Meghan+S

== =About Me:= Hey all! I'm Meghan. I grew up about 20 minutes west of St. Louis Missouri, my parents still call Chesterfield home. I absolutly loved where I grew up, but when it came to looking and going to college, I wanted to get out of the midwest. I applied to many different schools, all over the country and finally decided on Stonehill College in Boston. I went to college to ride horses, I have been riding competitively since I was 7, and rode while I was at school, although I did not ride on the equestrian team. I went into college as a history major, thinking I wanted to be a lawyer. While I loved history, I came to the realization that Law School was not in my future. I didn't decide to look into teaching until I was in my second semester of junior year. I was interning in New York City and would walk by an elementary school on the Upper East Side every day. I remember thinking that if I was a teacher, I would want to teach at that school. While interning I worked with a lot of high schoolers and that is where I discovered my love for teaching, as well as my love for New York City. Senior year of college, I applied to Fordham GSE, Adolescent Social Studies program, and the rest is history. I chose the picture above because if you know me, you know that I ride horses and it defines who I am. I love horses, riding and competing. Since moving to the city I have not been able to ride as often as possible but whenever I can get to a barn, I'm there.

=Life as a Tech User:= One of my first memories of technology is my mother, sisters and I surrounding the computer the first time we signed on to AOL. While I can't remember what the screen name was, I assume its the same one my mother still has today, we went into a chat room and were amazed at the simple fact we could talk to people all over the world. I think that that was the first time I realized that technology has the ability to connect people. I think that technology became a prominent place in my life after that. I got my own screen name, talked to people and communicated with my friends through AOL, AIM, and in the 8th grade, MySpace. I was one of those kids who was always on the computer talking to my friends and sending e-mails back and forth with far away family members. My life as a tech user in the classroom was highly influenced by my school. At my school, each student was provided a free laptop that we could take home at night and had to bring to each class. Because of this, technology was incorporated into each class. I learned all about photoshop, powerpoint, excel, and other advance technologies for the early 200's. My high school career is where I learned fun ways to add technology into the classroom, something I hope to do in my own classroom. One of my favorite projects in high school was the "Stamp Project". This project was the 3 parts. The first part consisted of learning about each decade of the 1900's and important events that represent each decade. We then had to choose a decade and an event, person, or place and write a 25 page paper on how that "thing" represents that decade. It was the first research paper I wrote, as well as my longest till my senior thesis. After writing the paper, we then had a create a stamp that symbolized both the "thing" and the decade. It involved advance photoshop skills. I chose Dr. Spock and the 1950's. It was such a fun project, and one that could be used in either world or US history classes. Today I notice I use AIM less and less. I no longer have a MySpace, and I spend less time on Facebook. I use other ways to communicate with my friends. My iPhone takes up a lot of my lafe, as does twitter and instigram. I have a MacBook (from 2008) but I think that it was slightly wasted on me. I never used it to its full potential only using Word, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto and occasionally skyping with friends.

=Copyright Clarity= This activity was especially hard for me simply because of how out of date my computer is. I have a 2006 MacBook, and it struggles to use advance websites such as Glogster and Prezi. I my computer crashed 4 times before I got it done. I think that this shows us that no matter how advance technology, there are always going to be gliches and problem, but we have to accept them and keep working. Copyright Clarity