CURRICULUM DEVELOPERS
Our Curriculum Developers are creating fascinating curricula and classroom activities that will captivate your students while seemlessly incorporating our professional footage into their learning experience. These units will meet state and national standards for social science and media classes, and are specific to a wide variety of thematic choices from the footage (e.g. education for women, commerce, medicine). Units will combine sound educational practices with cutting-edge use of a wide variety of technologies.
Kathy Altaras (BA, MS) is a professional educator, enjoying two separate teaching careers totaling 22 years, one in Texas and one in California. Credentialed in English and Spanish, she primarily taught high school English, settling in for the last 10 years with 12th grade students, preparing them for writing at the college and university levels and for passing entrance exams in writing and literature. She "retired" into consulting for hundreds of teachers, curriculum coordinators, and administrators on differentiating the curriculum for students of all ability levels across all content areas and on diverse instructional strategies for all teachers. She has written curriculum since 1987 and has offered seminars at the local, state, and national levels on a variety of education topics. At various times Kathy served as mentor teacher for assessment, character education, and English Language Arts, and she organized, supervised, and evaluated the high school accreditation process via the Western Association of Schools and Colleges for a staff of 175.
Kathy is a global student and traveler. She has attended college in Texas and California, England, France, and Italy. One of her favorites was Cambridge University where she focused on women in history who played a significant role in the foundation and development of Cambridge. Kathy likes remote and exotic travel. She considers herself a Darwin "groupie," having visited all the major sites of Darwin's life and travels. Her last check-off for Darwin was a recent trip to the Galapagos. Kathy "retired" again from consulting, only to start a publishing company specializing in niche-market non-fiction.
Joanne Edmundson Kistruck is a teacher with seven years of experience teaching English and History in a variety of high schools in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. She was an Associate Head of English in one Toronto school and the coordinator of the Writer’s Craft program for two Toronto-area high schools before taking a leave of absence from teaching to raise her two young sons. For the last six years, she has run a successful writing and editing business, published her own work in various magazines and newspapers, worked as an educational consultant, and started snapdragonink.com as a means of sharing her writing. A long-time traveler, and an educator at heart, she is passionate about both global studies and issues of poverty alleviation in the developing world. She also misses the classroom.
Sharon Peters is the director of technology at Hebrew Academy. She completed an M.A. in educational technology with a focus of online collaborative learning for high school students and has worked as an independent consultant creating ELA curricula for the online school in Quebec. During the summers of ’08 and ‘09, she led teams who facilitated professional dev. workshops with Education Beyond Borders (formerly Teachers Without Borders Canada) to educators in the townships of South Africa and rural Kenya. Her students have participated in several award-winning international web-based collaborative projects with classes around the world using technology to support the learning goals.
Sommer Mitchell (pending)