Reflective Online Portfolio
Welcome to my professional e-Portfolio!
My name is Mark Rousseau-Smith, and this website serves as a personal portfolio of my Master's degree work in Instructional Technology at CSUSB. I began my journey into education eleven years ago at Premier Academy, a private school in Pasadena. At this school, which primarily caters to the Asian community, I taught a range of subjects from adult ESL to 4th grade math. This was a great place to teach, but I knew in order to fully hone my teaching skills I needed to make the switch to public schools. For the next five years, I taught 7th, 9th, 11th, and 12th grade English in the Rialto Unified School District, which challenged me and helped me grow professionally as a teacher. From there, in order to work closer to home, I obtained employment with Hesperia Unified School District. I am now in my fourth year at Hesperia High School teaching Speech and Debate/Video Journalism, 11th grade English, and AP English Literature.
I started my Master's program in Instructional Technology because I saw a need for our school districts to more fully incorporate emerging technologies into our curriculum. The traditional model of teacher-led instruction of the 20th century is no longer applicable to today's students. The Internet, blogging, social networking, and other "new" technologies is second nature to our students, so we, as educators, must abandon our antiquated teaching methods and start infusing these technologies into our day-to-day teaching practices. Our students live in a media-rich environment; consequently, if we are to keep our students engaged, we must be able to adapt to this new learning paradigm. While the early use of technology in instruction can be traced back to the early 20th century, especially the use of films and other audio/visual tools during World War II to help quickly train our troops, we are now on the precipice of an exciting new revolution of technology in education.
As of June 2010, I officially earned my Master's in Instructional Technology with an overall GPA of 4.0