At present, this page includes supporting documents for my teaching portfolio, specifically sample teaching materials in a variety of formats. It is sorted according to format, and then subject area.

I have also added a section with library promotional material – after all, what is promotional material if not a way to teach your community about events, programs, and services your library offers?

I have chosen these materials to represent the variety of formats I have used to teach many different subject areas during my teaching career.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me!

Table of contents

• Slides from Workshops & Lectures
  • Study Skills, Research Skills, and Information Literacy
    • Study Skills for High School Students
    • I swear it’s just research! Hiding bodies, launching things into space, forging swords, etc.
  • Chemistry
    • Chem 20: Acids & Bases Review
• Handouts & Worksheets
  • Information Literacy and Study Skills
    • APA Style 7th Edition: Citing and Creating Reference Lists
    • Notes on Note-taking
  • Other Library Handouts
    • Registering for Library Events Online
    • So You Want to Donate Something
  • Chemistry and Other Sciences
    • Significant Figures/Significant Digits for High School Chemistry and Physics Students
• Posters and Brochures (Primarily Promotional Materials)
  • Library Promotional Materials
    • Miserable Millennials (Poster and 1/4 page handouts)
    • The Library is More than Just Books! (trifold brochure)
    • Sheep River Library Presents: Hollywood Got It Wrong (2025) (trifold brochure)
• Audio
  • Chemistry and Other Sciences
    • Chemistry 20 acid-base vocabulary review recording

Slides from Workshops & Lectures

Slides made to accompany teaching lectures and workshops. In some cases, the slides in these files acted as a back-up for a live demonstration of a website (in case of on-the-day internet connectivity issues). The slides posted here do not include speaker notes.

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Study Skills, Research Skills, and Information Literacy

Study Skills for High School Students (September 2024 version)

• Subject area(s): Study skills, with a tiny bit of information literacy.
• Intended student audience: Grade 9-12 students. This version was designed to work with a group of up to 40 students, ~90minutes in length.
• Delivery method(s): Interactive lecture.
  • To encourage active participation, the lecture is broken up with verbal brainstorming sessions.
  • There are two “long answer show your work” examples. Based on who attends, I will pick one of the two. I only use the chemistry based “show your work” example if all the students have completed science 10.
• Development: After every study skills workshop or lecture, I have collected feedback. The biggest changes came about after the invited guest lectures I gave at Oilfields High School, which included a significant amount of overlap with this lecture.
  • Based on student questions and written feedback, the next version may include a “fidget toys and ADHD” slide, a more formal introduction to computer file organization, and a reduction in the time spent on “how to show your work.”
• Other comments: This workshop is currently supplemented with a “note-taking” and “show your work” handout. I also provide students with piece of paper with a link to where they can download the slides.
• Authorship: excluding the graphic design for the slide backgrounds, the slides are either my work or cite the original sources.

I Swear, It’s Just Research! Hiding bodies, launching things into space, forging swords, et cetera. (August 2024)

NOTE: Slide 61 (“Questions”) was the actual end of the presentation. See “Other comments” below for details.

• Subject Area(s): Research skills and information literacy.
• Intended student audience: adult fiction writers (though some of those writers may be writing for non-adult audiences). 50 minutes with questions.
• Delivery method(s): In-person.
• Development: The section on assessing information resources (using CRAAP) was about 50% recycled material from other lectures that had received feedback. The remainder of the lecture was created entirely for this specific conference. Based on information I learned at another talk at the conference the day before I was due to give the talk, I realized I needed to make changes to the information assessment portion of the lecture. While the changes to the slides were minor, the verbal component of the lecture was longer. One section was cut and moved to after the final “Questions” slide, in case an audience member asked a question relevant to my removed material.
  • The version as it stood the night before the lecture is available on the blog post for this event. The version above is in all critical details the version that I presented at the conference.
  • Other major change that needs to be made: including on both the opening and closing slides a link and QR code to where the slides can be downloaded. With the other activities going on at this conference, and the sheer amount of distance needed to be covered between talks at the venue, many early departures and late arrivals would still be interested in downloading the slides!
• Other comments
  • The screen shots for Hathi Trust and OER Commons were placeholders for live-action interactive demos of those information sources, in case of on-the-day internet connectivity issues.
  • All slides after number 61 (“Questions”) were included in case an audience member asked relevant questions.
  • I need to determine a method of obtaining feedback from the audience members beyond “another conference attendee recognized me later, and asked me questions.”
• Authorship: excluding the graphic design for the slide backgrounds, the slides are either my work or cite the original sources. I created the bookshelf logo (including the titles on the spines), obtained all screen-shots from sample searches, and found all cited images.

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Chemistry

Chem 20 – Acids & Bases Review

• Intended student audience: Chemistry 20 private tutoring client.
• Delivery method(s): Interactive one-on-one online tutoring through zoom.
• Development: Towards the end of the high school academic year, I asked my tutoring client what topic(s) she most wanted me to review before her final, and this was part of the result.
  • In response to some of her questions during the interactive lecture, I added a few more slides at the very end to the version I emailed her the day following our tutoring session.
• Other comments: Slides do not include any of the zoom whiteboards, which included sample questions I worked through with the student. Most of the worked samples were from other units than the acid-base one, in any case.
• Authorship: excluding the graphic design for the slide backgrounds, the slides are either my work or cite the original sources. (Exception: according to the site I obtained it from, the confused emoticon did not have any restrictions on its use.)

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Handouts and Worksheets

• Some are meant to allow the student to learn and/or use the content completely independently & asynchronously.
• Some are intended to assess student strengths and weaknesses – the student completes the worksheet independently & asynchronously, and I go over the results at the next tutoring session. While the worksheets could be converted to a graded version, they are not currently used that way.
• In-class (synchronous) worksheets. The link provided will take you to the slides and the synchronous worksheet(s) for the workshop.

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Information Literacy and Study Skills

APA Style 7th Edition: Citing and Creating Reference Lists

• Intended student audience: Post-secondary students, faculty, staff, etc.
• Delivery method(s): Intended as either an independent & asynchronous handout, or to supplement a class lecture including a brief introduction to citation using APA style.
• Development: This handout is updated from the APA 6th Edition handout I created while working at the UTSC Library. The previous version was reviewed by a few other UTSC Library staff members, and appropriate changes made.
• Other comments: Library staff or other teaching professionals who would like to make use of this document (with the placeholder text filled in with institution-specific information) in their library, please contact me.
• Authorship: the text, layouts, and design in the APA 6th edition were my work, with changes made based on feedback from UTSC Library staff. I performed all updates from the 6th to 7th editions.

Notes on Note-Taking

• Intended student audience: grade 9-12 students who can read printed text at at least the grade 9 level.
• Delivery method(s): Intended to supplement one-on-one tutoring and workshops or lectures including a section on note-taking.
• Development: Initially created as a science-specific guide to note-taking, I expanded from the science-specific content, and changed it to this more generic version after a chemistry tutoring client asked about note-taking in other subjects. Now, I generally use this version rather than the chemistry related one when I am asked to teach note-taking.
• Other comments: On occasion, I have included the mind-map note-taking activity (slide 32 in the Study Skills for High School Study workshop above) as part of this handout.
• Authorship: layout, text, and design are my work.

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Other Library Handouts

Registering for Library Events Online

This document is intended to be printed out double sided and folded in half.

• Intended audience: this is stated on the brochure – it is for people who “never or rarely register for events online, or have encountered problems while attempting to register.” It is a guideline exclusively for the online sign-up available through the content management system that all Marigold Libraries use.
• Delivery method(s): Handout is available for staff to handout on request or when they identify the need. At present there are too many brochures in the library’s display shelf. I plan to add it to the library’s FAQ webpage in the near future.
• Development: After I took over the website at Sheep River Library, we began to include online event registration. To be more inclusive, we needed instructional material for the less tech-savvy.
  • There is a staff-only brochure to troubleshoot any problems they may encounter while registering on behalf of a community member, especially how to override the fact that all the registration forms require an email. It is not included here.
  • Before general release, for each round of changes, the brochure was given to a different staff member, with instructions to attempt to register for a fake event using only the instructions in the brochure. After each round, updates were made as required.
• Other comments: After completing in-house development and testing, the Microsoft Publisher files were sent to the Marigold Library System. This was to allow them to adapt and distribute this resource to and for other libraries as they saw fit.
• Authorship: The Sheep River Library logo is not my work. Outside the logo, layout, text, and design are my work, with revisions as described above. I obtained all screenshots and all images were sourced from websites with licenses that did not require image source credits.

So You Want to Donate Something

This document is intended to be printed out double sided and folded in half.

• Intended audience: like many public libraries, we occasionally have people interested in donating items related to local history. After an individual with professional museum/archive training joined our library board, it was decided the library needed to have something to redirect donations that we do not have the capability to properly care for. (We still accept local history books.)
• Delivery method(s): if an individual comes in with non-book materials they would like to donate, or asks over the phone/email if we would be interested, there are pre-printed copies of the brochure available for staff to hand out. Staff could also attach the PDF to email responses.
• Development: the library board member with professional archivist training wrote the text and asked me to turn it into a brochure. I did.
• Authorship: I sourced appropriate images, created the layout, and adjusted the formatting of the library board member’s text.

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Chemistry and Other Sciences

Significant Figures/Significant Digits for High School Chemistry and Physics Students

• Intended student audience: Grade 12 physics and chemistry students.
• Delivery method(s): Asynchronous. The student is expected to complete the sample questions, and use the provided answers to decide if they need one-on-one help to improve their understanding.
• Development: This handout was requested by a tutoring client. Drafts 1 and 2 were updated based on feedback from trusted non-students. At present, no actionable feedback has been received from the students who were given this worksheet.
• Other comments: This worksheet is also intended as a stealthy method to determine if the student is correctly entering things into their calculator.
• Authorship: This document is my original work. While I did review the suggested readings and checked other sources to ensure that my memory was correct, this was done after the bulk of the work had been completed.

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Promotional Posters and Brochures

Library Promotional Materials

Educating the public about programs and services the library offers is still a part of teaching in the library. The material in this section is more promotional than what most people would consider “educational” content.

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Miserable Millennials

This document is intended to be printed out double sided and cut into quarters.

• Intended audience: people who fit the target demographic. People who know people who fit the target demographic.
• Delivery method(s): placed next to poster advertising event to allow people to take a copy. Emailed along with poster to local organizations known or suspected to harbor millennials.
• Development: The first major opportunity to promote this event was during the library’s annual book sale. Since the full-sized poster that would be up during this event was going to be in a high-traffic area it most people would not have had enough time to read everything – and there may have been people in the way preventing them from seeing the event website QR code. To avoid these problems, I created small handouts that could be taken and read later.
• Other comments: The poster with all the same information as the flyer is letter sized, and uses consistent images for branding and recognition purposes.
• Authorship: I created the majority of the first draft of the text, and sourced all the images, and created the layout.

The Library is More than Just Books!

This document is intended to be printed out double sided and folded in thirds.

• Intended audience: community members.
• Delivery method(s): the brochure is available near all the Sheep River Library programming brochures.
• Development: after my father visited High River Library while on a camping trip, he came back with a brochure about their library of things. We had no similar brochure, and the library manager agreed that one should be created.
• Other comments: This brochure is at the absolute lowest font size I would use in a brochure for the general public. Additional cool stuff in the library will require moving to a four-fold legal-size layout.
• Authorship: Layout and text are my work. I sourced all images. Editing support provided by coworkers.

Sheep River Library Presents: Hollywood Got It Wrong (2025)

This document is intended to be printed out double sided and folded in three.

• Intended audience: community members.
• Delivery method(s): available with other programming brochures at the library. originally available for download from the Sheep River Library website.
• Development: Major events and speaker series at Sheep River Library get significant promotion. This was the stand-alone brochure for this event, and was coordinated with several other communication channels between the library and out community.
• Other comments: none at this time.
• Authorship: layout on all pages is my work. I condensed the text from other sources on the inside of the brochure. Text on the other side of the brochure is my work. Images sourced from appropriate places. Editing support provided by coworkers. Final approval was obtained from all speakers before printing.

Audio

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Chemistry and Other Sciences

Chemistry 20 acid-base vocabulary review recording

• Intended student audience: Chemistry 20 student(s)
• Delivery method(s): Online asynchronous
• Development: This audio file was created to help a student I had realized had some sort of undiagnosed reading and writing disabilities that were interfering with their study of chemistry. The script I used for the audio file was developed after I talked with the student to determine what content would help them study for their test. They decided that learning the vocabulary would be most useful.
  • If I am asked to create similar recordings in the future, I would insert a few seconds pause between the word I am defining and the actual definition to give the student-listener time to pause the recording and verbally repeat what they think the answer is. I could also break the individual word/definition pairs into separate files so the student could include them in a random-shuffle playlist.
• Other comments: I ensured that the quality of the audio I recorded was high enough to meet the standards set out by several audiobook publishing companies.
• Authorship: the audio recording and editing are all my original work.

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