Who is this Dappolone Person, Anyway?


Mike Dappolone (that's me) is the site's namesake, and I teach chemistry at Cherry Hill High School East in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (that's in the United States for those of you off the continent). I've been teaching since 2004 (following a brief stint in manufacturing), and I'll stay in education until they hammer in the last nail.

You can visit my coursework site for UPenn here.

I love my wife and two children, Spongebob, hockey, paintball, and teaching.

This site is an ongoing project. Check it often for updates and improvements.

What's the Point?

Okay, time to be serious.

Digital Dappolone is the culmination of several years of teaching in the high school environment - and, as only time will tell, may itself be the precursor to something even greater.

The very primordial beginnings of this site crawled out of the oceans shortly after I began teaching and I realized that my appreciable amount of web programming experience (from another life) could be put to good use. I decided to take my class materials to the web in an effort to keep parents better informed of what was going on in my class, and to help my students stay up to date by making their assignments and grades available online.

It wasn't long before the amount of resources and documents I had available for my students began to grow into a considerable collection, and with contributions from my colleagues, it was quickly growing unmanagable and disorganized. Also, my coworkers were making use of my website as a resource for themselves and their students. The time was quickly approaching when I would have to expand from a class website to a full-blown online archive. So I jumped ahead of myself and set up a simple but far more organized web page with a significant number of documents (activities, labs, POGILs, etc.), most of which I had either generated myself of cannibalized from cowrokers (with their permission!) and modifed to fit the familiar format to which my students had grown accustomed.

In 2007, I started a graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania, and suddenly I had a class of other science teachers who were both eager to share their materials, hungry for anything others would share with them, and interested in a central location to discuss their ideas. We started by informally sharing ideas and a few documents on the message boards provided in the courseweb at Penn, but the limitations of that system - foremost, its isolation from the teacher community at large - quickly became apparent.

My graduate work and subsequent independent projects ballooned quickly, and I needed a place to organize my thoughts and share my ideas. Entrance into a leadership training program at Penn to earn a certificate for principalship quickly added a large amount of new work to my repertoire, and the need to make it public continued to grow. What better place than the infant site I already had in place.

And so Digital Dappolone was born. I have several goals with regards to this site:

1. Construct a professional portfolio;
2. Make available everything I have to share about education, in hopes that my lessons learned will serve others;
3. Develop a comprehensive blog to serve as a forum for discussion primarily about curriculum and educational leadership;
4. Share my views on various topics in education, and solicit the opinions and comments of others;
5. Share activites, labs, assessments, and other materials for sake of improving chemical education and literacy;
6. Provide comprehensive resources for chemistry students, that they might have a place to find help with just about any topic in chemistry;

It is important to note that I am a strong advocate of cross-cutting in the curriculum. This website orignally came to life as a the brainchild of a chemistry teacher; there is room for plenty more stars on my proverbial flag. If you have something that you believe that should become a part of the this site, regardless of the topic, send it to me and it will find a home here.