Cross Country and Track

For the past 20 years I have been a runner competing in cross country and track since 7th grade. I ran in high school, college and have completed 3 marathons with one being Boston. I continued on with my passion for running and began volunteering for a middle school cross country team after I graduated college. It was so much fun and I really enjoyed working with the runners teaching them all about running, racing strategies, nutrition, attitude and life in general that I wanted to continue with coaching. Now I am the girls head cross country and track coach. I will be in my 5th year as the cross coach and 8th year as the track coach at this high school. This past year there were several accomplishments: in cross country the girls won the league title for the first time ever in the history of the school and two girls qualified to the state cross country meet. In track the girls team won the league title, which had not be done since 1980 and it was so exciting! I enjoy working with the girls a lot and helping them achieve their personal goals along with team goals and teaching them how to work together as a team. It is hard when they graduate after working with them for four years and becoming so close, but they come back and visit and many have continued their running careers in college. Each year is a new beginning with new girls to work with I look forward to more exciting seasons to come.

Photoshop

In my web design class I teach Adobe GoLive, Photoshop and Flash. I have taught this class now for four years this is one of my favorite classes that I teach because the programs are so much fun and you can be so creative. There is always something new to learn or try and you can experiment with your own ideas. When the students learn Photoshop they not only learn the program, but complete a couple of projects incorporating all of the elements that were taught from the book and then use their own creativity. The students complete a color collage project designed from my visual literacy class. I take them to the park across the street in the fall and assign each of them a color and they have to take pictures of items of that color. Then there is a lesson on color and how it affects mood and expression. From there they create their collage and write about what mood/expression is evoked from the collage. Also, they bring in pictures of their younger years all the way through high school and design a photo collage, which I have printed in color for them. Finally, they create an electronic portfolio at the end and add all of the projects created during the school year into a website which are burned to a CD so they can take it with them.

In teaching the programs it is difficult when someone is absent and one idea that I thought of while recording an editing feature in Camtasia for our project is being able to upload the video to my webpage and the student can then watch it and learn on their own time. This way they do not have to worry about coming in at a certain time during the day and then I can help answer their questions instead of reteaching the material several times. For this assignment I will demonstrate how to cut an image out of a picture and place on another picture. In addition, I show how to use layers with adding a background color and a border.

Traveling is an adventure!

I absolutely love to travel. Everytime I have the chance to travel somewhere new I will take the opportunity to be able to experience new and exciting adventures. This past summer my husband and I went to California for a 12 day vacation with 5 days visiting one of my sisters in San Francisco. We began our trip traveling down the coast to Santa Cruz and then on to Monterey where we spent two days. I could not wait to goto the Monterey Bay Aquarium because for one I took a marine biology class my senior year of high school and traveled to the Bahamas for a week studying marine life (and no it was not a luxury vacation). The second reason is in my Microsoft class I have the students create a brochure for one of their Publisher projects and they have the choice to create one for either the Cleveland Zoo or the Monterey Bay Aquarium and now I can say I have been there. This aquarium really focuses on the learning aspect of marine life and giving back to the environment instead of harming it. It is different in the fact that it is built right into the bay and that is where the marine biologists complete a lot of their research. In addition, one of my favorite animals is a stingray and I love the fact that you can pet them. In one of my past vacations on a cruise I actually swam with them in the Cayman Islands and held one - it was really fun, I would have one as a pet it if I could. If you would like to check the aquarium here is the link: http://www.mbayaq.org/

For the rest of our California trip we went on to Carmel, Santa Barbara, the Sequoia Forest and Yosemite the first week and then saw the sites of San Francisco with my sister. One neat adventure was to see Yahoo because that is where her boyfriend works so we went and had lunch with him and that was neat since I am a computer person. All in all we had a wonderful vacation.