High School Art/CTE Educator

Course Links

Teaching Digital Graphics & Design

Sample presentations and student work

I made a career switch, went back to school, and earned my California State Teaching Credential in Visual Art & Career Technical Education along with a Master of Education from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2014 with a 4.0 GPA.

Achievements

Built a course of instruction that focuses on micro and macro skills for today's graphic designer, based on California State Art and CTE standards that mimic real world experiences and utilizes design thinking methods, entrepreneurial skills, and a strong feedback loop, while offering differentiated instruction to meet the various skill levels of my student population.
Maintain a relationship with Diablo Valley College, to provide two articulated courses and created a pathway for students to obtain a certificate in digital media before high school graduation.

Courses Taught

ROP Computer Graphic Arts, Level 1 & 2
Digital Imaging / Digital Photography
Web Design
Art 1 / Beginning Foundational Art
Basic Computer Applications

Professional Development Courses Taught

Design Thinking: Based on DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats for Educators, supplied teachers with tools and methods to utilize design thinking in courses other than Art. Surprisingly it was well received and used by multiple Math departments throughout the SRVUSD school district.

Weebly Website Design & Production: Designed and produced a widely popular 21st century skills course to teach other educators how to design and develop their own Weebly Websites to house their course content, create course archives, and teach to students for projects and presentations.
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The Prezume: a CTE educator course to teach the “Prezume”, a Prezi format resume, which allows for greater student engagement when writing and producing resumes.

Typeface Poster Project

Research project to study a typeface showing the research information in the form of an informational poster that is well designed in Adobe illustrator, uses strong visual hierarchy,
​and is set on a 30, 45, 60, or 90 degree grid.

Adobe Illustrator ​Emoji Set

Overview: ​
Emojis, created in the 1990’s by a Japanese communications firm, evolved from typographic displays of facial representations or emoticons. These small, digital images or icons are used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication. In America, Apple helped bring emojis mainstream when it added the emoji keyboard to iOS 5 in 2011. Since then, digital language has evolved and there are 3,521 emojis in the Unicode Standard as of September 2020.
Goals:
  • Design a creative set of emoji based on an inspirational obstruction that you will need to incorporate into your design.
  • Use Illustrator shape tools, the shape builder tool, and pathfinder tools to craft your images.
  • Follow the tutorial for the first 11 faces.
  • Play with color, style and shape.
  • In addition to the 11, you need to come up with 3 new ideas for a total of 14 icons.

Adobe Photoshop Landscape in a Bottle

This is a direct instruction project where students are walked through the process step by step. It is the ultimate challenge to fully learn Adobe Photoshop and its ability to blend imagery non-destructively. Students start with an image of the stars, and then we layer, mask, adjustment and , and add effects. The final file typically contains 75-90 layers.