Hey Friend!
I'm so glad you're here!!
My name is Angela Speck. I teach Digital Art & Animation and Video Game Design to 8th graders at a Title 1 school in Houston. I have been teaching for 9 years and have been in education for 15 years. I started as a Campus Technician, and I fixed faculty and staff computers and student devices. I graduated from Lamar University in 2015 with a bachelor's degree. I am currently working on getting my ESL certification. I currently have Tech. Apps. (EC-12) and a Business Marketing (6-12) certification. I'd also like to add Technology Education.
I am a mother to two beautiful children, Emma and Henry. Emma started 3rd this year (2025), and Henry just turned 3. He was our surprise child in 2021 after COVID. They are both super active and keep me on my toes, and I love their individual personalities. Emma is in gymnastics and doing well. Henry.... well, he's into trucks and all things boy. He gets super excited when he hears car horns or trains. He'll go beep, beep, or chew, chew. I love it!!
My husband and I will have been married for 14 years as of March 2025. We both love to travel and have been to Iceland, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Mexico, and around the U.S. Some of our hobbies include nightly family bike rides and beekeeping. We also love to try making our own food at home. Sometimes we make summer sausage, breakfast sausage, bacon, and beef jerky. We love trying new things and experimenting.
My Why
Ten years ago, I sat in a tiny closet, about 10 feet wide by 10 feet deep, in an early college high school. Students would bring their devices to me for repair when they had issues or when the filter blocked their classwork. I would go into teachers' classrooms and help them fix their machines or assist with the digital aspects of their lessons. I became good friends with these teachers and often spent time in their classes, watching them teach and evaluating how quickly they moved around the room, helping students with the content they were learning. When a student asked a question, they "had the answer." Education never came easily to me. I was never a straight-A student. I struggled through the years and didn't fit in. In my senior year of high school, I had to get a tutor to help me with my algebra class and geometry classes just to graduate.
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However, one day, I was fixing simple computer issues for the Social Studies teacher and asked him, "Is teaching really this easy?" He replied, "Yes". I said, "You get up here every day and teach them this lesson over (fill in the blank), and then they work on the material. Is it really that easy that ANYONE can do it." He replied, "I tell you what, why don't you come up with a technology lesson for one of our assignments next week and you can come teach it to the whole class." I was in heaven. I studied all night and weekend to create a really cool interactive lesson about WWII for the students to develop using Windows Movie Maker. They had to use photos from Google and the text tool to create a 3-5 minute slideshow video to show their understanding of the war. Then, they would be responsible for presenting their videos to the class the next time they met.
From that moment on, I knew I wanted to teach. I knew that I was not a content teacher. There was no way I could teach core classes and prepare students for STAAR, but I did love computers and technology. I wanted to show students the fun side of what you could do with them. I love Photoshop and Illustrator and want to share my knowledge and passion with students. When I took these courses in college, it was the most fun I had in education, and THAT was what I wanted to teach. I wanted to share my knowledge with students, watch them learn new skills, and see the great projects they would create. So, after graduating college, I obtained my alternative teaching certification and took my content exam for Technology Applications. I was hired the following year at a small school in Houston, teaching 500 students. After three years there, the class was dissolved, and I was moved to the largest middle school in the district, with 1,400 students on campus. My classes went from 20 students to 30 students every 90 minutes.
My Family
