Teachers Ramp Up Tech Skills

On the closing day of the Summer Institute last Friday, some left tech-savvy, some came tech-adequate, but after two weeks of intensive training, teachers left tech-inspired.

MERIT, which offers the Summer Institute at Krause Center for Innovation located on the campus of , is a one-year program for educators of grades 4 through 12 that teaches teachers how to best utilize and integrate innovative technology in the classroom, using anything from Prezi, a free web-based zoom presentation program to creating 90-second videos to augment a lesson.

What it all comes down to is keeping teachers energized and finding new ways to keep students interested and engaged, said Diane Main, and using innovative technology can do that.

Main, a MERIT instructor, is the educational technologist at . Though she’s more than just tech-savvy, Main still walked away with learning a thing or two herself, she says.

“It’s all about staying excited and showing kids that learning can be fun,” Main says.

Dolly Sandoval—a former Cupertino mayor and city councilwoman who teaches math at —was one of about 50 educators who came mostly from the Bay Area for the 60-hour program.

Before enrolling in the program, the most technology she used in her classroom was using the computer to take roll, she said.

But through MERIT, she walked away with the knowledge of not only how to make a video, but how to make it into a lession.

“It’s a yearlong program. They will come back and meet periodically through next spring,” says Liane Freeman, director of strategic planning at KCI. “They will do follow-on work with each other, and support how they are using technology in their classroom.”

One teacher participating was Kami Thordarson, who teaches 5th grade at .

Though some of the teachers arrive as individuals from their respective schools, they leave the Summer Institute with a network of contacts, shared ideas, and in Sandoval’s case, a teaching partner of sorts.

Karen Larson teaches 8^th grade math at  in Los Gatos, a feeder school for Sandoval at Los Gatos High. The pair learned about Comic Life, a program that allows users to create posters, which Sandoval plans to incorporate in her lesson plan so students can make career posters.

Using graphics such as thought bubbles, comic characters and digital photos, Sandoval hopes to make it fun for those students who ask “why” they need to learn math and fail to see how it may apply to their career interests.

They’ll interview people in the workplace and uncover how math is used in that role.

“It will help them learn how they will utilize math in a future career,” she says.

On July 29, the closing day of the Summer Institute, the teachers shared with the group a presentation of at least one way in which they plan to integrate technology in their lesson plans.

Adriana Reyes for example, a teacher at in Mountain View, says students in her eighth-grade classroom will select a book that had once been banned, such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and create a book campaign, a digital argument, for why the book should—or should not—be banned.

Because some of her students come from low socio-economic households, Reyes turned her attention to free web-based tools.

“Access to technology was at the forefront of my planning,” she says.