2024 Presentations

MMATYC (Maryland Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges): Friday, May 24, 2024

  • Transitioning Students to Become Independent Learners - This presentation offers a variety of resources to instructor to help students develop skills such as organization, time management and effective studying practices.

  • Increasing Student Success with Spaced Repetition - How often have you seen students master a concept at the beginning of the semester only to completely forget on a cumulative final exam? Spaced repetition addresses this problem by implementing regular, cumulative reviews throughout the semester. This presentation offers a variety of resources and strategies instructors can use to implement spaced repetition in the classroom.

AMATYC (American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges): November 14 - 17, 2024

  • Increasing Student Success with Spaced Repetition- How often have you seen students master a concept at the beginning of the semester only to completely forget on a cumulative final exam? Spaced repetition addresses this problem by implementing regular, cumulative reviews throughout the semester. This presentation offers a variety of resources and strategies instructors can use to implement spaced repetition in the classroom.

2023 Presentations

CCBC (Community College of Baltimore County) Online Learning Symposium​: May 2023

  • Increasing Student Success in Online Courses  - This presentation discusses the need for and importance of frequent, personal communication with students.  Also discussed in the presentation is the use of videos and Calendly to facilitate communication between students and faculty.

MMATYC: May 2023

  • Teaching Good Habits in Developmental Courses - Many students enter developmental classes without basic skills such as organization or time management.  This presentation offers attendees a variety of different methods to teach and reinforce habits that lead to student success.   In this presentation I detail my use of composition books, badges, guided notes, detailed written solutions, videos, grade forms, flashcards, GroupME and Calendly.

2021 Presentations

MMATYC: May 27, 2021

  • Trauma-Informed Teaching: Creating Life-Long Learners, presented with Greg Stiffler  - In recent years, trauma-informed therapy has emerged as a way to counsel people who have suffered traumatic experiences.  Trauma-informed teaching similarly acknowledges that students may have suffered trauma both in their personal lives and in previous math courses.  This session explores the impact of such trauma on students’ ability to learn and taught instructors how to create a safe space in which students are free to participate without fear of ridicule or reprimand.  It also teaches instructors how to foster a growth mindset that expects learning to entail making mistakes and reframe those mistakes not as failure but as a natural and healthy part of the learning process.  

  • Online Learning: Reaping the benefits of Video Instruction - In this session, attendees are challenged to think outside the box and brainstorm different types of videos they can create to supplement instruction.  Participants learn to use videos to demonstrate the use of software, give students virtual tours of an LMS, create video reviews for tests, video solutions for homework and more.

CCBC’s Developmental Education Symposium: Tuesday, August 24, 2021

  • Compassion-Informed Teaching In Developmental Courses presented with Kate Abromitis– this presentation explains how past trauma in the math classroom can affect students.  This presentation shows two videos of students speaking about adverse experiences in the classroom.  In the videos, the students explain how such experiences can make students reluctant to participate and fully engage in the classroom.  The presentation goes on to discuss ways of creating and maintaining a safe classroom in which mistakes are not criticized but embraced as a natural part of the learning process.  

2020 Presentations

AFACCT (Association of Faculties for the Advancement of Community College Teaching): January 2020:

  • On Gamification and Kinesthetic Learning, presented with Cody Cassiday -  Participants learned how to use interactive games to create a more supportive and inclusive classroom environment for students, especially in developmental courses.  Presenters demonstrated a Winsanity! inspired game designed to maximize student participation and buy-in for optimal efficacy of classroom gamification. 

  • Increased Student Engagement across Disciplines: Three Strategies for Creating Active Learners, presented with Jamie Whitman, CCBC Online Learning Library Coordinator, and Anna Jaworski, CCBC Assistant Professor of Science - the presenters created and implemented projects designed to provide active learning experiences for their students as part of their CCBC NFLC experience.  Heather Luman discussed her experience creating a flipped-classroom. 

2019 Presentations

AFACCT: January 2019

CCBC Professional Development Conference: May 2019

  • Unleashing Blackboard’s Promise - This presentation highlighted several key features of Blackboard, including how to create online rubrics and post online assignments and receive digital submissions, messaging options in Bb (Bb messages vs. email and the pros and cons of each), and lastly features of the Blackboard gradebook.  This presentation was a result of my cumulative knowledge of Blackboard that I have built up over the past several years working at CCBC.  I wanted to share my knowledge with colleagues and help them make the most use of our LMS. 

CCBC Online Learning Symposium: May 2019

  • Digital Microbadging in Blackboard, co-presented with Fernando Paniagua -  Digital Microbadging is a way to add extrinsic motivation to certain course-related tasks.  Students can earn digital microbadging by meeting certain course requirements which are usually linked to the Blackboard gradebook.  Badges may also be part of the course grade or give the student extra credit. 

2018 Presentations

AFACCT, January 2018 and AMATYC November, 2018

  • Embrace Student-Centered Learning and Decrease Your Workload - This one-hour, highly interactive presentation covered the importance and practicality of student-centered classrooms.  I explained the difference between scalable and non-scalable resources and encouraged instructors to create re-usable resources so that they can save time in the long run.  I also spoke at length about the psychological forces at work in the classroom and the factors which discourage student participation. 

2017 Presentations

AFACCT, January 2017 and AMATYC, November 2017:

  • Video Projects as a Means of Assessing Content Comprehension, presented with Mary Elizabeth Gore -  This presentation explained the use of video projects in Statistics as a means of helping students master fundamental concepts in statistics such as data types, standard deviation, and confidence intervals.  Also discussed was how the use of video projects prevents plagiarism as students are required to create their own unique content in video format, explaining concepts in their own words and providing unique examples of the topic.