Santa Maria-Bonita School District teachers with Chromebooks in hand worked their way through a Google Summit on Aug. 7 at Tommy Kunst Junior High School. Summit sessions covered topics such as virtual field trips, YouTube bingo, and Google Hangouts in the classroom.
Tech gurus from Google for Education led the workshop sessions.
“Usually, these Google conferences are held in large cities and teachers have to travel to them,” Maggie White, a district spokesperson, said in an email. “[The district] was very fortunate to be able to bring the high tech training to Santa Maria for its teachers.”
The district purchased 3,600 Chromebooks during the last school year to aid in teaching Common Core—California’s new set of learning standards for core subjects such as math—and for taking the state’s new standardized tests, also known as Smarter Balance assessments. The workshop focused on making technology a seamless part of Common Core instruction.
This article appears in Aug 14-21, 2014.
