University of Georgia
Instructional Technology
School Library Media

Master's Portfolio
Summer 2006

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where my father was a Presbyterian minister. After a brief stay in Wynne, Arkansas, we settled in Tallahassee, Florida and I began first grade. For the most part, I led an idyllic childhood, spending summers at the beach accompanied by laundry baskets full of books I checked out from the local library. I adored C.S. Lewis and George McDonald fantasies and read and reread fairy tale anthologies. An elderly neighbor owned the entire collection of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy mysteries, and she graciously allowed my sister and me free access. We polished these off in one summer.

My parents understood the value of exposure to other cultures and made family travel a priority. We spent six months in Europe when I was in junior high school. My father exchanged pulpits with a Scottish minister and when we were not attending school in the tiny northern hamlet of Fyvie, we traveled throughout the continent. It was during these vacations that I developed a love of history and languages.

There were times of stress, however. I grew up during the 1960's during the height of the civil rights movement. Tallahassee, like many towns in the South, had its share of people who felt threatened by the idea of affording all people equal rights. The local sheriff often called my father, a bastion of calm and reasoning, to quell potentially violent confrontations and I recall many anxious moments as we awaited his return. Ann Waldron described some of our experiences in an ALA Notable book, The Integration of Mary Larkin Thornhill, published in 1975.

I spent the final semester of my senior year in high school in Kingsport, Tennessee before heading off to Queens College in Charlotte, NC. Approximately six months before graduation, I realized that my Spanish and history degrees had not prepared me to earn a living. I quickly added enough credits to become certified to teach. Unfortunately, my undergraduate teaching experiences left me ill prepared, and I found that I didn't particularly enjoy the classroom.

In 1974, I married, and moved to a small rural Georgia town while my husband finished law school. He set up a practice and I stayed home cared for our four children and helped out with family businesses. During this time, my reading interests moved from adult fiction to children's literature as I read aloud every night to my children. When my youngest started school, I returned to teaching. This time, armed with a little more maturity and patience, I discovered I actually enjoyed being with teenagers all day. After four years, I moved to the middle school, where I taught Spanish and also developed an intense interest in incorporating technology into my lessons. In 2003, I took position as an instructor at the Educational Technology Training Center helping teachers meet the recently enacted Georgia certification requirements for technology proficiency.

This job offered many opportunities to grow professionally as I learned how to plan and deliver instruction for adults, but found I sorely missed interacting with students in a school setting. In 2005, I realized that a career as a media specialist would be the ideal merger of teaching, reading, and technology and I enrolled in the UGA Instructional Technology (School Library Media) Program. I will complete my degree requirements in August and look forward to beginning my new career as a media specialist at Winterville Elementary School in Clarke County.