My name is Lissa Clelland and I lived in San Francisco for the first eight years of my life until my parents decided it would be a great idea to move me and my two younger sisters across the country to the beautiful state of Michigan. Apparently, I was unaffected and used to making new friends as I had never attended the same school for more than one year in a row until the sixth grade. I graduated from Northview High School in Grand Rapids, MI in 1998 and then attended a local community college for two years. I transferred to Calvin College, a small private school in Grand Rapids, MI to finish my undergrad work earning my B.S. in Biology and Secondary Education in 2003. My first teaching job was as an adjunct professor at a small community college teaching Intro Biology 100, a prerequisite for the nursing program. I taught there for two years and then resigned to continue my education and earn a M.Ed in Science Education: Biology Curriculum and Instruction. I earned my Master's at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL while teaching Biology full time at Brandon High School in Brandon, FL. After the completion of my Master's program in 2009, I moved to Arcadia, CA to be near my boyfriend of four years (we were married last September). I have been in California for the last four years and I'm teach AP Biology, Honors Biology, and Regular Biology at Bonita High School in La Verne. In my spare time, which I have very little of, my husband and I enjoy traveling and going to the gym.
I love technology and I am fairly computer savvy. I am very familiar with Microsoft Office as I create my own PPT presentations for class as well as all my own worksheets and fill-in notes for my students. I took a C++ computer programming class during my undergrad and fell in love with coding. While earning my first Master's, I took an internet in education class and learned how to create wikis, blogs, podcasts, and websites using basic HTML and XHTML. Ever since I've wanted to learn how to do more with HTML so that I could produce websites or webpages for my classes.
I was looking into taking a few computer classes (because I need a few credits to bump me to the next pay tier at work) when I came across the Educational Multimedia Program. The program encompasses everything I would like to learn to use in my classroom and then some, so the decision was easy, I was going to earn a second Master's. I'm always looking for the "next best thing" to use in the classroom to help my students succeed and I hope this program will help me learn how to utilize the "next best thing" or help me produce the "next best thing." As for future goals beyond this program, I hope both of my Master's degrees will someday allow me to teach a few education classes at a small college and my ultimate goal is to design/write an online interactive Biology textbook with a complete online curriculum.
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