I am a PhD student at Iowa State University, but most of my scholarly and teaching responsibilities are in my home country, Uruguay. In Uruguay, I teach digital skills foundation courses to incoming students, high-school students, and CECAP students. CECAP is a public organization that supports youth that have dropped out from the school system due to incarceration, addictions, disabilities, among other vulnerabilities. I consider myself a non-traditional educator as the learning experiences I have designed seek to develop learning communities which are sustainable and culturally relevant. Besides my experience developing games and digital spaces, I have a strong theoretical background in spatial literacy which I use to explore how learners make sense of space. At the moment, for my PhD dissertation, I am engaged in designing an alternate reality game, DeepFakes, in which learners interact with a character from the future who warns them against the use of their data in the 21st Century. My current PhD dissertation involves the design of a series of escape rooms in Gather.Town to promote data literacies within a youth participatory action research framework. The game inspires learners to engage in resisting and transforming data practices.
As an associate professor in the School of Education at Indiana University South Bend I mentor and teach pre-service teachers how to measure student learning, how assessment enables positive student learning outcomes, how to plan their lessons, units and instruction through curricular development, and backward design. I teach educational technology and how to use active learning and high impact practices incorporating innovative ways to use technology to engage students in synchronous and asynchronous settings. What intrigues me with this project is the possibility to contribute to how and if virtual worlds have an impact on learning, specifically students’ declarative knowledge. There is research regarding motivation, engagement, and affective outcomes, within virtual worlds but measuring student declarative learning is needed. Researching virtual worlds and their impact on not only learning but on usage would contribute to better designed platforms and perhaps increased usage and learning.
I currently work for Teach For Sierra Leone, a leadership development organization that recruits, trains and places teacher-leaders in primary schools to teach, lead and impact the lives of children in under-served communities. During times like the current Covid-19 pandemic, educational processes and even opportunities are seriously disrupted, especially in third world countries. When people are displaced by wars, diseases, and and other natural disasters, they are mostly cut off from all formal educational opportunities, and sometimes for a very long time. Virtual world building platforms can connect large numbers of learners across borders and are playing a significant role in the education of today's covid-19 world. As manager of the training department, I hold virtual meetings with team members who majority of them work in classrooms, and for me to keep monitoring, supervising, and coaching them all, I have to regularly meet with them
I am currently a fifth year VCE Biology author and tutor, and an eighth year VCE Chemistry and Biology teacher who is based in Melbourne, Australia. I am a recipient of the Ruth Dircks ASTA Scholarship to attend the CONASTA Science Teachers’ Conference this year. The conference enables me to learn new teaching strategies and software tools to stimulate hands-on learning in the classroom. I am working in a multicultural and multiracial school, consisting mainly of second-generation migrants. In the past 2 years, our school has pushed for a greater usage of ICT which includes the implementation of online learning platforms, as well as the use of virtual conferencing and digital teaching tools to enhance students’ learning experience in the classroom. As such, this fellowship program enables me to strengthen the use of virtual worlds to improve student learning outcomes.