Christine spent the first three years of her career as a Special Educator at Bayside Elementary, a grades 3 to 5 school just east of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on Kent Island. Working in conjunction with a Regular Educator in inclusion classrooms, she helped students with special needs to become active learners. In 2000, she made the leap to becoming a Regular Educator, and now teaches third graders at Bayside.

At first, she used computers mostly to help herself organize her tasks as a teacher as opposed to working with students in the classroom. But after joining the advance team of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Technology in Education this year, she's found many new ways to enrich her students' learning using technology.

Her students recently completed a unit that compared the cultures of foreign countries to our own. They learned about foreign cultures using a combination of traditional sources and the Internet - in particular, a Web site in which children from other countries talked about their culture. Her students then created a brochure that highlighted the similarities and differences between the two cultures, presented their findings to the class, and even put on a gallery walk for parents.

On making the most of limited classroom time with technology:
"Make sure that you've gone through whatever Web sites you're going to use to make sure that they're up to date... I have children who don't have a lot of experience with technology, so I model everything before they do it, and then take them step by step through the process using a LCD projector so that they have something to refer to."