Welcome.

This is a site that I put together as part of a project for a class that I am currently taking at Lawrence Technological University. Though I have worked for many years on the technical and educational side of technology, as you will probably surmise, graphics design has never fallen under one of my job descriptions. The site will be functional, but not necessarily pretty.

I have been the Technology Director for Cranbrook Schools for the past 15 years or so. I arrived at this role through a circuitous route driven more by happenstance than design. After spending the bulk of my college career in the electrical and computing engineering department specializing in computer design, I decided that I was really more interested in teaching as the result of my work in coaching age group swimming teams. After switching to the mathematics department and picking up a math degree, I showed up at my first school only to find that someone had just donated a DEC PDP11/03 mini-computer that no one knew anything about. Thus, began my long involvement with educational technology with a couple of interim attempts to escape its clutches through a foray into the life of a full-time corporate computer programmer for a few years followed by a return to full-time math teacher and coach. But alas, after a couple of years technology began to insidiously creep into my life until I was again ensnarled in a web a colleague told me that I would escape only by moving to a new school and leaving a gaping hole in my resume by not mentioning that I know anything about technology!

Seriously though, it's been a great deal of fun, providing endless challenges, frustrations, and opportunities to impact the education of kids. It's a field where lifelong learning is a requirement of the job, not an option. In the early years, I had the opportunity to hear people such as David Thornburg, Grant Wiggins, and others who, back when most people were focused on the technology, never lost sight of the fact that it was all about teaching kids - assessments, curriculum and so on. The things that seem so obvious now, were not always obvious and these people heavily influenced my thinking about how technology should be applied to education.

When asked how the job is going, I can always answer, "I'm never bored!"