, teaching a biology course to adult students while I worked as an educational technologist.Through conversations with educational technologists, instructional designers, and instructors, as well as through experimenting with my class, I heard a lot about what online practices do and do not support student learning.

Now I'm attending the University of Victoria, enrolled in the M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction program. Here I plan on adding some evidence-based background regarding the use of online learning resources to support my teaching practice. I will be using this Blog to track my progress.