TeachMeet Kentucky descended on Bowling Green High School last week, giving close to 200 educators the chance to swap teaching secrets, network with one another and discover ways to adapt to ever-evolving classrooms.

Teachers could choose to attend more than 50 bite-sized presentations made by their peers that tackled classroom technology, student autonomy and ways to better streamline the education process.

William King, director of technology for the Bowling Green Independent School District, was one of TeachMeet Kentucky’s organizers. King said the program began in a Scotland pub in 2006 and then made its way to America. The Kentucky arm just wrapped up its 13th year.

“What’s unique to (TeachMeet), it’s very specific in that it focuses on educational technology and tools for teachers to be more efficient and to help teach in the classroom,” King said.

TeachMeet hones in on classroom technology and shows teachers different ways to implement new tools to better aid themselves and their pupils, a necessary skill now that many school districts in Kentucky have provided students with their own Google Chromebook laptops.

“Before COVID, most of our school districts were not one-to-one (with Chromebooks). Kids were still using paper and pencil and doing worksheets, there might be a few computers like in a computer lab,” King said. “Since COVID, thanks to an influx of federal money and support from our boards, most school districts are one-to-one … having every kid have one of those devices is still very new to our teachers.”

Each session ran for 20 minutes, with teachers able to choose which presentations they attended “instead of forcing 300 people to sit in a room and learn one concept,” King said. “Our goal is that everyone walks away with a couple tools they can use when kids come back.”

The presentations covered a variety of areas, ranging from turning Pixar movies into lesson plans to gamifying classroom activities by taking inspiration from popular video games like Fortnite.

Amy Creek, a kindergarten teacher at Dishman McGinnis Elementary School, gave a presentation on how she got her students to write their own simple research papers – no small feat for kids at that age.

One of the academic standards for kindergarteners in Kentucky is to “compose informative text using a combination of drawing, dictating, writing and digital resources.” Creek said she wanted to push that standard as far as possible.

Her students each picked an animal they wanted to research. Creek assigned all of them nonfiction material about their respective animals through a program called Epic, which read the books to them out loud.

“As we were gathering info, I’d pull them over one at a time to get them started on the writing portion – one fact at a time,” Creek said.

Students followed step-by-step YouTube tutorials to draw their animals to accompany their research.

The students had the chance to display their work in the school gymnasium, blowing away parents and teachers alike.

“I even had one teacher say, ‘It doesn’t matter what grade I teach, I just want to make sure you teach the grade before I do,’ ” Creek said. “You never know what they’re capable of until you ask them to do it.”

Lauren Budziak, an assistive technology and communications consultant for the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative, gave a presentation about classroom accessibility, demonstrating ways teachers can increase access for their students using simple tech.

Some ways this accessibility can be reached is by running presentations through a color blindness simulator in order to check if slides are clearly visible to everyone. Budziak also gave examples of dyslexia-friendly fonts to ensure everyone can comprehend material clearly and explained the closed caption feature on Google Slides and YouTube.

“I’m so impressed with the educators in our region,” Budziak said. “They’re open with technology – there’s so many tools we can use to design our instruction and make it more accessible.”