Tilley helps usher in media advances

By Ron Booth
The Duncan Banner

COMANCHE May 11, 2008 12:45 pm

— You’d be hard-pressed to find someone at Comanche Elementary School, or Comanche Public Schools for that matter, that doesn’t have a compliment for Lynn Tilley.
Tilley is the library media specialist, and a key part of the advances in the use of multimedia technology in the elementary school.
However, Tilley is quick to point out that everything that the school does is a team effort.
“This is our window to the world,” Tilley said, pointing to a flat-screen monitor. “This is our portable conference unit.
“Nothing that happens here is just me. We have two wonderful grant writers, Morgan Mannen and Joann Ball. Mr. (Terry) Davidson (Comanche superintendent) allows me two have two wonderful library aides, Judy Philley and Gina Turkett. I couldn’t do it without those two wonderful ladies. Janice Vernon is our school principal, and I love working with her.”
The library runs 500 books a day, which is where Philley and Turkett, come into play.
“I don’t have to worry about it, because they take care of it,” Tilley said.
It isn’t just the people that work around her that are special to Tilley, but the whole community.
“I feel like Comanche is a special place,” she said. “We get wonderful support from the school board and the community.”
Tilley has taught at Comanche for two decades, and isn’t retiring anytime soon.
“I just got my national boards, so I’ve got at least 10 more years left,” she said.
Tilley has become an intricate part of Comanche’s reputation as a technologically advanced school.
Comanche has had many multimedia presentations that have spanned the globe and won awards at the Oklahoma Multimedia contest and an international contest. This year, Tilley has been working with teachers Paula Williams and Marilyn Pineda as they have been teaching the Chinese language to kindergartners during an after-school program.
Comanche has connected with the Confucius Institute at the University of Oklahoma. At OU, the program has been spearheaded by Sharon Gou and Luping Wang. The program is part of the KIDSPLACE program.
“They started out not knowing anything, and now they can speak in complete sentences. They have learned so much that they can even substitute words,” Tilley said. “These little ones are passing it on to their peers. We hope to expand the program to other classes this summer.”
All of the multimedia equipment and programs are part of the 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, which is directed by Krista Whitlock and Gina Hawkins.
“The programs allows kids a place to go when their parents are working,” Tilley said.
However, Tilley, who has also been a classroom teacher, said that being ahead of the curve hasn’t always been the case at Comanche.
“I can remember when we first got computers here,” she said. “Learning has changed because the world has changed. If you don’t keep up, you get left behind. We know have the ability to reach outside of the library walls.”
But no one goes it alone at Comanche.
“You have to have a lot of collaboration,” Tilley said. “We want our students to be 21st century students. We want them to use what they’ve learned with students in the school, state and world. Children are born into this world, we are the immigrants. You learn enough to get them started, and they take over and start teaching you.”
Comanche students have gotten the opportunity to learn from people all across the world.
“Comanche and Mustang Elementary presented to the rest of the world on the Oklahoma Centennial,” Tilley said. “We had students who were Native American dancers and the people in England thought that was neat.
“We’ve had presentations from Antarctica and Indonesia. We had a second-grade teacher who did an ocean program that connected with a diver at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.”
Tilley said that the goal of the programs that have been instituted at Comanche is to get the students to appreciate their current surroundings
“The whole goal is to learn about and appreciate what you have and where you are from,” she said. “The key is that they are learning.”
Another thing that the grants have done is to make every student a teacher.
“The key is that they are learning,” Tilley said. “I like working with kids in different grades. We may have a group of third- or fourth-graders work together. We’ve even had second-graders work with junior high and high school kids. The neat thing there is that, the second-grader will say something and the high school kid will run over to see what they are doing.”
In a time when all businesses are feeling the crunch, Tilley said that schools are, too.
“I think it is a mindset on how you deal with the tough times,” she said. “When times are tough, that is when you grow. You have to think, ‘I have a need, how do I meet it?’ When you get a group together, they figure it out. People here at Comanche have been great about coming together to solve a problem. We have great leadership.”

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