Digital photography, Minecraft, and iMovies are just three of the sessions that 160 Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) sixth- through eighth-grade students could participate in on Jan. 14.
Gina Daley, director of Santa Maria-Bonita School District’s GATE program, said the district does an extra curricular program for GATE students every year during winter break, and this year decided to focus on technology using the district’s Chromebooks.
Although the workshop wasn’t an official Google Summit, it was modeled off of one that the district’s teachers attended at the beginning of the year. Daley said the GATE program also wanted to give the learning day a conference-like and professional feel for the students, while making it fun and educational—almost like a job fair.
“The jobs that our students are going to have in the future, some of them don’t exist yet,” she said. “They may be the ones creating the jobs.”
She said technology changes at such a rapid rate that the district has to help teachers and students alike keep up with the advances, which is why workshops like the Google Summit for teachers and the GATE technology day are so important.
“We have to devote time to technology if we want our students to grow with it and effectively use it,” she said.
It’s going to take more than time, for the district to keep up with technology. District spokesperson Maggie White said so far, the district’s push for incorporating technology into the classroom is moving forward, and currently the district has about a 1-to-3 ratio of technology to students with the goal of making it 1-to-1 in the future.
“Funding, of course, is always an issue,” White said, adding that a lot of teachers are using Chromebooks in their classrooms on a regular basis, just like they would papers and pencils.
As far as the money portion of the tech-equation is concerned, schools have some discretionary funding and some are using it to purchase Chromebooks, helping the district zero in on its 1-to-1 goal.
“A lot of them have made a Chromebooks a priority,” she said.
This article appears in Jan 15-22, 2015.
