Melissa knew from the age of five that she wanted to be a teacher. In 2007 she graduated from Kansas State University with a degree in Elementary Education, and for the past three years she has been living her dream as the ELL teacher for first graders at Amelia Earhart Elementary School in Goddard, Kansas.
She was just beginning her second month as a teacher when she first learned about Mimio Interactive technology. She says it took her only a few hours to become "completely hooked." Over the past three years she has had many opportunities to teach other teachers in her district about Mimio during in-service days.
Melissa enjoys finding interesting ways to make her teaching memorable, and credits Mimio for stirring her creative juices. "I have had so much fun creating lessons and finding new ways to implement each subject every day-I cannot imagine being without Mimio," she says. She describes her classroom as "a Mimio classroom, where the kids can be the teachers, using the Mimio like little experts." Mimio helps her students stay engaged, she says, and they cannot wait to be the next one to come up to the whiteboard and use it. One of her recent class projects was completing a life-size replica of Georges Seurat's pointillist painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte." To get a feel for this form of painting, her students created many pieces of artwork with the Mimio, using the dot technique.
Melissa is currently working towards a Master's in Curriculum and Instruction, with an emphasis on English as a second language. In 2009, she became a Mimio Master, and is now working on the Mimio team as a Mimio Moderator. She is also a member of two Mimio teacher teams that are going to NSTA and NCTM this spring.
One of her first graders paid her the ultimate compliment recently. He said that when he grows up he wants to be a "Mimio teacher" just like her. He also said that she better watch out-he is going to take her job because she will be "too old."