A weekly newsletter to build community through updates, opportunities, and celebrations | | April 24, 2025 | Volume 11 | Issue 31 | | Spotlight on Shelley Workman | | |
By Shelley Workman, ESL Orientation and IELCE Coordinator
Originally from east of Corning, NY, I attended Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, VA, where I earned a BS in Business Administration. Later, I went on to receive a Master’s in Health Promotion and Kinesiology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I hold a Massage Therapy License from the Massage and Bodywork Institute in Charlotte, NC, and specialized in Sensorymotor Psychotherapy, having completed my certification at the Sensorymotor Psychotherapy Institute in Boulder, CO.
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In addition to my professional life, I am a proud mother to three teenaged daughters, ages 18, 16, and 13, all of whom are great athletes like their father. Our home is filled and complete with three dogs and two cats, all of whom are rescue animals except for the two-year-old basset hound. My husband and I have had basset hounds for years, and in fact, when we moved to Costa Rica in 2004, we drove there instead of flew, specifically so we wouldn't have to put our 15-year-old blind and deaf basset on a plane. The beloved dog, one of three bassets at the time, "retired" in Costa Rica, where he thrived living off-leash and free to roam for two years there. The pandemic brought us back to the U.S. to our family lake cabin on High Rock. Here our children integrated into the public school system of Davidson County as ESL students.
For the past year, I have been working at Davidson-Davie Community College in the Career & College Readiness (CCR) Department, where I serves as the Orientation Coordinator for new ESL students and the Workforce Development Coordinator for ESL students. I have a deep passion for my work and hold great respect for the ESL community.
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Travel: I love Iceland, but my favorite place is Costa Rica. I have desire to continue to travel more, but honestly with 3 teenagers, I love being at home and hosting them and their friends to meals, activities and parties.
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Music: Wichita Caravan. An old friend's local band-out of Charlotte.
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Food: Dishes made with love.
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Movies: Happy Gilmore, The Notebook, The Way, Into The Wild, The Forge
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Where is home? Home is where children pursue their passions, thrive, and enjoy time together. It's about hosting family and friends, sharing meals, and creating memories through laughter, play, and good food.
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Best thing about you? The best thing about me is that God gave me the gift to see the good in people and the world around me. While there's plenty of negativity out there, I believe, as my dad always said, that the quality of life is shaped by "choices, choices, choices." I’m proud that I’ve chosen to focus on the good.
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Professional Learning Events
| | | | Asynchronous Online Teaching Series | | |
Dear Widgy,
What if I don’t have the time?
Most things are “easier said than done,” including creating accessible content when we’ve already found or created the “perfect” resource. We know it can be difficult to go back and make sure that the perfect resource with a URL is still active, let alone accessible for students.
Like good bread, the best way to rise is with time. We can raise our content’s accessibility with time and, thankfully, Panorama has a few features to help give us back some of that time.
Like we discussed last week, Panorama’s Remediation Engine can cut down on the time it takes to remediate a few frequently flagged issues. For files that can only be partially remediated with the Fix-it Tool, the instructional support through the “Learn more” links can help us to learn how to make changes to the original file directly and avoid these issues in the beginning when we are creating new content as well--meaning less time spent remediating later when we would much rather spend that time grading, am I right?
As you remediate documents either in a Moodle course or through the DocHub, Panorama also has a way for you to download the remediated document to replace the original to either keep making accessible changes or to ensure you have the most up-to-date, accessible version of the file saved elsewhere.
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Once again, this will help save you time as you build your courses with the latest version of the file, knowing you will not need to spend more time completing the remediation again, and you can spend all that extra time grading, am I right?
If you create content directly within Moodle with HTML, Panorama also offers a real-time accessibility gauge that will provide you with an accessibility report as you create your content. This will ensure you are creating accessible content from the start, saving time having to remediate later should a student need an accommodation, giving you more time to grade, am I right?
| | Overall, what is really the most difficult is where to start. Let my friends help with that. Don’t hesitate to reach out to Amy, Trudy, Christina, or Kendra for peace of mind, a sense of direction, and more confidence that you are making correct accessibility changes. | |
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International Intrigue
Bags, Bags, Everywhere Bags
By Sarah Wright
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This week, the world celebrated Earth Day, and to commemorate it, we had a discussion at an Earth Day Culture Cafe in the International Education Office. We had quite a few students and some faculty join us. I think one of things that happens organically when we travel and interact with others from varying backgrounds is that we have real conversations. Our culture cafes, in general, are great catalysts for those conversations and discussions, but on Earth Day we focus on ways in which we, as individuals, the world, and different countries honor (or dishonor) the earth.
As someone who follows the water crisis (globally) and focuses in on Day Zero (the day that Cape Town will run out of fresh water) in Cape Town, South Africa, I am always interested in water on many levels–the impact on women, girls, education, National Security, causes of war, downstream damage–life, really. Here, in the US, we are known for single use bottles of water, but single use bottles are rarely used in many parts of the world. When we travel abroad, we give our students water bottles in swag bags so they will stay hydrated and refill their bottle. However, no matter how many times we told students that the water was safe in France, we could not get our students to use a refillable bottle–consistently. When the students arrived from Denmark, we had a few starter bottles of water for them, but we gave them refillable water bottles on the first official day of their program. We hoped they would spend the rest of the week refilling their bottles, and they did, but with the water from single serve plastic bottles. I did not physically put my face in my palm when I saw this happen time after time, but I did internally. Yet, I understand their reluctance to drink tap water and to take any attempt at conservation seriously. At several restaurants, the chlorine smell from the water was significant, and on day one of their US acclimation, we took them to Wal-Mart, and they were in awe, but they were also left with their jaws lowered at the sheer number of bags that the cashier used to load their purchases in bags. I walked up to a group of them and asked what was wrong. They needed to know if the bag had been pushed forward but only had one item in it if they should grab it for their cart. I assured them that when the next bag was started, the previous one was ready for them to grab off the carousel.
I never thought of the way groceries are sold and packaged in the United States being so unique, but it certainly is. In Europe, preservatives are not as prevalent, so people may buy groceries for a couple of days, but not for the whole week. And bags–people take their own because bags simply are not available in stores, and if they are, they are not the flimsy default plastic ones so abundantly served here–they are typically reusable and/or costly.
At this point, there is only one planet (for us to inhabit), and we need to be better stewards of the land and her resources. We can certainly learn from science, but taking care of the planet is a global responsibility, so learning with and from others is simply another way that the world is becoming smaller and smaller–and more globalized.
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