Excellent Educators is a WAVY-TV 10 initiative to celebrate local teachers who have gone above and beyond for their students and communities during the last academic year. These Excellent Educators were nominated by their school divisions. Congratulations to these educators for all of their hard work and accomplishments!
Name: Christina Tomcany
Division: Mathews County Public Schools
Position: Third grade teacher at Mathews Elementary School
What the school division said about this Excellent Educator: Christina Tomcany has worked for Mathews County Public Schools for 11 years and has 16 total years in education. She is currently a third grade teacher who has worked to build relationships with children who attend in-person and virtually.
Most children came back to school in-person this year, but a handful of families opted for their students to remain virtual. Tomcany has maintained a virtual learning platform for these children while also teaching students in person. Tomcany meets with these students outside of the usual instructional time to make sure they understand the content. She stays many additional hours to assure that students have assignments that can be turned in via Chromebook. She has worked tirelessly to assure that her virtual students receive the same great education as her in-person students.
Over the past three years, Tomcany has taken a deep dive on technological resources that would increase the opportunity for her students to achieve virtually. She took classes at Longwood University during the summer of 2020 and returned to school to share how to create and use all Google programs that are pertinent to education. Then, she came to school during our in-service days in August 2020 and provided professional development on how to develop a Google classroom that included access to all of the educational websites that we subscribe to. This created an educational hub for students so they didn’t have to hunt for resources, and it helped ease the burden on parents.
Additionally, she taught all staff how to develop their own website using Google sites to better convey information to families. Everyone in the building knew that Tomcany’s door was open and she was ready to help with technological issues. Tomcany also made a Loom on how to make a Loom, which is essentially a scree-sharing program to help communicate with others how to find the tools necessary to complete a job.
Tomcany also taught System 44, which is a phonics-based remediation program for reading for the grade level, so her teammates wouldn’t have to take on the extra responsibility during the trying times of virtual learning.
