Hello! My name is Sam. I am a PhD nursing student. IT 645 is an elective course for me. I am hoping that this course will help to me develop more well rounded teaching skills. I am a mental health RN. I work twelve hour night shifts on an acute, in-patient, locked unit setting. I am a Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation, Basic Life Support (CPR, BLS) instructor, and a Prevention and Management of Disruptive Behavior (PMDB) instructor. I was in the Navy for eight years. I spent seven of those overseas and spent the last three years of my Naval service teaching subjects such as Oceanography and Physics of Underwater Sound. During the time spent in the Navy, I was able to complete my first Bachelor of Science degree. Many of the classes I took were distance learning classes. Since that time I have taken several other online or online-traditional hybrid courses. Almost all of the PhD nursing curriculum courses are hybrid style courses that meet once a month, and rely mostly on Blackboard for the majority of interpersonal interaction and assignment submission. I am very comfortable with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat and use them often for both work and as a student. I am somewhat familiar with Access, having used it some number of years ago while in the Navy, but I have limited recent experience with this software. I have never used Concept Mapping. I am very comfortable with email, chatting and discussion boards. I use email daily in multiple aspects of my life, personal and professional. I chat less, but nonetheless am familiar with its workings. I have experience in discussion boards through other USM classes. As mentioned above, many of the nursing courses have a strong online component. I tend to like discussion boards better than email or chatting for didactic courses as it allows everyone to be involved in the communication process as individual schedules allow. I believe this facilitates contribution to the discussion from multiple parties because it loosens time constraints and allows for public or semi-public idea exchange. I am familiar with blogs, but do not generally participate. I have never created a podcast. I have contributed to Wiki threads, but do not do so regularly. As teaching is a collateral aspect of what I do, I'm unsure of the specific technical label is for my teaching philosophy. I believe that learning should be a collaborative interaction between the instructor and participants. In my experience a higher level of interaction and participation stimulates both interest in, and retention of, the material being presented.