Why I Teach
My friend David asked me the other day, “How did you get into teaching and why do you continue to do it?”. It’s an interesting question, and one that I don’t often consider. Teaching is just something I’ve always done. My first experience with teaching, albeit rather informally, was when I worked for Skyline Cablevision/RogersTV […]
Progress Report on My Flipped Classroom
We are a couple of months into the term now, and I thought it would be a good idea to catch you up on how things are going with my flipped classroom. If you want to know more about why I decided to do this, you can check out my three previous posts on the […]
The Secret to Success with New Skills
A big part of my life these days is devoted to teaching. I’ve developed and am teaching multiple online and hybrid courses in social media at Algonquin College, along with my digital video and web media courses in the full time Interactive Multimedia Developer program. My company has also just embarked on a new project […]
Case Jam: Facebook in the Classroom
I’m really excited and fortunate to be involved in a whole lot of stuff at Algonquin College these days. In addition to teaching part time in the Interactive Multimedia Developer program, I’m also teaching online courses in Digital Communication and Social Media in Business, and Jester Creative is working with the college to produce a […]
The Creative Power of the Mindmap
I was back in college the first time I heard about the concept of mindmapping. My Project Management professor showed it to us, as a way to brainstorm all the things that needed to be done to successfully complete a creative design project. That day, my eyes were opened to a new way of doing […]
Want to Learn? Learn to Teach
I sort of fell into the whole teaching thing. I never had aspirations to actually BE a teacher. I wasn’t a great student, after all. Sure, I didn’t skip classes, mostly got my homework done on time, but my grades were a mess – partly from being a military brat (Canada’s education system is not […]
What My Students Taught Me About Online Communities
As some of you may know, this semester I’m teaching a course at Algonquin College on Web Media. We’re talking about and doing everything from blogging to podcasting to social networking and anything else that falls under the Web 2.0 umbrella. What I love about this course is that though I was given a basic […]
On Teaching
Yesterday was the last class of the semester prior to the Christmas break. For the past 15 weeks, I’ve been teaching video production to 84 first-year future web developers and designers. It’s designed to be an introductory course, covering all the technical basics of lighting, shooting and editing but also emphasizing video as a visual […]
Are you a Great Teacher?
I was never the greatest student back in high school. I was miserable at math (still am), and miserable at English. I had to take makeup classes after school when I was in Grade 11, because my grammar was “atrocious”. Ironic that I’m now a writer (take that, Mrs. Dicresce!). I muddled through high school, […]