by Sharon | Nov 25, 2018 | acrylic, portfolio
Good studio day. Every pour I made is beautiful. I’m trying to decide what made the difference. Technique is certainly part of it. Today I mainly did dirty cup pours on a canvas loaded with either black or white paint. I made sure to run the cup around the...
by Sharon | Feb 25, 2017 | design, portfolio
These graphics are part of a prototype project that never launched. I created these in Adobe Fireworks using public domain clip art from OpenClipArt.org.
by Sharon | Dec 1, 2016 | conferences, design, discbound, internal projects, pedagogy, portfolio, professional development
For this prototype, I combined a typical conference program with “bullet journaling” — a new spin on the classic hand-written daily planner. The Lily Conference inspired this project. I ran across their awesome conference program while looking for a...
by Sharon | Feb 16, 2016 | electronics, personal, portfolio
Hobbyist electronics, including technologies or concepts like makerspaces, 3D printing, or Arduino prototype boards, are quickly finding their way into the classroom. This personal project is my first step into a new playground. I wanted to get my feet wet in the DIY...
by Sharon | Feb 4, 2016 | design, personal, portfolio
While I’ve more than successfully transitioned from paper books to ebooks, I haven’t been as enthusiastic about giving up paper calendars and to-do lists. Paper lets me create attractive planner pages that I can customize to fit my life. Apps can’t...
by Sharon | Jul 15, 2015 | design, portfolio
This flyer, advertising learning communities, was designed in Adobe Photoshop. The companion banner, created for a table at a student recruitment event, involved fabric dye, handmade stencils, white spray paint, and blue acrylic paint. The wonderful font featured on...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | audio and video, design, portfolio
This logo for a fictional university is one of several visual elements I created for an alternate reality game pilot. The game, which featured a college facing an inland hurricane, was designed for students in a public relations/communications program, where the...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | design, pedagogy, portfolio
For a job interview, I was asked to speak on student engagement. The night before the interview I brainstormed the idea of an “engagement quilt,” like an old patchwork quilt with several different pieces that contribute to the design. In my...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | design, portfolio
While at Massive Online University, I designed a logo for our now-defunct department, the Center for Support of Instruction. We wanted something that looked futuristic and technical, but also something that talked about inspiration and creativity. The combination of a...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | authoring tools, portfolio
Training faculty to use easy content creation tools like SoftChalk is a delight. It’s fun to watch faculty find new ways to connect students and content. I used this SoftChalk quiz with a web animation class. It’s SCORM compliant, so the grades went...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | design, portfolio
I designed these advertisements for video game classes using actual game boxes. The ads were successful, if by “successful” you mean students stole the ads off the walls. We didn’t make many of these because it’s hard to get gamers to part with...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | design, portfolio
This Ferris wheel illustrates the journey that takes students from jeans to graduation robes. The graphic, developed during a session at Evergreen College’s National Summer Institute on Learning Communities, was conceived and executed in under two hours on a...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | design, portfolio
Logo design is always challenging, it’s tough to reduce an entire team (or company) into a visual. This logo represents several things: students in a circle (collaboration) a gear (innovation, work) the sun (creativity) a wheel (progress, journeys)...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | portfolio, second life
One school I worked for began a Second Life project shortly after I joined the staff . . . Since I had previous experience, I was tapped to be the island administrator. As administrator, I was responsible for locating and purchasing buildings, plants, furniture, and...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | portfolio, social media
I designed a site in Ning that enabled a department to maintain ties with former students, guest speakers, and other interested parties. After reviewing about 60 social media platforms, we settled on Ning due to its ease of use, privacy controls, and Twitter...
by Sharon | May 7, 2015 | LMS, online training, portfolio, technical writing
Since I’m an experienced face-to-face trainer, I was tapped to develop content for the face-to-face training sessions when the University upgraded its in-house LMS. This web page, which includes a few simple Flash objects, is one example of the post-training...
by Sharon | May 6, 2015 | LMS, portfolio, technical writing
One of my former employers strongly believed in giving printed instruction manuals to faculty. I served as co-author on our Blackboard training manual. The manual incorporated Quality Matters principles. A few pages from the manual are below. Loading... Taking too...
by Sharon | May 6, 2015 | design, portfolio
In 2009, I designed a report my institution authored for a prestigious Beltway consulting firm. The professional appearance of the report was praised by our administration and by the client.
by Sharon | May 6, 2015 | design, portfolio
This party invitation was created in about three hours using clipart. It’s a working cootie catcher — you can print a copy and fold it up yourself, the YouTube video at the bottom of the page shows...
by Sharon | May 6, 2015 | design, portfolio
I designed several flyers for NLC’s Teaching and Learning Team. This one, promoting a session on clickers, is an example of too-good design. Most instructors thought this was an event hosted by a publisher; not an in-house session lead by their peers.
by Sharon | May 6, 2015 | audio and video, portfolio
After receiving a slew of confused emails from students I ran to my lab and produced this video in under three hours. Quality was not the primary goal — demystifying the content to alleviate student concerns was foremost in my mind. I produced this in iMovie....
by Sharon | May 6, 2015 | design, portfolio
In the documentary Beautiful Losers, Aaron Rose made a statement that inspired me. His quote is about editing, about removing things from your life that aren’t working. At the time I needed to make some severe edits to my life, and I found the process to be...
by Sharon | May 6, 2015 | authoring tools, online training, portfolio
In 2007 when Blackboard 8 released the vastly improved (and vastly different) Grade Center, my college had to train several hundred faculty in a short time span. I created a series of just-in-time training videos to help. This tutorial taught faculty how to add a...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | internal projects, portfolio, professional development
One of my assignments at Large Online University involved designing a department wiki and implementing an adoption strategy to encourage department staff to use the wiki. Initially, we decided to work with Media Wiki. I installed the software on a server, then began...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | portfolio, programming, second life
A Second Life project involved creating a debit card system so students couldn’t use Lindens to complete their assignment. One of my favorite clients, the team from Landscape Architecture, came to the table with an idea for an isometric drag-and-drop garden...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | animation, conferences, portfolio, professional development
Backup Singers: Hitting Productivity High Notes with Helper Apps is a presentation on automation I gave at the Texas Distance Learning Association in 2015. The presentation highlighted ways to automate tasks. . . . A traditional print handout felt too cumbersome for...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | LMS, online training, portfolio
Several basic Blackboard tasks are covered in this just-in-time tutorial. This Storyline learning object helped faculty transition from Vista to Blackboard. The production team I lead determined the content, wrote the script, and created the animations and...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | animation, LMS, portfolio
How can Announcements help your students? This HTML5 animation created in Sencha Animator is a prototype for a planned series of Blackboard tips videos. The two sidebar links for instructions are behind a firewall.
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | LMS, portfolio, training
Google helps you share content with your students using Google Groups and Google+ Communities. Which is better? This presentation explores the differences. http://www.slideshare.net/upload?from_source=loggedin_profile Sharing with Your Class — Google Groups and...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | personal, portfolio
In my spare time, I practice egg art. These eggs are decorated using pysanky techniques, which are similar to batik. The process involves writing on an egg with wax, dying the egg, then adding more wax, and more dye. The last step in the process is to remove the wax...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | portfolio, technical writing
This short tutorial was inspired by a professor with a new cell phone who wanted an easy way to share articles with students using his Blackboard class. The first part, shown here, describes how to post to Twitter using Gmail using IFTTT. The second part, which is...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | authoring tools, portfolio, professional development
Align objects and change stack order in Storyline and PowerPoint using your number keypad. As any experienced Storyline user can tell you, the align and distribute tools in Storyline (like “align left” or “move to front”) are used constantly....
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | audio and video, personal, portfolio, training
Silly video snippet I sometimes use as a sample for training classes, or for...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | audio and video, portfolio, professional development
Watch my Mac read a spreadsheet, and my PC enter the numbers into Storyline! Last year I worked on a series of extensive Storyline modules that required closed captioning. At the time, Storyline could not incorporate industry-standard closed caption files, and the few...
by Sharon | May 5, 2015 | audio and video, portfolio, professional development
See how I used ClipMate to help relieve some of the drudgery involved in creating closed captions in...
by Sharon | May 4, 2015 | portfolio, technical writing
Need a photo for your lesson? Learn how to find free photos using Flickr, and also learn what can trip you up! Flickr’s Creative Commons photos are a fantastic resource for teachers, but before using the photos it’s important for teachers to be aware of...
by Sharon | May 4, 2015 | portfolio, technical writing, training
Easily add active learning slides to your PowerPoint deck. PowerPoint is a key tool in most instructors’ toolboxes. This article shows how to easily instructors add a little interactivity to their slide decks. It’s based on techniques researched while...
by Sharon | May 3, 2015 | animation, authoring tools, portfolio, programming
I served as technical lead on a partial redesign of a Flash module on the OSI Model. My revisions included recording the opening narration, creating the crossword puzzle following the narration, adding closed captions to the Virtual Instructor, designing a new...
by Sharon | Sep 17, 2014 | authoring tools, portfolio
Redecorate the artist’s Bedroom in Arles using elements from Van Gogh’s other paintings. (This is a discussion of an in-progress project.) About twenty years ago, when I was young and in college, I spent my spring break editing Van Gogh paintings in...
by Sharon | Jun 18, 2014 | design, portfolio, training
Read how a clip art professor taught this designer a thing or two about best practices. Recently my department agreed to co-present multiple sessions of a face-to-face workshop in conjunction with two other departments on campus. Due to departmental calendaring...