Advisory Board

Lynell Burmark is an award-winning educator whose specialties include: strategies for successful presentations, resources for early literacy, multimedia for multiple intelligences, creativity and connectivity, the power of more visual teaching and learning, career-life-mission planning, event marketing and management, and “enlightening up” for stress-free living.

Lynell's concern for our youth and the practical experience and strategies she shares with educators have made her a popular speaker at conferences and workshops. During her nine years as an educational administrator, she always made staff development a major focus. As technology coordinator for the California Teacher Education and Computer Center (TECC) program, she designed and staffed over 350 hands-on computer trainings, authored and produced a two-volume proposal-writing guide, and taught grantsmanship courses to help schools obtain millions of dollars for computers. As multilingual resource coordinator, she conducted presentations and training sessions and authored, edited, and marketed twenty bilingual publications, as well as audiocassettes and transcripts to help educators deal with the influx of non English-speaking students.

Lynell earned her B.A., two M.A.s, and Ph.D. from Stanford University, where she was elected by faculty and students to receive the Walter Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her eleven years of classroom teaching experience span K-graduate school. While pursuing graduate work, she taught at Stanford, Cal State Hayward, U.C. Santa Cruz, San Francisco State and Santa Clara University. Then, for three years, she taught English as a Second Language, K-12, for the public schools in her hometown of Tacoma, Washington.

From 1988 through 1990, Lynell served as Executive Director of California's Computer Using Educators (CUE), designing projects and services to boost membership from 4900 to over 11,000 and quadrupling the annual spring conference attendance at that first memorable year in Palm Springs! Since CUE, Lynell has experienced life on "the other side of the Purchase Order" -- working as a consultant to high tech companies that produce multimedia hardware and software for the education market and consulting to schools and districts that want to optimize the use of technology across the curriculum.

As an Associate of the Thornburg Center for Professional Development since 1994, Lynell has enjoyed collaborating with David Thornburg, offering workshops to schools and districts, and keynoting and presenting seminars at conferences and other educational events throughout the United States and Brazil.

Along with David and other members of the Center, Lynell was filmed for a Canter & Associates video that is part of the Walden University Masters in Teaching with Technology. Lynell has since created the video presentation “Why Visual Literacy?” for 100% Educational Videos (www.schoolvideos.com) and contributed several “expert” segments to Cambridge Educational’s two-DVD program, “Integrating Media into the Classroom” (www.cambridgeeducational.com).

Lynell’s book, Visual Literacy: Learn to See, See to Learn, won the book of the year award for publisher ASCD in 2002 and has been expanded and updated as a CD to include classroom activities and applications (2006). In 2003, along with Thornburg Center colleague Lou Fournier, Lynell wrote a second book for ASCD, Enlighten Up: An Educator’s Guide to Stress-Free Living. She contributed the chapter “What You Get Is What You See (WYGIWYS™)” to Snapshots: Insights from the Thornburg Center, published in 2004 and the opening chapter “Visual Literacy: What You Get Is What You See” to Frey and Fisher’s Teaching Visual Literacy (Corwin Press, 2008).

Lynell’s passion is using the power of technology to reach every learner (new tools for a timeless purpose). She is always open to collaborating with others who share that mission.