Carson and Pioneer High School teachers listen to the opening introductions during the 1:1 Mobility program kick off training Monday morning. The program will provide every high school student with their own laptop.
Teachers from Carson High School and Pioneer High School took Monday to train in preparation for the school district’s 1:1 mobility project for the high school students.
As a part of the 1:1 project, every high school student in the Carson City School District will receive their own laptop for the school year. The program has already been implemented in the middle and elementary schools in the past two years.
The school district had a 1:1 kick-off training for the high school teachers Monday, where they learned to use programs — such as Edmodo, Google Drive and MasteryConnect — that will be available as resources to their students with their laptops.
“The laptops are a tool and tools change,” said Susan Keema, associate superintendent of Educational Services. “This is not to replace teachers. The students know how to use technology to utilize it for social media but the teachers can help them use it as a tool for learning so that they know how to use it for learning in college and later for a career.”
All of the high school teachers were present for the kick off, with 41 people helping teach the staff composed of teachers from the middle school and other trainers helping teach the staff how to better help use the laptops as tools for teaching.
“It is all student-centered learning so that we can have more collaboration with students for skills such as critical thinking to help take it to the next level,” said community officer for Nevada Ready 21 Mike Malone. “It is very exciting to help students learn on their own and collaborate to learn better.”
The training started with Keema and other officials from the Carson City school district and the Nevada Department of Education introducing the teachers to the training and then the rest of the day, the teachers went to various training sessions. Each session was split by skill level so that the trainers could have a better understanding of where the teacher’s knowledge on the subjects was.
“I think this will make teaching easier with these resources,” said Megan Schuler, one of the high school teachers in the training. “It can make it more engaging for students and they can have the ability to learn at their own pace and have the resources to adapt that learning.”
The students won’t be receiving the laptops for at least another week. Pioneer High School will get theirs Sept. 29 and Carson High School students will get theirs from Oct. 5-8. After the students receive their laptops, they will have to go through a Digital Citizenship program to earn their digital license, which shows that they learned how to responsibly use their laptops.