Hello there!

Welcome to my blog home for all things related to my teaching and educational background. I hope that you will find this site informative and helpful. As well, this site will serve a a location for various course assignments in my quest to achieve my online instructor certificate. I am nearing the end of the program through the University of Wisconsin – Stout. So far the program has been very interesting and helpful.  In fact it has proved its worth just this month, thanks  to the H1N1 virus.

Thanks to H1N1? How is that? Well, as the school I teach at, The American International School – Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has been closed – as has every other school in the kingdom – we have all moved our classes online. For me this has been a great opportunity to put some theory into practice.  I think the only really difficult aspect is that we are not sure how long this will last.  The Ministry of Education is telling us two weeks (for MS and HS, three for ES) but we are hearing rumors that it could be longer. So the key will be making the transition back to the face-to-face (f2f) environment on what likely will be very short notice. So all those computer based activities will have to be put aside as not everyone will have access to computers when they return to the school.

As for my background I have a BA in History from Colorado State. After receiving my degree I joined the Peace Corps where I taught EFL for two years. In the process I met my future wife, another volunteer, and we returned to Colorado where I returned to university to get my teaching certificate. Upon receipt of my certificate we decided that we would like to move back overseas. This time we entered the American schools international school system. After much searching we landed in Mexico City. We stayed there for three years and thoroughly enjoyed living in the worlds largest city. Deciding that we needed to move on we again went on the hunt for a school and found our current one here in Riyadh. We are now in our sixth school year at AIS-R and are quite happy with our decision to work at this school. As for after AIS-R? Who knows…life is an adventure which takes you to new and unexpected places (like Fiona, Cyprus pictured above) if you let it.