Three years ago I became the South Dakota State ThinkQuest Partner. In this capacity, I was to promote the research processes, collaboration, and web development skills inherent to the project. In year one, we worked with 115 students and 25 coaches teaming together to create content based web pages for others to learn from. Teachers gained an understanding of being a coach or guide and were able to change the way they approached teaching. Students learned what it takes to be a team - collaboration, problem solving, developing individual expertise to build team knowledge, and leadership. Coaches and students also gained knowledge of research and the processes to do deep, rich research. The website I developed to use with this project is located at http://sbsdl.tie.net/. The culminating event allowed teams to submit their content based websites to international competition. SD submitted 8 sites of the almost 1000 submitted. Two of these 8 sites were named semi-finalists and one became a finalist in the honorable mention category. This year we enjoyed working with 305 students and 28 coaches, with 30 teams submitting to the national competition. SD had a division winner (only 9 division winners in the USA) and one state winner. The division winning team traveled to TQ Live inSeattle,WA. The ThinkQuest project just ended again this year with 28 teams submitting websites from SD for the national competition.Both the students and coaches have learned a new way of teaching and learning and have seen their successes both at the local level and national level.

Two things I feel are my strengths include being the South Dakota State ThinkQuest partner - promoting and teaching a new way to learn and to teach using technology as the tool and also being a MarcoPolo Cadre Trainer. There are currently 96 in the U.S.training teachers to become Marco Polo experts in their districts to promote internet content in the classroom.

The major project that Londa Richter, a TIE cohort, and I have been involved in this year is integrating handhelds into the SD classrooms. We traveled toSanta Clara,CAto become Certified Palm Education Training Consultants and have trained more than 200 educators and administrators in the use of handhelds in the classroom and for assessment. We have also worked specifically with 5 districts as a pilot project to implement handhelds in the classroom. In the next month we will have a website up with all our training information and pilot project lessons and videos for others to learn from.

Various other workshops - Technology Planning, Technology Support Leadership, MOUS training, Questioning, Online Tools for the Classroom, Web based Classrooms, and Understanding by Design. Some of the workshops can be found at http://www.tie.net/staff/ under Marcia Torgrude.

Technology has been the force behind my growth as an individual. I minored in computers in college leading to my first teaching position. The changes in technology lead to my teaching an even wider range of technology related courses and becoming technology coordinator of the school district for ten years. I am now at Technology and Innovations in Education, a non-profit organization that provides professional development for SD educators. I am also working on my Master of Science Degree in Instructional Technology throughDakotaStateUniversityexpecting to graduate the December of 2003. Technology has been my guiding force.