Graduate work

I completed my Master of Educational Technology — with an additional graduate certificate in Online Teaching — in May of 2015 through Boise State University.

EdTech Portfolio

The culminating project for my Masters program was the development of a portfolio of all coursework, aligned to the AECT (Association for Educational Communications and Technology) Standards for Professional Education Programs.

This project included front-end development of the portfolio website itself, using Wordpress and Adobe Dreamweaver.

NOTE: Because this site is maintained on University servers that I no longer have access to, there may be some dead links where artifacts expired on a particular platform.

"Cognitive Load in Practice"

In the two and a half years I worked toward my Master's degree, I was a Senior Instructional Designer for Pearson's K–12 curriculum group. My role was focused on the development of digital/multimedia curricula. This made me one of only a couple of graduate students in my cohort who did not teach in a K–12 classroom. As a result, I didn't have pre-existing lesson content to work with. I ultimately chose topics for instruction based on two criteria:

Is it a topic that will advance my professional skills?
Is it a topic that will let me help my colleagues advance their professional skills?

In service of the latter, I focused several projects on a learning and development course I created on the topic of cognitive load. It was designed to provide editors, designers, and instructional designers with a theoretical background in "cognitive theory of multimedia learning" and practical tips for implementing that theory in multimedia development work.

Academic research

In this paper, I focused on how digital tools can support constructivist-based instruction. The paper looks at the foundations of constructivism as they relate to digital implementation and discusses constructivist utilization of digital technologies at three stages: design, implementation, and evaluation. As a part of the research process for this paper, I created an annotated bibliography that summarizes and reflects on the research value of ten peer-reviewed academic resources.