Melissa

Melissa is a teacher of Italian in New Jersey where she has contributed to the school communities and curriculum writing teams since 2009. She teaches Italian courses from levels 1 through AP and has also offered adaptive Italian courses for special needs language learners. She has a bachelors in Italian Studies and Psychology from Rutgers University as well as an MAT in Italian..

Melissa has been providing professional development throughout her district of 4000 educators since 2012 with respect to both educational technology integration as well as curriculum and language learning pedagogy. You may recognize her from AATI’s summer series Flipgrid training video. More recently she was also a co-presenter at the 2021 NECTFL virtual conference for her pre-recorded presentation on “Redefining Digital Language Learning Techniques” which aligned language learning with the SAMR model of technology integration to serve teachers of all languages whether their instruction was remote, hybrid or face to face and the 2020 NECTFL in person conference on "Bringing Your Students Communication to Life through Podcasting".

In 2019, Melissa was a recipient of the Italian Teacher Association of New Jersey’s Borsa di Studio in which she was granted the opportunity to study in Taormina. She is also a K-12 representative for the state of New Jersey and an active member of the executive committee of the American Association of Teachers of Italian.