[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith the help of a conference, Hays CISD teachers gained the opportunity to learn from their peers about how to better use technology as a learning tool in the classroom.
On June 8, Hays CISD held its fourth annual Fusion Digital Learning Conference at Simon Middle School.
Jamie Locklin, director of digital technology at Hays CISD, has organized the annual conference the last two years. She calls it a “celebration of learning where everyone can come together and share ideas about what works in their classrooms.”
Locklin said the conference sold out of the maximum of 250 teachers that could register for the daylong event.
The conference is held the Thursday after the school year ends. The event is free of charge to the teachers who attend.
Locklin said the funding for the event came from the digital technology budget with any surplus paid by the chief executive officer.
This year’s conference offered 28 presentations, 25 of which were Hays CISD teachers. International speaker George Couros was the keynote speaker for the event, which focused on the message in his book, “The Innovators Mindset.”
Locklin said the focus of digital learning is to personalize learning to each student. Whereas instead of one teacher standing in front of 35 kids with only 45 minutes to teach a concept, the teacher can utilize technology to extend the learning experience.
“By putting technology in the room, it allows the teacher to clone themselves and teach a small group of kids, while another group in the same classroom is gaining first hand knowledge by a video the teacher created at the same time,” Locklin said.
This learning style is called blended learning and allows students to discover new ways to learn using digital technology in addition to the traditional approach.
“It’s not just about getting the technology,” Locklin said, “It’s about thinking about how that technology impacts how teachers teach and how students learn and using it in that way.”
The Fusion conference provided teachers with classes about how to work with 3-D printers and integrate that into their lessons.
There were also presentations where Hays CISD teachers and faculty taught other teachers how to create their own Google websites, how to create and post their own teaching videos, and how to use social media as a tool for reading comprehension.
Locklin said teachers were also learning how to use apps such as Plickers and Kahoot to integrate a game-based pedagogy into the classroom. Those apps allow them to create short quizzes and quickly poll the students to get real time comprehension data.
“Tools like these are helping teachers to realize how they are teaching and what they need to improve on or change in order to better teach the students,” Locklin said.
Locklin called the digital technology movement at Hays CISD the “baby” of Michael McKie, who was formerly the superintendent. While she hopes whoever replaces McKie can bring their own bend to the way digital technology is used in the district, she believes its here to say.
“I think that digital technology and digital learning as a trend in education is not going away,” Locklin said, “We’re learning that learning is more of a process instead on an end result and trying to help kids learn the way they learn.”
