BES teacher makes waves in Florida

Laura Walker

Laura Walker, a fourth-grade teacher at Blakeney Elementary School, presented "Unlocking the Path to Activstudio 3" at the Nat ional Activ08 Promethean Conference in Sarasota, Fla., recently.

Walke r 's session addressed the creation and use of transparencies and containers in layering information on an interactive board. A time of discussion followed where Walker was able to answer several questions.

When demonstrating the transparencies feature, the example used was to show the layers of the human body from skin, to muscles, to bones, but, the process could be used with many disciplines such as Lan- guage Arts with prefixes, suffixes and root words or math with steps in working a division problem. The use of containers provides the teacher with a way to pre-program a page so that students can receive immediate feedback on the correctness of their answer without additional supervision. All of the techniques provide a way for all students to be actively engaged in their learning.

Walker, along with the rest of the Blakeney staff, was introduced to and trained on the Promethean Board, in part, through the implementation of the eMath grant. Blakeney Elementary has been participating in this math/technology grant for the past four years. The grant requirements included the purchase and integrating of technology into the curriculum, creating of units which stress student's active involvement and performing math tasks that require higher order thinking skills.

Kathy Widner, eMath grant consultant, said, "Many teachers at Blakeney have put in numerous hours after school finding, creating and learning to use flipcharts to utilize with the students in the classroom. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the dedicated staff of our 21st Century School and a nod of appreciation to Walker for representing the school and community in such a commendable way."