About Claire
I’ve always loved to write and create and when I retired I finally had time to work on projects for my interests. Although I enjoyed my careers as an educator and researcher, I’ve always had interests that extend beyond those fields. On this site, I’ve combined my academic work with my broader post-retirement writing and web development.
My professional and academic career began in 1971, after I earned a M.Ed. degree in education of the deaf. At that time, I started a long career of teaching deaf and hearing-impaired children from preschool age through junior high years. While teaching, I continued my education, taking university courses in other areas of education, including literacy education. In 1989, I decided to once again be a full-time student and pursue doctoral studies.
My doctoral studies culminated two years later with an award winning dissertation. When I was thinking of a dissertation topic, I chose one that combined my three academic degrees and areas of expertise: early childhood education (B.Ed.), Deaf education (M.Ed), and literacy education (Ed.D.). My Literacy and Deaf site contains the full text of my dissertation research which focused on emergent literacy of preschool hearing-impaired children.
After earning my doctoral degree, I taught and engaged in research at several universities, both in the United States and abroad. In 2003, due to an injury that prevented me from traveling to my university, I developed a website my students could access for lessons I posted while I recuperated at home. I had been interested in technology and programming since the early 1980s, and I was already a self-taught amateur programmer. Earlier in my career, I had used my skills to create programs for my students, a relational database for my own use, and assorted other small apps to make using my computer quicker and easier. Once I started developing websites, I realized that I wanted to spend more time on programming and less on teaching. However, I needed to make a living, so I continued teaching at the university for another three years.
In 2006, realizing that I was just three years away from retirement, I decided to leave my position and start my own small business. I had used Apple computers for over twenty years and I was well versed in Mac software so I decided to use those abilities to write, publish, and sell ebooks on Mac system software and related apps. I enjoyed the writing experience and I advanced my programming skills by doing all the coding for the website and by creating Automator apps for use with the ebooks.
When I retired two years later, I started developing websites for my hobbies and interests. I began learning more advanced coding techniques and eventually took online courses on more advanced web development topics. Now I split my time between writing content for my websites and improving the coding behind the design and writing.