NCTM E-Workshop

Elon University and Guilford County Schools

During January and February of 2008, Dr. Terry Tomasek invited classroom teachers from Gibsonville Elementary and Sedalia Elementary to attend an E-Workshop hosted by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

The workshop, which focused on geometric thinking at the 3rd through 5th grade levels, offered approaches and techniques for integrating geometric concepts in the classroom and provided activities for classroom implementation. The highlighted activities promoted student understanding of shapes, spatial relationships, transformations, and visualization, using technology instructional resources.

The E-Workshop offered a collaborative and interactive opportunity for local teachers to explore a professional development topic with their colleagues from another school as well as with colleagues from across the world. Online participants were from other parts of the United States as well as Canada, South America and Japan.

Two sessions were held, giving teachers the opportunity to use the ideas learned with their students and then bring back those experiences to share with the e-learning community. The follow-up session was a time to reflect on and discuss the impact of the activities on student learning and to explore additional activities.

The workshop was conducted in the newly remodeled Curriculum Resource Center at Elon University. Visual information was delivered via the Internet while audio was delivered by speaker telephone.