I grew up on Whidbey Island, Washington and now reside in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle with my wonderful wife and two sons.  My introduction to computers was the old Radio Shack TRS-80 that my dad used to write his PhD thesis.  In my youth I used his IBM PS2 and Dan Bricklin's PC-Calc spreadsheet to track my baseball stats.  At the University of Puget Sound I was introduced to email on a UNIX server, searched online using engines like Netscape Navigator and AltaVista (RIP), and would Telnet into the Univeristy of Washington library system--all on my 14400 baud modem connected to the house phone jack using a 20 foot cord.

When I began my teaching career in 1999 teaching 7th grade language arts and social studies at Snoqualmie Middle School, I immediately saw how my students loved using digital tools to create projects that represented what they knew about a topic  I also realized that the World Wide Web could help bridge the gap between school and home--thus mrtalmadge.com was born in the mid 2000's.  At the same time I developed an interest in mobile technology, particularly the use of handheld computing devices (aka Palm Pilots and Pocket PC's).  

With the Web 2.0 revolution came more ways for teachers and students to create and collaborate using online tooIs. I used Skype to connect with educators and friends around the world, created screencasts and posted them to my website via  YouTube playlist, posted to a Twitter account and put the stream on my website and then created an online classroom community using Edmodo--all of this by the year 2009.

Eventually, I landed a job at the district office as a full time instructional technology specialist working with teachers in their classrooms and leading workshsops.  I also began seeking opportunities to extend my reach--regionally by presenting at the local ESD and annual NCCE conference as well as nationally by seeking election to ISTE"s special interest group for mobile learning (SIGML).