GBCS offers technology bond update - Grandblancview

GRAND BLANC — Voters opted to fund additional technology software, hardware and infrastructure for the school district last year and in this first of a series, Grand Blanc school officials take a look at the first steps, or “How it All Began; an Inside Look at West Middle School.”

Before students returned this fall, Grand Blanc Community Schools (GBCS) had a lot of prep work for rolling out new technology.

It began with a two-day summer training to educate, motivate, and inspire employees.

CBD Consulting (Communications by Design) facilitated the training event and showed about 80 educators the possibilities available to them through the new technology. From Google Classroom, Google Docs and Chromebooks, to Blended Lab space, employees were given a taste of how the new technology could help educators teach and students learn with a variety of tools.

As 8th grade science teacher Elizabeth Lemerond observed: “You’ve got this spectrum of where we are as a district. I’m very supportive of starting slow and having everybody be on board, instead of rushing and having people be left behind. Just to say, can you have a similar mindset? Because if we start there then we can always add skills later; but if you start off with, ‘here’s a bunch of skill-based information’, some people aren’t in the same mindset.”

Since the training, teachers are learning the new technology on their own time to help them prepare for in-class instruction. While using it in the classrooms, teachers are coming up with new questions and seeking out different ways to incorporate the technology.

Besides supporting each other, they have the opportunity to use one of CBD’s professional learning consultants, Matinga Ragatz, a career teacher with a specialty in current concepts design and technology integration.

Molly Maldonado had Ragatz give her students a 50-minute lesson on organizing their Chromebooks, helping them figure out how to create folders and organize items in the folders, and how to use apps in Google. Maldonado felt the time was very valuable for her students.

“It was nice because she would have them watch a video, then she would give them different apps and they could pick which ones they wanted to use,” she said. “She really individualized it for the kids; here are all these things, what works best for you.”

In a sense, the training, technology, and Blended Labs allow students to take control of their own learning and they are enjoying the responsibility and the flexibility.

Alaire Wells, an 8th grader in Lemerond’s science class and athlete at West Middle School, stated, “The old computer lab was so confining that I always got distracted because if you were in the back, all you would see is the back of other kids’ heads, so you would get more distracted. Now you can move around, get out of the way so you can see better. It’s pretty useful for learning.”

That’s the technology bond in a nutshell; a resource for students to reach further, beyond the textbook, beyond the scope of the classroom; a supplemental tool to broaden understanding and help prepare students for a future of their choosing.

Maldonado said, “I think that the bond being passed is a wonderful thing because it’s giving our kids access to things that they are going to be using in their real life, whatever kind of career field they go into. It’s getting them used to using this stuff in middle school and high school even, so once they get to college where they will be expected to know how to do all of this, it will be second nature.”

There were three main components introduced this school year:

Chromebooks issued to each student to have until the day they graduate.

Other classes will have the opportunity to work with in-classroom Chromebook carts. Carts can be checked out by a teacher based on the classroom needs for the day.

All middle school classrooms have the opportunity to time block the Blended Lab spaces for their class work at both East and West Middle Schools. — P.S.

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