Technology

Exploring new technologies and closing the digital divide.

Students working on laptops — Students at work during a technology pilot

Platform pilots & rollouts

I'm usually the one who tries a new tool first, figures out where it helps, and then trains everyone else.

2015 Campus-wide Canvas rollout, then Canvas Trainer of Trainers (2016–17): hands-on sessions for 140+ educators, 100% campus adoption in the first month.
2017–18 ClassCraft pilot: rebuilt district English units as gamified pathways and presented them to my professional learning community.
2019–20 Nearpod pilot: interactive, self-paced lessons for in-person and remote classes.
2021 Screencasting software pilot for recorded lessons and feedback.
2020–21 Student and staff Zoom orientation when classes moved online.
2020–22 District Newsela rollout: leveled nonfiction reading and low-stakes writing practice.
2021–23 ClassroomScreen pilot, and HB4545 student support: tracking progress in the Edgenuity LMS and reporting to support staff and families.

I have also led long-term adoptions of Ditto, Gimkit, Remind, Quizlet, and ClassDojo across Allen ISD and the North Slope Borough School District. Details are on the Instructional Design page.

Joseph in a mad-scientist lab coat and wig, helping students at laptops — Kicking off the physics unit in costume: students build digital Rube Goldberg machines in Portal 2 for “Project Goldberg” (Steam for Schools, Kaktovik, Alaska).

Games as learning tools

Steam for Schools / Teach With Portals (2014–15): used Portal 2, Kerbal Space Program, and Universe Sandbox to let grades 5–8 experiment with physics and math, and Elegy for a Dead World to teach narrative structure and publish student writing.
MinecraftEdu (2013–15): explored Minecraft as a platform for classroom projects.
Today: I program my own quiz games for corporate training. Play them here.

Game testing

I've tested 19 games before release, from MMOs to indie puzzle games. See the full list on my Entertainment page.

Tinkering

Wiimote Whiteboard (2011): built a portable, cross-platform interactive whiteboard from a Wii remote and open-source software, for a fraction of the cost of a SMART Board.
Student-guided math tutorials (2013): students recorded their own video lessons on iPads with the ShowMe app.
Automated reading journals (2014): students logged reading check-ins on Goodreads, and IFTTT collected their entries for me.

Dashboards for decision-makers

A dark dashboard with a radar-style heatmap of eight departments, a territory map, and an activity log — Ripple Map concept demo

For an executive team's presentation to ownership, I designed and built a working mockup of a real-time risk management dashboard: a "living" heatmap showing how issues in one department (Staffing, Billing, Compliance, Legal, and more) ripple outward into the others. Pick a sample site type, filter by territory, and run what-if scenarios like a recruiting drought, an overtime spiral, or a botched big-event rollout, then apply a "cure" and watch the organization recover. It was a visual aid for a plan, not a production system, so all names and data here are fictional.

Open the dashboard demo

Tech in industry

In a 2023 externship with NETSCOUT (through Dallas Workforce Solutions and Allen ISD), I shadowed cybersecurity and network performance teams, documented their tools and roles, and turned them into case studies and career presentations for high school students.

Background

My interest in technology goes back to making video games and studying information technology at my local Career-Tech Center (A+, Network+, iNet+, MCSE and Oracle training), then computer science courses in college. In 2023 I completed Harvard's CS50.

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