Swan River School is making its mark in how rural
Leading the way is fifth-grade teacher Shelley Emslie, who was recently featured on the cover of “EdTech” magazine highlighting how Swan River arrived at, and uses, G Suite for Education to meet the needs of a rural school. G Suite for Education is a collection of free cloud-based tools, apps and services created by Google. She also trains other educators through the Northwest Montana Educational Cooperative and Montana-based Beyond the Chalk.
It’s not unusual for regular classroom teachers to take on a variety of subjects, roles and initiatives in a small school, but Emslie didn’t imagine she’d become a Google for Education Certified Trainer and Swan River’s G Suite administrator until she hit a roadblock in applying for a technology grant three years ago. Up to this point, staff had been using a variety of email services for school business and there wasn’t an official school district domain name for Swan River.
“At the end of the grant I put in my Gmail account and they said you can’t have a personal email you have to have a school email to verify that I was a teacher,” Emslie said.
After talking with Bud Gaiser, who is both the school’s P.E. teacher and the Information Technology person, she reached out to the Office of Public Instruction to find out how the email issue could be remedied and was told to check out Google’s educational offerings. So she did and signed up.
Now, Emslie plans to apply to become a certified Google Innovator, which means she will have to pass another series of tests and interviews. If approved, she will attend a three-day academy at Google headquarters.
