During the past 8 years, I have been on an incredibly journey.  I started my journey in Vancouver, Canada, but then moved to New York City, USA. There I met my wife, and we moved together to England. Here we had a son together and moved together to Bangkok, Thailand.

Professionally I started my career out as a teacher who was capable with technology but I did not use it often in my teaching because it was rarely available in the inner city school I started in, instead I experimented in other ways.  I do remember using the Carnegie-Mellon learning management system with my students. One observation that stuck with me from this time was that students were initially engaged by the technology, but became bored with the repetitiveness of the activity.

When I moved to London, there was a dearth of technology available and I became more proficient in using it with my teaching.  I set up my own class website for the first time, and learned how to program in JavaScript, Actionscript and PHP so that I could build educational widgets for use in my classroom.  All of the work the students did online was ungraded, and what I noticed from this time was that the amount of effort they put into their blogging was directly proportional to its perceived value.

I moved to Thailand and after 5 years of teaching I felt the need to formalize some of what I had learned. I decided to do a Masters Degree, and after much searching I found the Masters of Educational Technology program through the University of British Columbia. My application was accepted to start in January of 2008.  I continued to use technology in my classroom in the same ways I had been using it previously.  When I started my Masters degree, I remember that my use of technology began to change.

I became more purposeful in my use of technology in my classroom as I learned more about the pitfalls of it's use.  Learning about the theory behind learning with technology made me realize that some of my uses of technology lacked purpose but that others were fantastic learning opportunities.  I remember the Jasper project specifically introduced me to the idea of using multimedia with my students in my mathematics classrooms.

Please watch my guided tour below and find out how to navigate my ePortfolio. You can also download this tour here in slightly higher quality.

The learning theory which my metaphor best describes is Social Constructivism.  If you watch the video below, notice the parallel between the diagrams I've used to describe the learning I've done through out my Masters degree, and the diagram in the video which describes Social Constructivism.