Ryan Ikeda

So my name is Ryan Ikeda and I teach English at Los Altos High School. This is will be my second year teaching. I enjoy traveling and am leaving for Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and Spain in 9 days!!! I'll be returning a couple days before our program starts. I'm looking forward to working with you all this summer. Ryan

Matthew Phillips

Greetings, nerds!  

My name is Matthew Phillips.  I just moved to the bay area recently from Montana. 

This will be my second year living and Mountain View and teaching English in Fremont.  My colleagues and I are working on creating a Technology career path at our school and we are looking forward to forming some common practices. I’m excited to start exploring ideas and making plans for next year.  I’ve got a bunch of ideas to try.  Most probably won’t work (my fMRI assisted reading assessment plan is ahead of its time) but with some collaboration and adaptation we’ll create something almost as innovative.

I love living and teaching in such a diverse and progressive area and I am glad to find a group of educators who are taking concrete steps toward giving students the skills they will need and desire in this particular community.  I look forward to meeting and working with you all.

Matt

 

Andrea Hutchison

Hi Everyone,
I’ve been living in California and teaching at Milpitas High School since 2000. Before that I taught in Texas for 13 years. I’ve taught pretty much all of the business education courses including programming, accounting, and computer applications. In my current position, I teach Computer Applications and am lead teacher for the Digital Business Academy and the Business Department at MHS. I finished my master’s degree from SJSU last year and took last summer off, so I’m really excited to have the opportunity to learn some new technology applications. I love to learn new things and try to instill in my students that learning is a lifelong process!
My “About Me” section includes that I’m Mom of two awesome kids. My son just turned 20 and lives in College Station, Texas where he works full-time as a department manager at Best Buy and attends Blinn College full time as well. I’m really proud of him in case you can’t tell! My daughter is 16 (going on 25) and is totally a free spirit. She’s truly the light of every day for me. She loves cheerleading; My Space, cell phones, her iPod and (ugh) boys! I know school is in there somewhere! :-) She’s very creative and wants to do something in the field of journalism.
I’m looking forward to spending time this summer with a group that I know I will have a lot in common with!

Mark White

I teach 5th grade along with fellow KCI participant, Linda Bauld, at Sunnybrae Elementary in San Mateo. I was born and raised in Colorado, but I have now lived in San Francisco for over 20 years. I started out as a corporate computer consultant, but found little satisfaction in the work. So one day, I up and quit to pursue my true dream of becoming a teacher. I have been teaching ever since, and I love, love, love it. I have worked in both public and private schools, and I have taught every grade level from pre-kindergarten to 12th, except for 3rd.

When I am not working, my passions include swimming, bicycling and traveling. I swim on a Masters team, and I occasionally compete in various meets around the country and around the world. Last year, I took up open water swimming, and I was especially excited to compete in the Waikiki Rough Water swim (2.5 miles). I am currently training for the Lake Berryessa 2 mile swim.

I also love to travel, and my last trip was to Sydney, Australia over Christmas vacation. That's me after swimming in a spectacular pool right on the harbor, with the Sydney Harbor Bridge and Opera House in the background. My next travel plans include D.C., Williamsburg, Virginia, and New York for this summer, and Copenhagen, Stockholm and Amsterdam in the summer of 2009.

I'm looking forward to working with all of you this summer. I always enjoy working with other teachers and sharing ideas.

Cathleen Carmichael

Hi, I am Cathleen Carmichael from Kennedy Middle School in Redwood City. I have taught the Computer exploratory class at Kennedy for about 14 years. Before this, I taught all subjects in 2nd through 6th grade. Now, I am branching out and teaching ELD to a small group of students who need extra help learning English. My goal is to create a project for this ELD class that includes the use of podcasts.

I am a Bay Area native but have lived in many places, Spain, Florida, Southern California and Humbolt. I got my masters degree at Humbolt State. I have a daughter just graduating from Cal State Monterey Bay and a granddaughter finishing first grade. I have a new tent trailer in which I plan to spend every minute that we are not working this summer.

I am looking forward to working with everyone this summer. It looks like a great group of educators.

Steven Caringella

Hey everyone,

Steven Caringella here. I am one of the MERIT instructors, for the K-6 group. I teach Fourth Grade at Zanker Elementary School in Milpitas Unified School District, and am about to complete my tenth year of teaching. I'm really excited to have so many other Milpitas teachers in the summer institute!

I was an EWYL (MERIT) participant in 2004, then a Fellows participant (I highly recommend this after you complete MERIT), and finally a Fellows team leader for two years. I also teach technology classes part-time here at the KCI. Check out http://caringella.my-ecoach.com to see what classes I offer.

When I am not teaching, you can find me juggling my two and a half-year old Chase, and my three month old, Dean--one in each arm--or spending time with my wife Jen. Hearing my son call me "Daddy" is about the best feeling in the world there is!

In my free time, I like to camp and backpack, read, and watch reruns of the Office over and over again. Like Michael Cummins, I too am a U2 fanatic, although he far surpasses me with his photo taken in front of Bono's home in Ireland.

Looking forward to meeting each of you this summer!

Steven
caringellasteven@foothill.edu

Barbara Okazaki

I am a Physical Education teacher at Piedmont Middle School in San Jose. I am in my 28th year of teaching and still enjoy going to work. I am married (27 years) and we have 2 daughters and 1 son. The girls have UC degrees in biology and our son is at UCLA majoring in history. We also have a 2 year old boxer/staffordshire terrier named Cheechoo.
Needless to say we are involved with many activities. (tennis, basketball, volleyball, crafts and technology) I enjoy taking tech classes as I am trying to incorporate more crafts & technology into school projects.
Physical Education is usually viewed as a "low tech" subject, but I am working on changing that at Piedmont Middle. I am very excited to be a part of the KCI Merit program this summer and look forward to meeting everyone & learning new things.

Corona's Jewels

Crown’s Jewels
My name is Patricia Lynne Corona. I am fifty three years old and live in Oakland, California. I have been a teacher for twenty-six years. I’ll just write the highlights, or jewels of my life.
I was born in Los Angeles, raised in Minnesota, North Dakota, and California. I started school in Minnesota in 1958, and I have never stopped taking classes. I enjoy learning. My mother told me I was always a curious child. I was the first person in my family to obtain a Master’s Degree.
I graduated from Lowell High School in 1971, in San Francisco. I’ve worked and attended classes ever since. I worked in convalescent hospitals and took classes at City College. When I graduated from City College with my A.S., I transferred to San Francisco State University. I got my B.A. When I got my teaching credential, I got a job in a private school in San Francisco. I finished my M.A. at S.F.S.U. and started taking classes around the Bay Area. In 1997, I switched to teaching in public schools. I taught in Ravenswood, Redwood City, and now Oakland school district. I taught teachers how to teach math and science for two semesters for the University of Phoenix, I have taught newborn to 105 year olds.
During vacations, I enjoyed traveling. I have traveled all over the United States. I have also visited Canada, the Virgin Islands, and took two cruises. I cruised by Denmark, Norway, and England on my first cruise. My second cruise went from Florida, the Bahamas, the Panama Canal, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and ended in Mexico.
In 2001, I got married. My husband is very supportive of my pursuits of travel and education. It is fortunate that I took many years of Spanish in school, since my husband only speaks Spanish. Since we married, he is learning English, and my Spanish is getting much better.
You could say I have a multicultural background. My mother’s third husband was Chinese Hawaiian. I have godsons and goddaughters- two are African American and the other two are Filipino/Hawaiian/White. My husband is Mexican. My maternal great-grandmother was born in Norway. I enjoy learning about different cultures. I always thought I could have been an anthropologist, if I hadn’t become a teacher.
I enjoy my pets when I am at home. I have a little black female dog named Reina, a white, brown and black male dog that looks like a Jack Russell Terrier named Chevy, a Bearded Dragon named Pepper, a turtle named Gumbo, and many fish. They keep me busy. In December of 2005, we bought a house in Oakland…which also keeps us busy.
I love teaching. In addition to my Master’s degree ( in education with an emphasis in computers), I have a multiple subject teaching credential from the state of California as well as a CLAD credential. I still take classes, I just can’t decide if I should go for another degree or another credential. I was nominated for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and was given an award by the mayor of San Francisco for being an Outstanding Teacher in San Francisco.
I also enjoy music, keeping in touch with friends, a good mystery story or a good joke, and cooking- when I have time. That’s about it for me. Oh, by the way, in English corona means “crown”, in case you were wondering about the title.
I am looking forward to the summer KCI program. I don’t have photos, since I am currently a work in progress ( I am on a strict diet, I’ve lost 55lbs as of today).
See ya!
Call me Lynne

Travlyn Russell

My daughter slaving a hard drive.

She calls herself "nerd-spawn."

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of myself.

However, she is cuter anyway!

I am thrilled to part of this year's KCI Merit Program. As I enter my tenth year teaching, it will be nice to have the time develop curriculum that integrates technology in a mindful way, rather than in an accidentially useful way--which always seems to happen to me.

My background: I was born in Chapel Hill, NC, but moved to the Bay Area with my parents when I was six months old. I grew up in Oakland with my techno-phobe father. However, I was always fascinated by technology, because my mother was always on the cutting edge. We had a Wang Word Processesor, for crying out loud! When I went to college (back before the World Wide Web), my mother took me down to the basement of the Computer Science building at Davis and forced me to get a Unix account so I could "email" her. It was 1989, so that was pretty cutting edge at the time. When I got a 14,400 baud modem, my neighbors thought I was crazy; "you'll never need that kind of speed!" How the world has changed...what hasn't changed is my love of technology and my desire to keep my skills current.

I spent most of my professional life teaching underserved populations in Dorchester, MA and Richmond, CA, so there really wasn't much emphasis on technology--just getting books was a challenge! However, I demanded than my students learn some basic computer skills--other than using the web to design sneakers. Now that I am in Fremont, it's great to have students who know how to use PowerPoint, Excel, webcams, you name it! It's exciting to be close to silicon valley in a community that values cutting edge technology and high quality education.

I look forward to expanding my use of all sorts of technology this summer--see you then!