Clarkstown Educators Attend and Present at NY Google Summit

On Friday and Saturday, October 4th and 5th, five educators from the Clarkstown Central School District attended the NY Google Summit 2013 to learn new strategies and share experiences related to using Google Apps to engage our learners.  Three also led presentations for other educators.

Marine biology teacher Heidi Bernasconi presented Using Google Apps to Easily Collect and Demonstrate APPR Highly Effective Teaching Practices to an eager group of adult learners. Her presentation focused on using Google to capture key practices that lead to distinguished or highly effective ratings in the Danielson Framework used for teacher evaluation.  

My session, titled Going from Good to Great with Google, was essentially a recap of our district's six year partnership with Google as an broad based learning tool. Participants learned of our roll out and how we brought the innovators and early adopters on board.  What they were most interested in learning was the program we developed in-district that produced 17 Clarkstown (certified) Google Educators.  

District technology learning facilitator Jennifer Cronk co-presented Using Google Apps for Jazzy (and Archived) Professional Development with Irvington School District's technology director Jesse Lubinsky. This session provided information regarding effectively using Google Hangouts to deliver and capture professional development sessions.

We are fortunate to have teachers committed to exploring and sharing with other educators as we work together to transform student learning experiences.  As more and more of our students use these tools as part of their daily practice, collaboration, synthesis and creation of information is noticeably improved.  

Our education system is in the middle of significant shifts, and we are fortunate to have teachers whose vision goes beyond state standards (a minimum) and challenge our students to work in teams to create, present and ultimately defend the information they have mastered.  Broad shifts such as this take time, but the Clarkstown Central School District is proving to be a nationally recognized leader in this arena.