I retired from teaching in 2023. I was a public school teacher in New York State from 1991 to 2023, where I worked in small, rural Adirondack school districts. I hold permanent teaching certifications for French 7-12, Social Studies 7-12, and Elementary (N-6).
Initially, I started blogging as a way to promote my small business. Innovation Assessments has a learning management system that offers a full online teaching platform. But as I have been blogging, I have found it a helpful way to transition into retirement. I am leaving a log of my own teaching experiences and what I have done. This is a nice way to end a career doing something I really loved.
I taught middle and high school French for fourteen years, then switched to teaching social studies in 2004. My teaching experience also includes other related subjects and computer courses elementary through college level. I have taught French as an adjunct in the high school for SUNY Albany and college level computer classes as an adjunct in the high school for North Country Community College.
Since the early 1990s, I have had an interest in computers and computer programming. I was a certified computer network technician for six years (CompTIA Network+ Certified) and I served as computer technician and technology coordinator in two districts in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Since 2023 when I officially retired from teaching, I have been working part-time for LanguageBird and Proximity Learning.
Roots
The roots of Innovation Assessments go back to the late 1990s, when I first began building online teaching resources through FrenchRegents.com. As my teaching career expanded across languages, social studies, instructional technology, and remote learning, the work evolved through projects including MultiLinguae.com, JonesHistory.net, and TeachersWebHost.com. Rather than emerging from venture capital or a startup incubator, Innovation Assessments developed organically from years of day-to-day classroom practice — gradually growing into a platform designed to support authentic learning, teacher efficiency, and thoughtful use of AI in education.
Innovation Assessments has had a number of incarnations since its inception as FrenchRegents.com in the late 1990s. It has also been MultiLinguae.com, JonesHistory.net, TeachersWebHost.com, and finally register as the sole proprietorship, Innovation Assessments.
Long before “SaaS” was a buzzword and venture capital flooded the education market, I was sitting in front of a monitor trying to figure out how the early web could make a teacher’s life just a little bit easier.
Innovation Assessments didn’t appear overnight; it is the culmination of nearly three decades of hands-on iteration, born directly out of the classroom. If you were to spin back the odometer on the Internet Archive, you’d find the DNA of this project scattered across the timeline of the modern web:
- The Late ’90s (
FrenchRegents.com): It started in the dial-up era as a hyper-focused, static resource to help students survive the New York State French Regents exams. - The Early 2000s (
MultiLinguae.com&JonesHistory.net): As the web became dynamic, I realized teachers didn’t just need content—they needed tools. I began building database-driven vocabulary engines, activity generators, and history resources to save educators time. - The 2010s (
TeachersWebHost.com): This was the cloud boom. I consolidated my scattered tools into a full-scale suite, developing cloud-based rubric creators, digital gradebooks, and auto-scoring online quizzes.
Today, all of those lessons, failed prototypes, and classroom triumphs live under a single roof: Innovation Assessments. I’ve spent 25 years building, breaking, and refining digital tools for education. I didn’t build this because a boardroom asked me to—I built it because I knew exactly what teachers needed when the classroom door closed.