Teachers from around the Bay Area came to the Harker Teacher Institute at the Saratoga campus last month to learn more about technology and methods available to help them improve their classroom effectiveness.

During a wide variety of sessions, teachers learned about such skills as using digital content and grading quizzes with Moodle, creating collaborative documents in Google Docs, making high-quality graphics with free software and even filming documentaries.

In contrast to last year’s Teacher Institute, no keynote speaker was featured this year. Participants preferred “to spend most of their time on things that would make a difference in their classes next year rather than hearing about things to come,” explained Dan Hudkins, director of instructional technology.

Hudkins said this year’s institute was “very smooth and successful,” thanks to the careful coordination and arrangements made by Harker’s instructional technology staff of Fred Triefenbach, Lisa Diffenderfer and Angela Neff.