About Me ... in 3 Paragraphs

Hello,
My name is Joel R. Miller and I am an agricultural education instructor at Hampton Public Schools located in South Central Nebraska. I am currently finishing up my 5th year at Hampton and really enjoy where I live and work. Besides my teaching duties, I also am the adviser for the Hampton FFA Chapter, and a sponsor for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. My coaching duties include serving as head football coach and assistant boys basketball coach. Even though it would be nice to have made the boys state basketball tournament, I'm enjoying the fact that my coaching assignments are completed for the year. My wife, Stephanie and I reside in Hampton and have two kids. Our daughter Macy is 3 years old and attends preschool in Hampton and our son, Noah, is 20 months old and is always on the move. Stephanie and I met while in college together at Northwest Missouri State University. We both received our bachelor's degrees in Ag Education. She is still searching for a full-time teaching position in a relatively close area but has kept herself plenty busy subbing. Its nice to know that when she subs for me, things will get done and she also understands the content that I teach. I've struggled getting things accomplished with other substitutes during my 8 years of teaching.

My technology background would have to be rated a little bit above average. I feel like I am very competent in many areas of technology and am always desiring to learn more but it is easy to see as I teach more and more years, the technology is moving at a faster pace that I am. I taught 3 years in Cambridge, Nebraska and was first introduced to Mac computers and after an adjustment period, I fell in love with using Mac. In Hampton, most of the high school is using PC machines however a few teachers have their own MacBooks. I choose to use a MacBook but have PC computers in my classroom for student use. I find myself going back and forth multiple times during the day which keeps me fairly fluent with both platforms. As far as other technology in my room, I have a mounted projector and a document camera that I use constantly each day and as I mentioned earlier, I have 11 PC workstations in my room for student use as they work on FFA record books(excel files) or presentations that I assign from time to time. My MacBook uses Office 2004 for Mac and the PC's in my classroom are on Windows XP with Office 2003.

I guess you could say that it may not have been inspiration, but more of laziness that caused me to wait so long prior to starting my Master's Program. I always knew once I took my first teaching job, that I needed to make steps towards continuing to grow as an educator. I kept putting it off an putting it off. Another teaching on staff at Hampton has gone through this program at PSC and strongly recommended it to me. Yes, many people think that I'm crazy having a family and coaching 2 sports with other extra duty assignments, but I feel that with the way this cohort system is set up, it may be difficult, but it is probably the only way that I would ever get done with a Master's Program in a reasonable amount of time. At the current time, I have not major plans after recieving my degree other then to continue to work towards becoming a better teacher each and every year in hopes to impact future generations for the better. 

This if my family at a Northwest Missouri State Football game during the fall of 2010

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I'm not a big photo person and really don't think that I'll be able to find a good picture to publish but I'll see what I can come up with. I'll probably use one of my entire family.