docent

Grace Gallego

You can get very busy working in the high tech industry and can easily forget about the community where you live or work. I have lived in Marin County for twenty years, raised my daughter who attended Marin County Schools, Lou Sutton School, Novato, Deer Park School, Fairfax, Reed School, Tiburon, Coleman School, San Rafael, Davidson Middle School, San Rafael, San Rafael High, and finally Marin Community College in Kentfield. I no longer live there; however, I work there and reserve a corner in my heart for the beautiful environment and the people that live in it.

The community relations group at Autodesk (where I work) actively encourages employees to be involved with the community through volunteering. In my job, I deal a lot with adult education. (You can understand more about what I actually do from my bio below.) I wanted to get more involved with schools, especially younger kids. I am especially interested in showing them more about computer art and graphics and the internet.

I have volunteered for the Canal Community Center in San Rafael working with the kids in the day care program. I then heard about SEED. The environment is also very important to me.

I attended a fun, one-day training program filled with hands-on activities. Docents are then assigned a school. I was lucky to have been assigned the third-graders at Hamilton School. I had a group of brilliant, alive and helpful kids. Most important, the teacher, Carrie Moenke, was cooperative and very involved.

Besides the one-day training, SEED also supplies each docent with a binder with teaching tips, a kit that includes many tools and goodies to use in the projects and a comprehensive curriculum developed by Project Learning Tree.

I decided to develop this web site to share what the Hamilton School third-graders have done and their experiences through the SEED projects. I encourage other SEED docents to work with me in developing their own sites and expanding this site as a resource for SEED docents.

BIO

Grace Gallego is a specialist in the field of information technology learning. Her extensive experience includes more than 10 years of developing and managing a worldwide network of Autodesk Training Centers. In addition, she has had responsibility for a broad spectrum of education programs that include product management for award-winning multimedia CBT, instructor development and online certification/testing. In her current position, her responsibilities have been expanded to focus on distance and web-based education development as well as emerging technologies in the realm of learning solutions. Ms. Gallego also serves as a trustee on the board of directors for CEdMA (Computer Education Management Association), providing leadership for professional training strategies. She is serving a second term on the CEdMA board. She has also served as an advisor to several education and training organizations.

She has been a presenter and has led panels in various training-related conferences such as ITTA Strategies for Success, TechLearn, CEdMA National Conferences, ASTD Forums, IQPC, ITTA Windows '95 Launch-Microsoft, Autodesk University, A/E/C Systems Show.