About

Screen Shot 2017-01-11 at 11.56.39 AM.png As a naturally curious person, I spend my life constantly evolving and adapting my skills. As a self-professed jack of all trades, I have an endless fascination with how things work. This desire to understand and learn has certainly caused me my share of headaches, a recent plumbing disaster is a great example; yet these trial and error adventures have provided me with some of the most valuable learning experiences I could imagine. After all, what better way to learn than by making a mistake?

I was born and raised in Port Coquitlam and graduated from Terry Fox Secondary after spending earlier years at Mary Hill Junior (now Pitt River Middle) and Irvine Elementary.

I graduated from Simon Fraser University where I also completed my PDP and Bachelor of Education. My major was focused in curriculum development. I went on to complete a Master’s degree, in Educational Technology and Learning Design. During this program, I researched the deployment of technology across school districts from a historical perspective. I also closely studied factors that influence the availability of technological resources and expertise in schools throughout the province. Another key area of research was the potential for connection between social media usage and mental illness. I am very interested in the growing potential for online diagnosis and social support for mental health situations via social media networks and other web-based tools. During this research, I conducted a study of over 100 participants to determine if markers of mental health concerns could be attributed to certain specific types of activities on social networking sites. The results were very promising and give me hope that experts will one day be able to intervene in potentially critical mental health episodes by early detection via social media monitoring.

In 2006 I moved to London, England where I taught at a variety of schools throughout the inner-city before ultimately accepting a two-year position as a pre-school teacher. Public pre-schools in the UK are considered part of the school system and employ certified teachers. I was also able to use my curriculum design experience as a member of the UK early years curriculum redesign. These experiences where very enlightening and tremendously valuable in my development as an educator.

I then spent a decade teaching in SD43, starting in primary and moving on to spend the bulk of my career in secondary. My most recent teaching work was as head teacher at Pinetree Secondary a large, 1,500+ student multi-cultural school in Coquitlam. At the end of 2017, I moved to SD61 and am now working as a district Vice Principal with the Greater Victoria School District Learning Team, where my focus is on Secondary school support, new curriculum integration, technology for learning, and numeracy.

I am actively involved in professional development throughout our province and am the past-president of Computer Using Educators of BC (CUEBC). I also am on the BC Ministry of Education’s Applied Design, Skills and Technologies curriculum team, working to redevelop the K-12 “coding”curriculum in our province.

Some of my hobbies include kayaking, graphic design, and digital music composition. I also love to travel and have been to some spectacular places including Africa, and South America, and most recently China to teach a high school Summer program in Fuyang, a town about an hour outside of Hangzhou. I have recently completed sailing lessons and plan to eventually circumnavigate Vancouver Island and spend some more time exploring BC’s west coast.

Great Wall of China