I want to be authentic in how I teach, in how I live and in how I write.  As an eighth-grade teacher in a low-SES school in Phoenix, Arizona, authentic learning has meant filming documentaries, painting murals, participating in community service and writing a blog called Social Voice .

I’ve taught middle school in the Cartwright School District for six years. I have taught both seventh and eighth grade social studies, computers, reading intervention, math intervention, writing and now self-contained. For four years I’ve had 1:1 computer to student ratio, starting first with using really old computers on Linux and now using netbooks. I run a co-cirricular program called Project Impact where we do service projects and use a tech-integrated framework for the service learning.

On my journey toward authenticity, I make many mistakes. I want to be open about the fact that I don’t have a solution or a magical formula (hence the tagline on my blog “musings from a not-so-master teacher”).  What I offer are my thoughts on teaching and life – whether these are pictures or videos or podcasts or blog posts.  I’ve written two books Sages and Lunatics and Teaching Unmasked and I write a few blogs: Spencer’s Scratch Pad , Adventures in Pencil Integration and Ditch that Word.

I have a bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University and a master’s from Northern Arizona University, where I earned the Ed Tech Graduate Student of the Year Award for a project on blending asynchronous/synchronous professional development (and for a curriculum that replaced traditional course management systems with social media tools).