We have been running in-person summits continuously since 2011. Summits are conference-style events which are normally two days of hour-long sessions on a variety of topics, plus fun group activities like the keynotes and demo slams.
This is a virtual educational summit featuring Google for Education was hosted by the Farmington Municipal School last July 12th, 13th and 14th, 2021 organized by AppsEvents and supported by Acer, with a series of workshops throughout the day led by highly acclaimed Google Certified Trainers and Educators.
The goal of the virtual summit is to help administrators, educators, specialists, and assistants/paraprofessionals learn how to use the tools for productivity and/or in innovative ways to engage learners to be successful in achieving competency in all areas of the curriculum.
Virtual Summits with AppsEvents
All the live sessions we delivered through Google Meet, a calendar event created by a single account on the school’s domain meant we didn’t have to worry about admitting attendees, but to be safe, we also added everyone to the calendar event (but avoided sending the invites to save people’s inboxes).
With this in place, everyone simply needed to be able to access the Google Meet links to join on the day at the right time. On this occasion the links were made available through the school’s PD platform internally, but for other events we have used a Google Site or sched.com as we have for previous events.
More Choice with Virtual
Going virtual allowed us to broaden the schedule and bring in a wider variety of speakers. Our amazing speaker line up of educators from across the US joined the Google Meets through the week to deliver quality hands-on sessions for the attendees.
For an in-person session, we get to network as speakers and with the attendees. This is certainly something we miss from in-person events. I met with the speakers to make sure everyone got to meet each other and we have a Google Chat room through the week as an event back-channel.
The Workshops
Spreading the sessions across a week instead of 2 days gave more flexible timings for the schools, busy preparing for remote learning. We still ran concurrent sessions, but on reflection we don’t need to unless someone really wants to attend everything! The team of speakers covered a wealth of experience, all having their own experiences of managing learning through COVID from North Carolina, to Florida, to Texas and Chicago!
Meet the Speakers
The sessions received great feedback from the educators who attended
“Please bring George back again. His ideas are wonderful, his way of teaching does not leave me feeling lost, and he makes me feel save. I would love to spend a full day learning from him.”
“Love to see more examples of how this is implemented”
“I would like to know what else I can do in Docs, but this is a good start.”
“Great Ideas and presenter Energy!”
We have lots to think about going forward:
- Session lengths and timing
- Content relevant to teachers learning digital tools from the beginning
- Continue to consider diversity and inclusion in sessions and everything we do
As we have done for our certification bootcamps we moved these to a series of 90 minute sessions right after the 3-day summit and took a group of educators from Farmington through to their Google Educator Level 1 exam. Our online offering for these is available through the year and into 2021. To find a time for you, check out our online bootcamps here.
We look forward to being able to work face to face with educators again in the future, but while staying safe and social distancing is needed, we are very pleased to have grown more and more experience of what works with remote and online professional development.
If you are looking at bespoke PD sessions, summits or certification bootcamps, we would be delighted to help you plan and deliver high-quality professional learning for your colleagues.
