PORTFOLFIO
Unified Partnership Volunteer Training
Pre-event training preparing volunteers to confidently and inclusively support Special Olympics athletes.
I designed this comprehensive pre-event training course, along with subject matter experts to prepare both high school students and adult volunteers to confidently support athletes during Special Olympics events. The course moves beyond basic volunteer instructions by helping participants understand the purpose and impact of Special Olympics, inclusive and respectful interactions with athletes, appropriate communication and boundaries, sensory awareness, safety procedures, and event-day expectations.
The training combines universal content with role-specific preparation, allowing volunteers to understand exactly what is expected of them in positions such as athlete escorts, event retrievers, check-in and wayfinding, Olympic Town, Young Athletes, awards, refreshments, and athlete encouragement. Practical resources, including event maps, logistics information, codes of conduct, scenario-based content, and assessments, help volunteers translate what they learn into effective action on game day.
This project demonstrates my approach to instructional design: creating learning experiences that are accessible, purposeful, learner-centered, and directly connected to real-world performance. Because the audience includes learners of different ages, backgrounds, and levels of volunteer experience, the course was designed to provide a consistent foundation while giving each volunteer the specific information needed to successfully serve athletes and contribute to an inclusive, welcoming event.
Making Sense of the Numbers as a Community
This capstone project brings together my passion for education and my analytical approach to problem-solving. I designed a professional development course for a hypothetical North Carolina high school working to move beyond a "C" on the NC School Report Card. The course guides educators through why data is collected, how to use technology to gather and analyze it efficiently, and how to connect what the data reveals to the support systems that can respond.
Because my learners are adult, working professionals, I designed the course around adult learning principles. The content is grounded in real problems teachers face, respects their expertise and limited time, and gives them opportunities to apply new skills directly to their own classrooms and school data rather than just absorbing information.
Through this project, I strengthened my skills in ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement & Evaluate) course development, data-informed instruction, educational technology, and professional learning design. Most importantly, I learned to build care and context into how data is used. A student marked "NP – Not Proficient" on a spreadsheet may also be experiencing homelessness, the loss of a parent, or another challenge no data point can capture. Data gives educators valuable information, but it should never overshadow the humanity of the students it represents. I built this principle into the course so that teachers learn not only to interpret data, but to use it responsibly to understand and support students.
That focus led me to the Community Schools model, and I spoke with a program coordinator at Duke University to learn how it works in practice. The idea is simple: students must have their basic needs met before they can learn effectively. Meeting those needs is far harder, and it takes a network of people and partners working together. The course reflects this by teaching educators how to activate those support systems in response to what their data shows.
Universal Design for Learning
I designed this informational brochure to introduce educators to the three core principles of Universal Design for Learning: engagement, representation, and action and expression. The goal was to translate instructional design theory into a clear, approachable resource that educators could quickly understand and apply in their own classrooms.
The project demonstrates my ability to combine learning theory, visual design, accessibility, and concise instructional writing. I used visual hierarchy, illustrations, examples, and learner-centered language to make complex concepts easy to navigate while modeling the same principles of flexibility and inclusion that UDL promotes.
Creating Smart Digital Citizens
Based on the ISTE Standards for Students as of 2026
Creating Smart Digital Citizens is an instructor-led, in-person learning experience designed to help secondary students become thoughtful, responsible, and effective users of technology. Aligned with the ISTE Standards for Students, the presentation combines direct instruction, guided discussion, real-world examples, reflection, and interactive activities to explore digital citizenship, information literacy, computational thinking, creative communication, global collaboration, and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Designed for delivery in a face-to-face classroom environment, the presentation serves as both a visual learning tool and a framework for instructor-facilitated engagement. Rather than relying on slides alone, learners are encouraged to discuss, question, collaborate, and apply concepts throughout the experience. The project demonstrates the intentional design of an instructor-led learning experience that balances clear content delivery with active learner participation.