About the Author
I have always love helping and inspiring others to achieve their goals. I have always been interested in the fitness world. Together those interests have created a passion for providing opportunity to others to maintain a healthy and fit lifestyle by giving my students access to information that will help them be successful in all aspects of their lives. I love working with our youth, especially at-risk youth. I love watching the light of understanding shine in their eyes aka "the light bulb effect".
I have coached water polo for ten plus years. I have worked with all ages and being a part of all of the athletes journeys has brought me no greater joy. I truly love watching young athletes grow into young adults and then eventually a working and contributing member of our community. Coaching is my motivation behind becoming a teacher. With a back ground in Kinesiology I became a Physical Education and Health Science Teacher at a title one school. Working with at-risk youth, although challenging, has proven to be rewarding when you help a student learn to actually enjoy the learning-process again.
I have coached water polo for ten plus years. I have worked with all ages and being a part of all of the athletes journeys has brought me no greater joy. I truly love watching young athletes grow into young adults and then eventually a working and contributing member of our community. Coaching is my motivation behind becoming a teacher. With a back ground in Kinesiology I became a Physical Education and Health Science Teacher at a title one school. Working with at-risk youth, although challenging, has proven to be rewarding when you help a student learn to actually enjoy the learning-process again.
Reflections on my Journey
Throughout my journey to receive my masters degree I personally feel as if I have grown tremendously as an innovative learner. Baggio explains in detail auditory, kinetics, and visual learners and how we need to address each of the learning styles. The SITE model helps me better understand the needs of my audience. And lastly, even though Dervin, Clark and some of the other sense-making models were very dense, which was probably the greatest challenge of this course, I learned so much from each text as we broke them down in presentations, videos, and discussions. I understand that in order to make sense of new information we use not only our prior knowledge, but also our prior experiences and our cultural backgrounds. Each individual learns differently because we all experience the world differently and if we want to bridge the gap we need to meet each of our students needs. A daunting task, to say the least, but manageable with the assistance of technology.
Lasting Learning from the Innovative Learning programThere are so many things that I have learned throughout the Innovative Learning program. Including having a better idea of how to use instructional design models such as TPACK, ARCS, SAMR or Dervin's sense making model to create lesson plans and/or projects that are student driven.
Not only have I learned how to create better and more innovative projects and lessons that target each individual student's needs, but I learned how to conduct a proper action research. Being able to conduct an action research has given me the tools and ability to test out different teaching methods and instructional tools. One of the biggest take away is being able to implement technology into my lessons with ease. I feel so comfortable bringing my physical education class in to the 21st century. 
To access my blog, fit4edu, which recalls my journey throughout the Innovative Learning Program please click on the picture.
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