NEW PALESTINE — Days after sending their students out on summer vacation, more than 400 Indiana teachers headed back to the classroom this week participate in an educational experience of their own.
The county’s four school districts teamed up to host the fourth annual AppleMania Conference, a summit on technology in education that attracts educators and school administrators from across the state.
The two-day learning experience, held Thursday and Friday at New Palestine High School, is made possible by a grant from the Indiana Department of Education Office of eLearning, said Ashley Arnold, a technology integration specialist for Greenfield-Central Schools and a chief organizer of the event.
Each day of the conference, participants hear from a keynote speaker before breaking off into small-group workshops. Teachers from Southern Hancock, Greenfield-Central, Mt. Vernon, Eastern Hancock and Shelbyville Central schools serve as moderators, sharing teaching tips and swapping success stories.
The local AppleMania conference is one of nearly 20 e-learning conferences hosted across Indiana in June and July as education leaders push to encourage schools to think beyond pen and paper.
AppleMania takes months to plan and orchestrate, said Chris Young, Southern Hancock’s strategic learning coordinator. He and Arnold applied for the state’s grant in October; and soon after learning they’d received the money, they started seeking out technology-passionate teachers who would want to serve as presenters, he said.
When the conference was first started in 2015 — while many schools were launching one-to-one initiatives — the workshops focused heavily on ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, Arnold said.
Those discussions continue, she said, in workshops focusing on increasing STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) lessons, teaching coding to kids of all ages and using MacBooks, iPads and Google apps.
But the conference has also grown to include lectures on other educational topics like fostering creativity in the classroom, fighting “fake news” by teaching critical thinking and best practices regarding school safety.
Some talks served to inspire educators.
Young admitted he was most excited to have scheduled Dr. Buddy Berry, superintendent of Eminence Independent Schools in Henry County, Kentucky, as the keynote speaker to kick off the 2018 conference.
Berry is heralded as one the nation’s leading school administrators for his work trying to integrate innovation and creativity into the schools he supervises.
In addition to his keynote address Thursday morning, Berry lead a workshop designed for school administrators that focused on creating “the school of the future,” where students learn not only about science, reading, English and math but about collaboration and community engagement.
Berry said his school district has chosen to make displays of civil service and certain positive character traits requirements to pass from grade level to grade level. In their small community, it’s proven to be beneficial in many different ways, he said.
Berry told the crowd a story about a second-grader who baked cookies with her grandmother, who was living in a nursing home, as part of a class project. The student shared the cookies with other residents at her grandmother’s nursing home. And after seeing the joy it brought them, she decided to come to the facility once a week to bake treats for the residents. And years later, even after her grandmother’s death, the girl still visits the nursing home with treats once a week, he said.
“That doesn’t happen unless you have the right soil in which to let that idea grow,” he said, telling that audience that he believes schools should be places that foster life lessons, not just academic learning.