About

Welcome to Freshmancomp.com, my teaching and learning website for South Mountain Community College. This is my 9th year at SMCC, and I’m presently doing a one semester only transfer at Glendale Community College. I wanted to see what it was like to teach at one of the larger colleges in the district.

I have been teaching for 17 years. I taught 2 years at Deer Valley HS, 2 years at Westwood HS, and 4 years at Central Arizona College before coming to South. Before starting my teaching career, I studied communications at Phoenix College. I later changed my major and my location and earned my B.A. degree in English Literature from California State University, Bakersfield in 1989, and a M.Ed. degree in English Secondary Education from Northern Arizona University in 1993.

Two years ago in 2004-2005 I took a sabbatical to finish up my doctoral dissertation on the effects of hybrid courses on retention and student satisfaction. I finished my doctorate in Instructional Technology and Distance Education at Nova Southeastern University in 2005.

I am a big advocate for the use of technology in the classroom, and I have some links on this site to share some of what I’ve learned and what I use in my teaching. I’ve been doing a lot of research on podcasting and many other Web 2.0 technologies that have popped up on the web lately. I’ll be sharing my experiences with these technologies with you.

I also use this site to podcast course content for my students in my freshman composition courses. I’m a Mac user, so using the iLife Suite helps make creating course content simple and easy.