Curriculum Vitae: Bram Moreinis

Work in Schools

Experiences that inform my work in schools have these roots:

• Coordinating school/university partnerships at the Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT)
• Graduate study,  National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching (NCREST)
• Providing in-service training, technical support and project development to alternative schools in NYC, including
  • Central Park East Secondary School
  • The School for the Physical City
  • The Ralphe Bunche Academy
  • University Heights High School
• Providing technical support and coordination to the National Teacher Policy Institute of IMPACT II
• Serving as technology director of one inner city and one rural school district (Poughkeepsie and Taconic Hills)

References from this work are attached to models of technology professional development.

Work on Websites

In 2005, I formed a web design company with students I had trained as Tech Scouts (http://hvscouts.com). Tech Scouts is based on these assumptions:

• Students have much to teach adults - not only about how they see their world, but how to participate in it.
• Students would rather be appreciated for contributions than praised for performance;
• By providing technical support and training to their schools and communities, students can prepare for the work world.

Together, we founded Beyond the Box Web Solutions (http://btheb.com). My young partners knew more than about open source software than I, and we chose Drupal CMS (http://drupal.org) as our chief development platform. The Open Source Community is a global collaborative network of very smart people who know their way around computers, enjoy making things of value and sharing what they know with others, and get paid very little for it. Drupal is an open source community project: the software is contributed for free, maintained for free, and updated based on feedback by the people who use it.

My students also taught me to get over my aversion to Instant Messaging. They never asked me to teach them how to write five-paragraph essays. When they left for college (and it became clear that college workloads would actually interfere with their evenings), I moved to an all-adult staff and became Game Face Web Design (http://gamefacewebdesign.com).

Cross-Fertilization

I believe that the empowered, collaborative, values-driven culture of open source makes a great model for schools to follow.

Upon this insight I have founded The Empowered Teacher, dedicated towards helping schools use intranet environments for planning and teaching to support blended learning: because "Learning 2.0" need "Web 2.0".

We help students, teachers and administrators connect, work and learn together with online environments.

-Bram Moreinis