— By Lisa Andrew Ed.D, Hollister School District superintendent and JR Rayas, director of technology
“Ask your team’s techie if you need help in copying and pasting your logo,” says first grade teacher Diana Flores to her 25 students. As Ms. Flores monitors the students, she notices one of the 6-year old “techies” reaching for another student’s keyboard. “Techies, remember, you need to coach your team on how to do the task, not do it for them.”
Students in Room 28 at Sunnyslope School in Hollister School District are no strangers to building a slide deck using Google slides on their Chromebooks. On this day, they are coping the logo from their favorite sports team and creating an opinion slide about why their team is the best. Each student is focused, engaged and knows where to go for help.
The Hollister School District began its technology integration journey in September of 2015 after a conversation with Martin Cisneros, a highly-acclaimed leader in education technology professional development and board member of CUE. Together with the Hollister School District Technology Committee, led by Technology Director JR Rayas, Cisneros and the committee brainstormed and created “A Day with Tech,” which included tech workshops for teachers and administrators centering on the use of Google applications for productivity.
Google Docs, Slides and Sheets were part of beginner level lessons while Google Classroom and Sites were part of the intermediate sessions. “A Day with Tech” was held on a district professional development day, with more than 275 participants. All workshops were facilitated by the Hollister School District IT Department staff and supported by Cisneros. The feedback from the day was overwhelmingly positive and became the catalyst for a shift in technology integration professional learning in the Hollister School District.
Responding to the success of “A Day with Tech,” a second district-wide training event was developed. This time, participants would be provided the opportunity to become a Google Certified Educator in Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Forms, and Calendar. In June, 2016 (three days after school was out), the district held its second Google training day co-facilitated by CUE, with more than 175 teachers and administrators (53 percent of the total teachers and administrators in the district) choosing to come.
Self-assessment was part of the registration process, during which teachers specified current skill levels ranging from beginner to advanced. Sessions were six hours in length and focused on the use of Google applications during instruction. Instructors differentiated their sessions based on the self assessment, though the core content was the same for everyone. Feedback from this event affirmed the district’s technology integration professional development direction, as once again teachers and administrators left excited and eager to continue their digital learning journey.
In the fall of 2016, Hollister School District Google University was born, with the sole goal of graduating Google recognized, Google Level 1 and Google Level 2 Certified Educators. Members of the Hollister School District IT Department and a handful of early teacher adopters would be the professors (all Google certified), designing instructional slide decks, videos and scenarios that taught proficiency of the entire suite of Google apps.
Google University Day kicked off on a Saturday in January 2017. Teachers of all skill levels work with their peers, learning new skills and pedagogy for the integration of Google apps in their day-to-day teaching. Assignments are organized in a Google Classroom and include test prep materials to prepare for the three-hour online Google certification exam. As incentive for participation, teachers can purchase continuing education units to advance on the salary schedule once all assignments are complete and they have passed their certification exam. Thus far, moreo than 80 teachers and administrators have become Google Level 1 Certified. Four Google Testing Saturdays have been held, with several more scheduled. An added bonus of Google University is the model it provides teachers on how to organize their own classroom and use of the Google Suite with students, having been students themselves in such an environment. Recently, Hollister School District expanded its Google University to include classified employee participants, focusing their workshops on office usage of the Google Suite.
All of these efforts have not gone unnoticed by Google. Recently, Hollister School District served as a pilot district for Google’s Project Culture Shift, a program to help school leaders foster a culture of innovation. As a selected district, the Hollister School District Visioning Team consisting of administrators and teachers, participated in design thinking workshops facilitated by Googlers from the Google Education Division. The Visioning Team focused on the question, “How might we collaborate with parents to define and build 21st Century learning environments?” by first interviewing parents, dreaming of all sorts of “out of the box” ideas based on the parent interviews, and then selecting two ideas to prototype. The Visioning Team will continue to prototype into next school year and will use the process to address other district initiatives.
As the Hollister School District continues its culture shift to one of innovation (curiosity, agency, collaboration, risk-taking), more and more classrooms will begin to mirror that of eighth-grade Social Studies teachers Laura Collier and Kaitlin Krebs at Rancho San Justo Middle School. A visitor to their classrooms during the study of the U.S. Constitution would see small groups of students accessing a Google Classroom filled with simulations, investigations, tasks, and writing assignments all aimed at deepening student understanding of the Constitution and its relevance to an eighth-grader.
Chromebooks are opened to Educreations for podcasts, Crash Course for videos, and the U.S. Supreme Court website, among many others. Students are heard debating federal vs. states’ rights, federalism as it pertains to healthcare and the environment, as well as landmark Supreme Court cases and citing national documents, found on thIternet and vetted for accuracy. When asked how learning this way is better than reading details from a textbook or watching a historical documentary on DVD, students reply, “I like having a Google Classroom where I can find all my assignments in one place. I get to complete the assignments and projects at my own pace and pick the group I want to collaborate with. All of our assignments are interesting and are related to what we are dealing with today. We are using information from the past to decide about our future.”