Ms. Evans has been teaching since 1991.  She began teaching in the Bristol Virginia School System in 1999.  She taught at Highland View for two years before coming to Washington Lee Elementary. 

When asked what technologies she most likes using in her classroom, Ms. Evans responded that Accelerated Math has been a wonderful tool to use as a math teacher.  It has given her the opportunity to individualize help for students on a daily basis.  Her passion has become her SMARTBoard™.  She took a class last year and learned how to Google and download activities created by others.  She now uses Turning Point as the primary way to review for the US History SOL.  Mrs. Barlow and Mrs. Dingus prepared a review based on individual SOLs that all fourth and fifth grade teachers could use.  Ms. Evans was so inspired by their willingness to create and share these presentations that she could not wait for the class Mrs. Warren was offering on learning how to create her own activities.  She is now working on putting together several science reviews for next year to share on the portal.

Last year, she would pass Mrs. Crouse's first grade classroom and would see her students totally engaged as she presented lessons using the SMARTBoard™. She would stop in and ask her how she accomplished these lessons and she would always take the time to explain how things worked.  One day Mrs. Crouse showed her the gallery and she was hooked.  If there was a defining moment for Ms. Evans, this was it!  She wanted to be able to do this too. 

This year, she was fortunate to have Mrs. Crouse on the same floor so she decided to take advantage of her expertise.  She realized that all these SMARTBoard™ activities she was downloading were written by people just like her and decided it was time to start writing activities based on the Math SOLs.  Ms. Evans said, "I had a student teacher, Sara Musgrove, and between the two of us, we started creating activities not only for math, but also for social studies.  If one of us was teaching, the other one was creating.  We then learned from Mrs. Warren how easy it was to share with all the other teachers on the portal.  Ms. Henley and I also decided to take all the 4th Grade Math SOLs and create 4th grade review activities.  Once again, we were able to share all of these activities with the others on the portal."

One of the first reactions Ms. Evans noticed in her students was their excitement during math class.  They would ask each day what fun thing we were going to do in Math.  The SMARTBoard™ enabled all students to have a part in the day's lesson and they were always ready to participate.  She feels the SMARTBoard™ was less intimidating for students, even those who were reluctant to share information.  The SMARTBoard™ allows so much interaction and visualization that she found she could not wait to share with the students and her colleagues all the new possibilities for teaching that she was discovering on a daily basis.  After the SOL tests were completed, she asked her students if they felt using the  SMARTBoard™ had helped in their test taking this year.  They started telling her the SMARTBoard™ activities that came back to them during the test.  One student even wrote about how using this tool was her favorite memory of Washington Lee Elementary.

Many of the teachers are taking classes with the elementary ITRT, Mrs. Warren now and Ms. Evans is so excited about the amount of information they will be sharing on the portal.  She said that once a lesson is created, you can't wait for the others to try it and make improvements.  She feels we are blessed to have the technology staff that we have here in Bristol because with these folks around, we can't help but wonder, what next!