Dream Job
Dream Job
When I was a little girl, my sister and neighborhood friends and I used to play school. As one of the youngest on the street I never got to be the teacher, only the student. I always wanted to be the teacher.
Fast forward to high school where I excelled in math and science, loved school, and thought to be on the path to becoming an engineer. Senior year I did some soul searching and realized that I wanted to spend my life in school, as teacher.
Originally I wanted to be a math AND French teacher but because of the way the majors worked, that would mean extra years in college to take different methodology courses, two student teaching stints, etc. (Not very flexible!) so I dropped the math, spent my sophomore year in France, and became a French teacher.
But my passion for math and science never went away. I was a geek, as techy as you could be at the advent of the Internet. Early in my teaching career I used as much technology as I could in my teaching - overhead projector, cassette tapes, VCR with tiny TV at the front of the room - all to make the French language and culture come alive for my students.
As the years went on, so did my love and use of technology in teaching - I was the first district teacher with a website (coded from scratch and hosted on my husband's server), web quests, presentation cart wheeled down from the library so I could actually project digital files, and email penpals for my students.
Then in 2007, I applied and went through the process to be selected as a state-level Keystone Technology Integrator. I was one of 100 in the state to be asked to attend the Summit that summer.
I arrived in Shippensburg that summer as a French Teacher and left, well, something else entirely. There really weren't Instructional Technology Specialists yet and that type of job certaintly didn't exist in my district.
But I came back with a passion, with a drive, to make a difference and to lead from the middle. And that's when I emailed a bunch of district leaders to express this passion. Less than a month later I was selected to be the "coach" for Classrooms for the Future grant we had just received, which provided SMART boards and laptop carts for 14 WHS classrooms.
So in January of 2008 I left my French classroom behind to embark on my
Dream Job
The rest is history!