Shore Hosts Technology Roundtable

From the Shore Regional School District:

Shore Regional High School (SRHS) students have been “Google-ized” and are now paving the way for other school districts in the area to do the same. 

This past summer, SRHS rolled out Google Apps for Education to the student body, connecting the faculty and the students through communication and collaborative applications. In addition, SRHS purchased 50 new Samsung Google Chromebooks. These new devices give the students and teachers a simple solution for fast and easy access to Google’s web based learning applications.

“We are very excited to be spearheading this revolutionary learning tool in our schools,” said Michael Vaccarino, Shore Regional’s Technology Coordinator.  “Chromebooks provide the teaching and learning benefits of computers without the typical distractions that come with technology in the classroom. Using Chromebooks, teachers spend more time teaching and less time managing classroom technology.”

Due to the success of this rollout, Shore Regional High School hosted a technology roundtable meeting which was attended by twenty-five of the surrounding school districts. The focus of this roundtable was to discuss educational technology and the use of Chromebooks in the classroom.  Jamie Casap, Google Education Senior Evangelist, served as the keynote speaker on this topic. Lisa Thumann, Google Apps Education Certified Trainer at Kean University, also discussed “32 Ways to Use Google Apps."

In addition, Ericom Software participated in the roundtable discussion about the hot topic of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Ericom demonstrated their product, Access Now, which allows users to virtually launch Windows based application inside the Google Chrome browser. 

“This was a great roudtable and I was very impressed with Google’s vision of educational technology,” said Joseph Emerson, Hazlet’s Network Administrator.  “I am looking forward to the future potential of Google application and devices."

After the meeting attendees felt they now have better data to accomplish the difficult decision of becoming a 1 to 1 technology device district.