Since October, 2001 I have been employed by the College of Education at Michigan State University, working under the supervision of Dr. Yong Zhao, Executive Director of the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University as well as the Directors of the Center for Teaching and Technology and the US-China Center on Research in Educational Excellence.
When I started at the College I worked for an after school clubhouse called "Klick!", that provided administrative and pedagogical support to 20 clubhouses throughout the state of Michigan. As part of the head office for Klick! I was responsible for technology support and integration in the clubhouses, curriculum development and workshop and seminar staging. Along with a core group of staff, I helped create curriculum guides and facilitate technology use for virtual environments like Activeworlds, Lego robotics competitions and video editing workshops.
Klick! ended in 2004 and I moved on to general consulting with the College of Education under the supervision of the Center for Teaching and Technology. During this time I worked on a number of projects including the Preparing Teachers for the Technology of Tomorrow project (PT3) and the instructional spaces redesign of Erickson Hall.
In 2005 Dr. Zhao and our group received funding by the Hong Kong based SunWah Educational Foundation to develop a dual pedagogy, dual language immersion school concept which eventually led to an array of schools in the U.S. and the world who have preschool-5th grade Chinese immersion programs. The most famous of these schools being the Flagship 3EIK in Beijing, China.
Based on our work with the US-China Center, the Hanban (The Chinese Language Council International) and MSU partnered to create the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University. The Confucius Institute, unique from conception, was established to be an online Confucius Institute, developing virtual Chinese resources and online courses for K-12 students throughout Michigan and the world. As director of technology, I am involved in the deployment of our online courses, resources and professional development. Working with our instructors, faculty and staff I facilitate the creation, quality assurance and deployment of everything from our online virtual Chinese environment "Zon", the Institute's Second Life "Chinese School" and our eTextbook "Chinese Your Way", among other projects, as well as providing the collaborative technology for communication amongst our global team.