Hello all! I just started this post from scratch because my initial one was 985 words, so I'll save you the life story and work off of the outline I found on Coursera!

I'm from upstate NY, wher eI've lived my whole life. It's a quiet spot, but I'm happy to raise my son with my wife at the end of a dead-end road in a rural area. There's no street lights to keep us up at night (which is nice) and no broadband internet (which is awful).

I'm currently working as the "Senior Education and Product Empowerment Specialist" at docStar. We make ECM (electronic content management) software and that's a long way of saying that I'm the training manager for a really cool software company. I work with fantastic people and am incredibly fortunate to be where I am. My past includes positions like IT guy, guitar player, game developer (fun fact: I have a song in Guitar Hero), voice over producer and instructor, and a few other weird things.

My educational background is pretty much instinct only. I didn't know that I wanted to teach until I reached a career dead-end, and was inspired by my wife going back to school to get her Master's in School Counseling. I just landed my current job in September and am looking to acquire some actual educational... education. :)

I'm experiencing some success with a series of micro lessons I've been making for my company. My recipe is brevity, production value, and humor, and the owners of the company, our partners, and customers have told me that they love this format as opposed to hour-long, dry technical videos or manuals. 

I use technology for everything. I can't balance a checkbook, so I use an app on my phone that does the math for me. I also don't have any formal education in this either, but my dad was a brilliant programmer who built accounting software in the 80's that his clients were still using in the early 2000's and I learned computers and technology through osmosis. I built my first desktop when I was 14, and decided not to go into tech as my misguded teenage rebellion. 

I knew that I loved teaching when I was a voice over instructor, and would use anything I could get my hands on to teach with. When I started in that career, our students would get four one on one two hour sessions, which was later cut in half. I used podcasts as overflow for what we couldn't get into our abbreviated classes and would invite questions via email. It wasn't much, but I enjoyed it.

I'm here because I'm hoping that I can develop some educational theory and get a good foundation here so that I can feel more confident in the role of "educational professional." I want to make learning more of an active experience for my students than a passive method of watching a video that has some humorous elements.

I love the notion of learning being a lifelong activity, and it's up to us to find new and exciting ways to do so. Gigantic textbooks and manuals are great resources, but they're not enjoyable experiences. If we can make enjoyable experiences, then we can make learning something that people want to do and look forward to; not something they feel like they have to do.

I'm hoping that through this, I can elevate what I'm creating to be something special, I'm in a unique position at my job where I'm regularly communicating both with our customers and our leadership, so as they're learning more, they can use the product in better and smarter ways, be more efficient, and go home to their families with a good amount of energy at the end of the day. 

I'm happy to be on this journey with you all!