Welcome to my very first blog post in our district domain! I’m excited that my school district is moving forward with GAFE (Google Apps For Education) as this will allow the teachers, students, and district leaders the ability to collaborate on more projects and activities.
Understandably, much of my summer has been spent preparing professional development sessions for teachers and administrators. At the beginning of August, my ITRT team provided training for district leaders during their annual Leadership Conference. On Day 1, our team of 10 provided 2 hour training sessions on Google Drive, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Sheets and Forms. Administrators were given the opportunity to choose the content and level that best fit their needs and we split up into pairs to provide information and support. Leaders could choose two sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. When leaders were not in our sessions, they were receiving additional information about district policies and initiatives.
Day 2 expanded the learning with additional options of content integration, some of which used Google products and some that did not. I was thrilled to present my version of “Teach Like a Pirate” based on the best-selling book by Dave Burgess. As a hook to my presentation, I dressed like a pirate and offered participants colored beads that later became a sorting process for small group selection.
