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NCCAT Hosts WRESA STEM Tech Conference

CULLOWHEE—One hundred teachers from across western North Carolina attended the Western Region Education Service Alliance (WRESA) STEM Tech Conference at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, a nationally recognized leader in professional development.

Teachers and school leaders took part in sessions to discover strategies for using technology effectively. Two keynote speakers—Dr. Jayme Linton, Program Coordinator for the Master of Science and Online Teaching and Instructional Design program at Lenoir-Rhyne University and Dr. Stephanie Schuttle, Postdoctoral Research Associate with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences spoke to the conference.

Educators also had the opportunity to participate in multiple breakout sessions focused on elementary education, secondary education, leadership and community engagement related to STEM and technology.

“We have been wanting to do this for a long time to serve far western North Carolina teachers with a time of collaboration around technology,” said WRESA’s Dr. Karen Sumner. “We needed a facility with adequate technology, and NCCAT was the perfect place.”

Sumner said the conference was organized to recognize different districts have different technology situations.

“Some districts are one-to-one, and some are far from that so we wanted to have a conference that gave all of them the information they could use in their districts,” Sumner said. “This was a great turnout, and there was time for valuable networking and collaboration.”

WRESA is a collaborative that was created by western North Carolina school systems in 1996–1997. Since 1998, all of the 18 school systems in western North Carolina have been members of WRESA.