Jessica+Miller



My name is Jessica Miller and I am from High Point, NC, the furniture capital of the world. I have only one brother. He is 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days older than me and is my best friend. I am a senior Special Education major at Clemson University and have been since Fall of 2006. Begin a Clemson Tiger is extremely exciting, especially during football season!

My relationship to technology is one of wonder and utter interest. I am fascinated with the abilities that technology allows average people to have. I enjoy learning about how things work and why. Photography is one of my favorite hobbies and I love using technology to edit the pictures. Being able to use the different settings not only that are on my camera, but also on various photo-editing software like Photoshop Elements is very fun to me.


 * Wordle**: Creating a Wordle is not only fun and easy, but it would be very interesting for students to create their own each week with their spelling words. This way, it's graphic enough for them to learn it and also, they get to be in charge of formatting it and personalizing it. In this way, they will make their spelling words theirs and own them. The teacher could easily make a motivational one or one with all of the students' names on it for the first day of class. It's just one more way the teacher can make her classroom warm and inviting for her students.


 * Photofunia**: Photofunia helps the user create interactive and engaging additions and modifications to her existing photos on her computer. In using this with a class though, it might be a little tricky to find something that appeals to all the students' likes.




 * Big Huge Labs**: This is a website that can help teachers make posters, picture cubes, and many other engaging materials to use with her students. The picture cube can be used as a dice for board games or even to improve vocabulary. It has the potential to be an amazing resource for teachers who work with students who are learning English too. The posters can be motivational or funny and each student can make one at the beginning of the year and hang it on the front of their desk so their classmates and teacher can learn their personality and interests quickly.




 * Interactive Whiteboards/SmartBoard**: Using SmartBoard technology is not just revolutionary, but can also help students with special needs feel like they are part of the learning process. When a student can come up to the board and do an activity in front of the class, he has a tendency to feel like he owns the material and is in part a helping connector between the material and his classmates. It gives him such a sense of pride and accomplishment. I have seen the faces of children with and without special needs light up when they get the chance to go up to the SmartBoard and help facilitate the learning process for their peers as well as reinforce it for themselves.

SMART Board Project Presentation SMART Board Project Lesson Plan


 * CBM with Excel**: This project enabled me to learn how to use Microsoft Excel to create a spreadsheet and graph for real Curriculum-Based Measures (CBM) data. It was challenging at first to make sure everything was in the correct format and entered in the appropriate cell or blank. However, despite the set-backs, now that the kinks have been worked out, I feel like this is definitely a practice that I will be in the habit of using on a regular basis.




 * Virtual Manipulatives**: Using the Kidspiration software, there are many fun and innovative ways to create worksheets and activities that will get the students' minds engaged. Using this program, the students not only have a interactive way to write and brainstorm, but they can learn about Science, Math, and even Social Studies at the same time within the same program. With the teacher's guidance, this program could save teachers the angst of wasting time with transitions or losing the students' attention and energy.




 * General Education Portfolio**: I really enjoyed this assignment. It gave me a chance to go back through the work I did my freshman year and see how much I've actually grown. I included my first ever Philosophy of Education and my updated one so they could be compared. This assignment let me go back and pinpoint what I learned when and remember all of my classroom experiences. I'm going to continue to love updating this portfolio and adding proof that I'm still growing as a teacher next semester and beyond.