About Me

Since 2005, I have worked for the Florida Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT) at the University of South Florida. At FCIT, I have had the privilege of being on the staff for both the Laptop Initiative and the iTeach Initiative, two programs that provide training and support on Apple Technologies to faculty and students in the USF College of Education. I have also been on the Faculty Support Team, which provides technology integration assistance to faculty in the college.

At FCIT, I was also the project manager for both Tech Ease and  Tech Ease for All,  a collection of free assistive technology and web accessibility tutorials for teachers. I consider myself an Inclusive Learning Specialist: my mission is to help educators create more inclusive learning environments through the appropriate implementation of assistive technology and attention to universal design for learning and web accessibility principles. As someone who has a visual impairment, I have experienced firsthand how technology can improve the lives of people with disabilities and give us access to educational opportunities that were not available just a few years ago.

In recognition of my accomplishments in the field of educational technology, in 2009 I was one of 52 educators in the U.S. selected to join the 2009 class of the Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE)Program. ADEs are a select group of K-12 and higher education professionals with an identified expertise in educational technology.

When I am not working on technology projects, I am also a Ph.D. student in the Special Education Department at the University of South Florida in Tampa. My research focuses on the experiences of graduate students with visual disabilities.

More about me…

I have a visual impairment. For the past decade or so, I have lived with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a degenerative disease of the retina (to learn more about RP, visit this site). Rather than thinking of my disability as a limitation, I see it as an opportunity to use my experiences to help others who have similar disabilities. I do not let my disability define what I can and cannot do, and I’m always looking for new challenges to tackle. When I visited Peru in 2007, I had the opportunity to climb Wayna Picchu (the mountain you see in the background in all the pictures of Machu Picchu). Even though it took me a lot longer than most to get up the mountain, I did not let that stop me. I was successful in climbing up to the terraces at the top of Wayna Picchu for these pictures.

Photos by Shannon White.

Another example of my attitude about my disability is my love for photography. Despite the fact that I only have about 10 degrees of central vision, I continue to work on my craft as a photographer. By visiting this Flickr page, you can see some of my favorite photos.

While I have focused on technology for the last ten years, I have an eclectic professional background that I consider an asset. Before coming to USF, my jobs included the following:

• Technical specialist for the Delsea Regional School District in New Jersey. In this position, I was responsible for 650+ pieces of equipment. I credit this job with providing me with a solid foundation in all areas of educational technology, from hardware to networking.
• Help desk manager and webmaster for Deloitte Consulting (now Braxton Consulting) in Philadelphia.
• Program assistant for the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project of the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker humanitarian service organization).
• 9th and 10th grade Spanish teacher at the Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia.

I did my undergraduate studies in Political Science at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and I am also an alumn of the Westtown School, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. Although I am not a Quaker, I appreciate the influence my Quaker education has had in making me an advocate for equality and social justice for everyone, including people with disabilities. An example of my efforts in this area is the following video I did for the East Hillsborough Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind:

Gear

I use a lot of Apple products (no surprise there, I’m an Apple Distinguished Educator):

• 13 inch Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and 250 GB hard drive. I got this laptop in mid-2010. It has a 2.4Ghz Intel Core-2 Duo processor, rather than one of the new i5 ones. I’ve updated to Mac OS X Lion and for the most part I’m happy with how it runs on this laptop. This is my main laptop that I take with me everywhere (presentations, school, etc.). In addition to Mac OS X Lion, it is also running the following software: iLife ’11, iWork ’11, Final Cut Pro X, Aperture 3, Screenflow (for screen recording), MovieCaptioner (for closed captioning), Photoshop CS 5.5 and Acrobat X Pro. I occasionally run Windows 7 under Fusion 3 when I have to do training or tutorials that require me to do so.
• Dell 19 inch widescreen monitor: yes, I know it’s not an Apple product, but it was a lot cheaper than a Cinema display and it does a really cool trick in that I can flip it on its side so that I have plenty of space for reading long PDFs for school without the need to do a lot of scrolling.
• 13 inch White Macbook, 3GB RAM, 250GB hard drive. This is my old laptop that I still use at home as my desktop replacement. The battery is dead, but since I keep it plugged in all the time it’s not a big deal. I got this computer in 2007, so it’s getting a little old, but it runs the recent OS X Lion upgrade just fine for surfing the web and other light tasks. With this laptop I use a cheap 17 inch Acer monitor because I’m so used to having dual monitor support.
• iPad 2: I got this device through my job. I am using a red Gripcase to protect it (Disclosure: I was provided this case for testing).
• 4th Generation iPod touch
• iPod Classic: holds most of my music collection. I don’t use this as much anymore because I like cloud services like Spotify and Pandora so much.
• Wacom Graphire tablet: I thought I would use this gadget more, but I generally don’t do much to my photos when I import them into Aperture and I don’t use Photoshop too much these days.
• Apple Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad: the Bluetooth keyboard makes VoiceOver easier to use on the iPad (mostly entering text, everything else is pretty easy to use without the keyboard). The Trackpad is something I bought to use with  my white Macbook so that it has multi-touch support in Lion.
• Logitech RF Remote: I can’t present without this little gadget.
• Western Digital 1 TB MyBook hard drive: this is my Time Machine hard drive I use to keep weekly backups.
• Seagate 2TB Go Flex hard drive: this is new hard drive I purchased to consolidate several hard drives from my old Windows computers.
• Seagate 2 Go hard drives: I have a couple of these I carry with me for large files. The nice thing about these is that you don’t have to carry a bulky power brick, as they get power from the USB port.
• Apple TV: Love this device for listening to podcasts and Internet radio, along with the occasional movie rental.
• Apple Airport Extreme: provides wireless coverage that never goes down. Very happy with this wireless router.
• HP OfficeJet 4100 all in one printer: for the occasional print job.