One of the most tasking responsibilities of a Christian school is to attract qualified, long term substitutes on short notice. Ask our Business Facilitator, he’ll tell you, “there’s no room for error when hiring an educator midyear,” and sometimes, like in the hiring of Mrs. Robyn Sturgeon, God works in mysterious ways. Shortly after her acquisition, we learned in depth of Mrs. Sturgeon’s passion for teaching Math in a Christian worldview setting and thought she would be an excellent candidate for this week’s recognition.

Robyn graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Math Education and continued on for a Master in Physics Education. Then after teaching Math for 16 years in Delaware, Mrs. Sturgeon moved to Florida. Three years later, she felt it was time to give it another shot!

On a typical day, you’ll find Mrs. Sturgeon’s classes praying and it shows in her knack for building strong relationships with her students. Immediately after walking into her classroom you’ll find a skilled educator fully utilizing her National Board Math Certification. Students say her authentic delivery of abstract concepts is easy to understand.

However, the most exciting aspect of her teaching style is her willingness to integrate and try new technologies in her classroom. Mrs. Sturgeon is no rookie to integrating a Smartboard. And with Geometry being her favorite subject, she has perfected the use of the TI calculators. On an average week, students will find a blend of many visual presentations through Keynote, Powerpoint, or other means.

Personally, I enjoyed learning about her take home tests. Students can choose a delivery method to show their own mastery in a specific topic. For example, when students mastered Quadrilaterals, and the 5 ways to classify Triangles, some students made an iMovie video project, while others chose a Keynote presentation. Claire Anderson, one of Mrs. Sturgeon’s early adopters, followed her lead and decided to try Educreations. Educreations is an app that lets you annotate while recording your own audio; afterwards, students can share it to their classmates or a teacher can have students submit their videos to the teacher. Take a look at the project. You can easily see the student’s mastery through their ability to teach the concepts to the class.

Mrs. Sturgeon’s aptitude for technology can be seen through the speed at which she adopts technology. She believes in being a lifelong learner and will be challenging her students to build individual portfolios of their projects in Pathbrite. Pathbrite is an ePortfolio project management system that integrates into Canvas and allows students to display projects and multi-media work in a visually appealing way.

It’s refreshing to see our new instructors come into an environment that has an abundance of technology integrated and knock it out of the park. The Administration at The First Academy would like to thank her for delivering a state of the art technology experience for our learners and ensuring a Christian World view in her lessons.

If you’d like to try out Educreations in your home or classroom visit the iTunes Educreations App page.