‘Every day is different’: Hempfield instructional technology specialist named PAECT Outstanding Teacher of the Year | Local News

Hempfield Faculty District’s Educational Know-how Expert Susan Allen describes her work as “a minimal bit of every thing.”

From integrating the district’s 1-to-one particular technology application to teaching young children how to use a 3D printer and helping in generating a balloon animal or two, Allen places that description to observe. That type of dedication has been rewarded as the Pennsylvania Affiliation for Schooling Communications and Technologies named her Exceptional Teacher of the Calendar year for 2022.

The affiliation, a regional affiliate of the Intercontinental Modern society for Technological innovation in Education and learning, has a lot more than 3,000 associates throughout the point out. The nonprofit concentrated on instructional technologies contains instructors, librarians, media experts, parents and superintendents as users.

Centerville Middle University Principal Lisa Mumma submitted a single of various nominations for Allen.

“She’s an incredible useful resource to have in the district,” Mumma said. “I am thankful that Hempfield has ongoing to guidance this placement. With our change to so a great deal instruction involving technological know-how, she is necessary.”

In the most basic terms, her function as educational know-how specialist is in helping academics and pupils with what they do in the classroom – particularly with technology. She balances her time concerning 5 diverse kindergarten by grade 8 structures in the district, which include Centerville.

Allen has always been seriously included in the science, technology, engineering and arithmetic disciplines, acquiring taught science in the district for 18 decades before getting to be a technological know-how mentor at the higher university degree in 2007. A number of a long time later, she stepped into her latest role.

“Every day is various,” Allen said. “There’s usually a thing new all around the corner to check out and look into.”

In her tenure with the district, she has utilized grant money to construct makerspaces at Hempfield’s two center faculties and order robotics tools these as Hummingbird bots with lights, motors and sensors.

And when several schools across the place scrambled to source learners with engineering at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Allen and her colleagues had now recognized the district’s a person-to-one iPad plan.

This paved the way for a aim on schooling teachers and functioning with learners to make digital studying run as smoothly as probable.

Allen and her workforce have also ensured Hempfield pupils are very well-outfitted to take possession of and responsibility for technological innovation in their training.

For illustration, Allen will work with a group of youngsters named the “Tech Squad” who operate an function every single day through the center school buildings’ flex period. It is at these activities the place the balloon animals and 3D printing arrive in, alongside with occasional chook feeder and sculpture setting up.

“It gives our students something to be happy of,” Mumma claimed. “And they rise up to the obstacle.”

Mumma included that Allen’s is “the deal with our center schoolers know as considerably as technology.”