About
Right now? I’m a instructional technology specialist for the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology. They keep me busy there. I work on two Title IId grants. Project ICT, which focuses on technologically-enhanced project-based learning, and OPAL, which primarily concerns itself with e-learning and digital portfolios. I built the Office of Educational Technology’s web page and help maintain the South Brooklyn and Staten Island Office’s page. I also manage a few Ning-based professional learning networks (like this one). I’m currently working on building a web presence for five of the 21st century schools that recently opened in Northern Manhattan.
Before my foray into educational technology, I was a special education teacher in Brooklyn, NY. My bread and butter was teaching science to (not so) eager eighth graders in Fort Greene. I have taught sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in English, social studies, math, science, art, and technology. I am in the process of putting the finishing touches on my Master of Science degree in special education at Hunter College of the City University of New York. I am an alumni of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, which takes inexperienced career-changers—or career-starters, in my case—and throws them into high-need, urban classrooms.
Prior to working for the New York City Department of Education, I worked for the Rutgers University Office of Information Technology and Apple as a lab supervisor and a campus representative respectively. I am passionately interested in the role of technology in the classroom. My philosophy is that technology should not be used to replace the blackboard and the overhead projector—to reinvent the wheel, per se—but instead, educators should use the latest technology to create learning experiences that were not possible before modern technology.
As an undergraduate at Rutgers University, I studied sociology and psychology. I wrote a honors thesis on the role of mass media in the social construction of natural disasters, using Hurricane Katrina as a case study. I helped coordinate the 2006 New Jersey Folk Festival and worked as a teaching assistant in American Studies and assisted Professor Angus Kress Gillespie with research for his forthcoming book on the Lincoln Tunnel.
