My career as an educator has been an accidental one – but most definitely a happy accident. I taught in higher ed for approximately 8 years. I began as an adjunct at Marshall University and ending the traditional role as the Computer Science Program Manager at Hocking College.

As an AWS Authorized Instructor and Educator, I still teach as an AWS freelancer for schools across the country. In addition, I am a subject matter expert for organizations like Freedom Learning Group, LearningMate, and Teamed. As a subject matter expert I am able to bring my experience as an educator to the role of someone who helps create the content that learners learn from. It is a great combination of two of my favorite things – writing and teaching/learning.

One of the things I enjoy about being a SME is the opportunity to improve my skills in curriculum development and developing learning objectives. Working with the instructional designers and learning design specialists, I am able improve my approach and processes to developing content. I’ve decided to take my own skills to a higher level. After doing some research and taking some recommendations, I have registered for the the ISTE certification program.

What is the ISTE Certification?

The ISTE Certification focuses on pedagogy skills for educational practitioners – this includes teachers, instructional designers, technology coaches, and other roles. The course is made up of 10 weeks of professional learning and a six-month portfolio that is created during that time.

Study Tools & Techniques

One of the tools I recently spent some time taking a deep dive on for a SME project is Microsoft OneNote. During this exploration, I re-discovered the usefulness of this often overlooked tool to manage resources, ideas, and assignments on one platform that is customizable.

Some of my favorite features of OneNote are the following:

• sections that are easy to navigate and customize
• ability to separate add pages to the sections
• add text, images, links, videos, and audio files

Right Question Institute

My degrees are in business, IT and Information Systems Management – not in education. While reading and researching during week 1, I came across the Right Question Institute. The more I read about RQI, the more I resonated with and was inspired by it’s philosophy. So much so – that it has it’s own section with multiple pages that I can easily refer to when planning for my next AWS class.

Follow along to watch me learn and discover how to become a better non-traditional educator and instructional designer.

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