Portfolio for Joseph L. Lockett

Interviews and Appearances

I am a comfortable with public speaking and group facilitation. Here are a few examples:

Montessori Education: Doorway to Lifelong Learning is a 2003 video developed by the North American Montessori Teachers Association (NAMTA) and The Post Oak School which features several interview clips with me. See a raw transcript of the full interview in this issue of the school's weekly newsletter (before my time as editor).
I served as the public face of The Post Oak School on several occasions, including acting as panel chair from 2006-2010 for the annual Alumni Night and giving a short speech for the "Montessori Moments" theme at the 2008 Post Oak Parent Association Dinner.
I presented on digital communication (photography and publishing) to a national Montessori convention in 2008 on a few weeks' notice, after the cancellation of the scheduled speaker.
"Montessori Education in Houston" ran on Houston's KUHF public-radio station on February 16, 2009, and featured a short interview with me, some students, and my head of school.
I both act and direct with the Baker Shakespeare Theatre group at Rice University, and occasionally with other troupes. See my theatrical resumé for details: log in with username "interview" and password "lockett".

Cooperative and Production Work

I have extensive experience, both on my own and in groups, in crafting written materials, either as one-off publications or as recurring data-driven instruments.

The Weekly Post (earlier, The Post Oak News) is an eight- to twelve-page weekly newsletter I edited from 2006 to 2008, including writing many articles (search for "Lockett" within the page linked above).
I served on or led two committees at The Post Oak School which produced important school documents: the Portrait of a Graduate and Portrait of a Teacher.
I developed many forms for The Post Oak School while serving there, for both internal (kept behind a login screen) and external use, often going back and forth for several rounds of revision before publication. I'm quite proud of the Infant-Parent Program registration, which had to pack several pieces of information onto one page.
For years the school's emergency release form had to be fully filled in by hand, then turned in to be laboriously compared with existing database records. I wrote a query in Senior Systems and created a data merge in Adobe InDesign to pre-fill-in returning parents' forms using existing data, so that parents only had to mark changes rather than rewriting all information from scratch, and so that office staff could easily see corrections rather than comparing each and every field.
I redesigned The Post Oak School's parent handbook (link is to current version, not mine), using Adobe InDesign. InDesign's long-document features enabled consistent styling throughout, automatic generation of a table of contents and index, and insertion of hyperlinks in the PDF version for both the table of contents and the index.
I wrote a Senior Systems query and designed an algorithm (expressed in Python by a contract programmer) to pull data from the school database and arrange it for easy import to InDesign for the school directory, complete with collation of multiple children and cross-references for differing last names. This system enabled monthly updates of the directory online which preserved the same formatting as in the printed version. (No link can be provided to the directory because it is password-protected.)

Web Development

My skills transfer easily to web development, both in its similarities with printed matter and in its differences and opportunities.

I served with the group which oversaw the total redesign of the website for The Post Oak School and edited or wrote much of the content, particularly the Montessori program descriptions, "What AMI Accreditation Means", and a Thanksgiving piece which occasionally serves as the home page's lead article.
Using the xCatalyst content-management system, I also designed a database query and CSS styles to automatically display current and past issues of the school's newsletter, both on their own page and as automatic links from the site's home page.
I designed the format and CSS for the school's faculty and administration biography pages.
While directing the play Proof for Rice Players in 2007, I redesigned their web site, later chosen in 2009 by ClickitTicket as one of their Top 20 College and University Theatre Club Websites.