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Welcome to my ePortfolio! Here you'll find a curated stream of posts from my personal and professional blogs and social media. This site serves to document my journey as a learner, educator, and leader in instructional design and technology, showcasing my professional philosophies and personal interests. Explore my projects, presentations, and about pages to learn more.
Designing With, Not Just For: Lessons from Inclusive Co-Design
April 7, 2025
I had the opportunity to attend a compelling presentation hosted by the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health that discussed the critical importance of involving communities—especially those often underrepresented—in the design of tools and interventions intended for them. The parallels to my own experiences as an instructional designer for degree programs were immediately apparent...
You Belong Here: The Report on Culture and Community at Rice Business
November 2024
This annual report includes the contributions of the Instructional Technology and Design Services team to digital accessibility at Rice Business. My team developed instructional design templates and provided accessibility resources for the school’s degree programs, available at business.rice.edu/EdTech. Our efforts contribute to creating a more inclusive learning environment for all members of the school community.
Tracy Winter on Why Neurodiversity Matters: Inclusive Workspaces For Every Brain
October 25, 2024
Dr. Winter's presentation emphasized that DEI trainings often fail because they are not integrated into the organization's strategic mission and lack actionable steps. Instead of focusing on changing beliefs, the emphasis should be on changing behaviors first.
Key takeaways regarding neurodiversity in the workplace: (click to expand)
Neurodiversity refers to the diversity of minds.
The neurodiversity paradigm suggests that there is no "normal" mind.
Neurotypical aligns with society's concept of "normal."
Neurodivergent individuals may have innate or acquired differences that deviate significantly from societal norms.
A crucial point raised was the need to make processes accessible, eliminating the burden of accommodation requests. This proactive approach fosters a more inclusive environment.
Motivations for embracing neurodiversity: the business case, the realistic perspective, and the ethical imperative of doing the right thing.
Stimming, or self-stimulatory behavior, is common and natural among neurodivergent individuals. Allowing for stimming in the workplace is a simple yet powerful step towards inclusivity.
Let's Talk: Artificial Intelligence
Let's Talk: Artificial Intelligence
September 30, 2024
I delivered a presentation on Artificial Intelligence to my peers at a Rice Business Network event. I discussed AI's functionality and its historical development, including neural networks and foundational models. I also addressed AI misconceptions and ethical challenges like bias, deepfakes, and the digital divide.
Rice Teaching and Learning Symposium
January 5, 2024
The symposium explored the importance of liberal education in addressing global challenges, trends in 21st-century general education design, and the role of high-impact practices.
October 27, 2023
Corporate Insider Perspectives
Deciphering AI
Imposter Anxiety
Inclusion Acumen
EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Meeting
June 2023
The event "Together Towards Tomorrow: Shaping the Future of Teaching & Learning" delved into higher education's evolving landscape. It examined lasting and adapted teaching practices, emphasizing innovation amid global challenges. The ELI Annual Meeting united expertise, technology solutions, and institution-wide insights to address key educational matters...
Program Tracks
- Equity Mindset & Practice
- The Future of Educational Technology
- Fostering the Practice & Profession of Teaching
- Innovative Learning Environments & The Future of Higher Education
- Advancing Student Support & Success
Global Accessibility Awareness Day
5.18.2023
2.27.2023
Information for instructors regarding FERPA and guest speaker releases when reusing classroom media artifacts...
October is Accessibility Awareness Month!
11.1.2022
Accessibility Awareness Month is a month-long campaign observed in October dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding of the importance of digital accessibility for people with disabilities. During Accessibility Awareness Month, organizations are encouraged to review their websites, apps, and other digital products to ensure that they are accessible to people with disabilities...
MBA Roundtable Forum on Learning Analytics
September 2022
The fall forum highlighted curriculum innovation through learning analytics. Experts presented workforce-oriented research and exemplar systems. Topics covered data culture, AI, and course redesign. Objectives included fostering collaborative analytics culture and ethical data integration for innovative curriculum development. Attendees were urged to invite peers for informed discussions on effective teaching and institutional advancement...
Tani Barlow on using films as instructional materials
11.5.2021
Dr. Barlow spoke about her use of film in her teaching a course on 20th century East Asian history, the inspiration behind this use, the challenges she overcame in developing the course, creating a digital film library for instruction, and the pedagogical aspects of using films as instructional materials...
Alma Novotny on “Preparing for the Apocalypse – Using tech to make your life easier.”
10.1.2021
Dr. Novotny’s presentation was focused on using technology to improve face-to-face teaching in order to reduce stress on the instructor in cases where teaching is disrupted, due to student absences, instructor life-events, natural disasters and technology failure. Dr. Novotny discussed her history of teaching using technology, adapting to needs of a diverse set of nontraditional learners, including adult learners, professionals, distance students and MOOCs....
Diana Strassmann on wiki edit-a-thons as class and community collaboration projects
4.2.2021
The Rice University Program in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities (PJHC) hosted a Black Lives Matter Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on October 17th 2020, prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests the previous summer and spurred on by the goal of PJHC to advocate against a “single story”...
Janell Straach on Digital Feedback and Engagement
3.5.2021
Dr. Straach described her instructional process in Masters in Computer Science program, which was designed to be conducted completely online for working professionals and be centered around both student-to-student and student-to-faculty interaction....
Keith Cooper on Adapting a Class for Online Instruction
1.22.2021
Dr. Cooper described how he changed the format of an undergraduate, 120 student Computer Science course from in-person to fully online instruction for the Fall 2020 semester. The traditional thrice weekly lecture schedule with additional tutorials run by TAs was altered to a two week cycle of five lectures followed by a Q&A session, as well as additional office hours and and 1-on-1 sessions....
Naoko Ozaki on Course Gamification
12.4.2020
Dr. Ozaki described her process of creating and administering learning activities that lead to final projects for a first semester Japanese language course during the Fall of 2020. Teaching the course completely online, Dr. Ozaki was concerned about the effects of student isolation and less 1-on-1 student and instructor interaction, and decided to focus on shared activities and creating a sense of community...
Ray Simar on Creating a Class Portfiolio
11.6.2020
Professor Simar described how he created an ePortfolio site using Google Sites to house recordings and associated documents, for Friday lunch talks that were intended to let the students in an academic course hear about a number of interesting topics while they were learning remotely in response to COVID-19 pandemic...
UHD Technology Learning Conference 2019
The Technology Teaching and Learning Center (TTLC) at the University of Houston-Downtown hosted their annual Technology Learning Conference on October 11, 2019. This year's theme was Making Our Learning Space More Accessible...
Elements of Digital Citizenship
12.21.2018
The proliferation of new forms of technology and media in the 21st century, such as smartphones and social media, has left us in a new age of innovation in our lifestyles, bringing with it a digital world. The natives of this new world are Generation Z, the generation born around the turn of the millennium and the years after...
Cyberbullying - A Reflection on a Societal Issue
12.20.2018
In the social media age, cyber bullying has become an issue of great significance that has to be addressed not only by educators, but by our societal leaders. Cyberbullying can be defined as willful, repeated and aggressive acts conducted by an individual or a group over electronic media, in a situation of social power imbalance, intended to cause intimidation, embarrassment and emotional distress in a victim who cannot easily defend themselves...
12.16.2018
As educators we need to be mindful when using the work of others, and also appropriately model this to our students. This is part of practicing and modeling ethical behavior, which is important to the idea of citizenship, both digital and not. The two major behaviors we need to avoid when using works created by others are plagiarism and copyright infringement...
Understanding the Impact of Technology
12.15.2018
The proliferation of internet connected devices and digital media has made technology an integral part of contemporary life in the developed world, with practically every daily human endeavor having the ability to being augmented by technology...
09.23.2018
The "learning fundamentals" expressed by Peter Gray serve as an eye-opening look at the state of today’s educational culture: we seem to be doing almost everything completely contradictory to what he advises...
Online Instruction: Teaching the Learners and the Teachers
08.19.2018
I think that our goal as instructors is to take the best aspects of objectivism, constructivism, and connectivism, discussed by Bates in Teaching the Digital Age, and apply those the courses we teach...
Lecturers and Cognitive Overload
08.17.2018
There has been a lot of discussion over the place of lecturer in the classroom, especially in the digital age, when there are so many other possible learning activities that are available due to technology. One thing that we need to remember is that not all lectures are the same; lecturing and can vary in how engaging and useful it is to students...
Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
08.01.2018
For a five week online course I am developing as a student in an Instructional Design in Online Learning course I’m planning on implementing some of the ideas I discussed in my innovation plan and researched for my literature review...
Examining Seven Life Skills 06.30.2018
Innovation strategies depend not on reinventing the wheel, but on implementing the strategies into existing educational frameworks. I think that as agents of innovation, we as educators are trying to achieve most of the same goals as as the ones laid out by our organizations, but are advocating “new and improved” ways of doing so. The lists of skills developed respectively by Tony Wagner and Ellen Galinsky, are a great reminder of what we seek to cultivate in the students...
05.14.2018
As part of my coursework in Leading Organizational Change at Lamar University, I explored current leadership theories and practices for digital learning and institutional change in educational systems. Our course learning goal was to equip ourselves to be differentiated leaders who can address the inevitable resistance to change that will occur when launching innovative digital learning initiatives...
Self-differentiated Leadership and Crucial Conversations
05.13.2018
In my time as an educator, I have come to recognize more and more that a large part of being an innovator is being a leader, not just a person who has great ideas...
Reimagining my Innovation Plan and the Why? 04.21.2018
As a student in the DLL program at Lamar, an innovation plan and its implementation in the setting of my professional organization are a big part of the learning and leading activities of my coursework. However, I have undergone a change in my professional role since I entered the DLL program...
A Vision for Change 02.19.2018
The idea of being an innovative educator can seem intimidating because those words create the perception that you have to implement extremely elaborate and ambitious educational programs to be one. However, I think an educator can practice innovation just by taking some small steps to improve teaching and learning experiences...
Communicating a Message of Change 02.17.2018
After watching The Power of Words I do feel that our problem in today's world is not the lack of information; with technology most of our society has practically every fact known to man in history at their fingertips. What they need is help with interpreting facts, knowing how the facts affect them, and which facts should be important to them...
Innovation Plan 02.16.2018
As part of my coursework in Disruptive Innovation in Education, I designed an innovation plan that would improve teaching and learning outcomes in my content area by integrating technology into my organization's instructional practice. This innovative practice is disruptive because it is being initiated by a small group focused on improving student outcomes in our specific content area, but could serve as model that will influence the larger institution at all levels...
Innovation and "Now-ism" 02.04.2018
From the examples of innovation seen in the presentations by Joi Ito and Monique Markoff, we can see that innovative technology and practices often come from those who have few resources and are not part of major institutions. Those who are innovating are living in the moment and coming up with ideas to find solutions for the needs and challenges they see in their present...
Progressive Education 01.27.2018
Viewing a video from the 1940’s discussing progressive education, I do recognize a lot of of the language as similar to that used in discussing educational innovation today. The video shows students repeating multiplication tables, states and dates from history. Instead of learning by rote and memorization, the video advocates learning by doing and learning by solving practical problems, which is what most education advocates say today...
Disruptive Innovation in Education 01.22.2018
Disruptive innovation is a term that was originally coined in 1995 in the field of business administration by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. It refers to the process by which a service or product initially thrives at the bottom end of the market by providing a lower cost product that can fill unfulfilled demand, and then is sought after and disperses throughout market, eventually displacing the established providers of the service or product...
The Need for a Learning Revolution 01.22.2018
Upon viewing Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk , I do agree with his central argument of shifting away from a one size fits all system of education to more personalized learning environments...
MLK Day 2018 01.15.2018
#Inspiration
ePortfolio showcase 12.20.2017
It was helpful to look at ePortfolios made by other Digital Learning and Leading students when I was considering what site platform to use and how to organize and format my information...
Climate change... in a science teacher's backyard 12.20.2017
Looking around my backyard on a no longer surprisingly warm December day in Houston, I could have easily thought that I was outside on a balmy spring afternoon...
Ownership of ePortfolio 12.10.2017
It is clear to me that ownership is a crucial aspect of the ePortfolio process because of the agency it gives the owner to make meaning of the process and product of ePortfolio...
Why use ePortfolios? 12.10.2017
While reviewing Helen Barrett’s 2015 presentation on ePortfolios, I noticed that she defines the ePortfolio as both a process and a product...
How I got started with ePortfolio 11.26.2017
When I entered . the Digital Learning & Leading program, I was conscious of the requirement to build and maintain an ePortfolio, so I created all my assignments in a format that would look good in an ePortfolio...
ePortfolio and my DLL journey so far 11.09.2017
Learning about the COVA model has helped me to refine and articulate my knowledge and ideas about education. The use of ePortfolio allows me to practice the COVA model myself as a student, and experience a more personalized learning environment...
Personal Learning Networks 11.03.2017
I joined two new PLNs for this week's assignment and discussion and will elaborate on those as well as one I already belonged to...
The COVA learning approach 10.28.2017
Using the COVA learning approach while being a student in this program might impact my learning in the following ways...
Growth mindset in technology integration + Universal Design for Learning 10.20.2017
As I have read Mindset and have looked over the other course materials, I have been thinking about my mindset in terms of my education, relationships, career and other interests...
Mindset and the message of "yet" 10.12.2017
The message of “yet” (or “not yet”) to a student tells them that are on their way, on a “path to the future”, as described by Carol Dweck. A failure or an obstacle can be looked at as an opportunity for a new beginning instead of an end...
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