The Creative Science Classroom

I am a veteran high school science and technology teacher in Utah. I have taught in public, charter, and private schools and at M-Tech (formerly Mountainland Applied Technology Center) in Utah Valley, where I taught media design technology classes for graphic design, desktop publishing, video production, and 3D animation. As a science teacher I have taught chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, earth science, forensic science, computer science, and engineering design.

I have participated in a number of NASA education workshops including the NASA Educator Workshops for Mathematics and Science Teachers (NEWMAST) program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA in 1998. I was then chosen as part of the NASA/JPL Solar System Educators Program to receive additional training on space missions and share that training by conducting my own educator workshops in Utah. In 2002 I was chosen as the Educator Facilitator at JPL for the NASA Explorer Schools program and helped to plan and implement educator workshops at JPL for 100 teachers across the country. I am also a MAVEN Educator Ambassador and a SOFIA Airborne Astronomy Ambassador, having flown on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) in 2013. Recently I have been part of the Teacher Innovator Institute at the National Air and Space Museum. I am including my resume here with more details on my achievements:

After 32 years of classroom teaching at the high school level I am embarking on a new adventure by completing a Doctor of Education (Ed.D) degree at the University of Northern Colorado. I have completed all coursework and comprehensive exams and am now working on my dissertation. This web site is set up to report on the progress of my research and to provide training videos for students and teachers to create digital media as they master science content.

For past year, beginning in June 2023, I have taken on a new role as an Education Program Specialist at Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah. My job is to travel around the state to present space science lessons to 4th and 6th grade students on the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) standards. As a way to combine my primary job and my need to complete my dissertation, I am combining my research topic of student-created digital media projects with the sixth grade SEEd standards to build a Cosmic Creator Challenge hosted by the Planetarium. All sixth grade students in Utah are eligible to create a project for the Challenge where they choose a topic from the SEEd standards, pick a medium or design software program to learn, and decide on an approach for their project. The end goal is to create a product that teachers their peers about the objects in our solar system which shows scientific knowledge, creativity, quality, software proficiency, and science communication ability.

This website has been built to provide support for this program and to train students how to use browser-based design software through a series of Digital Media Micro Lessons. These videos will be posted as they are completed during the summer and fall of 2024. Please keep checking back to see if more are finished.