2026 Utah Rural Schools Conference

Come discover how to move beyond basic prompting and start building your own specialized AI team. Using Google Gemini Gems, you will learn how to "program" custom AI assistants tailored to your specific classroom or administrative needs—no coding required. You'll also learn about an existing library of pre-made Gemini Gems you can easily copy and start using right away! Make sure to bring your own laptop or Chromebook to this session and leave with a personalized digital assistant ready to tackle your unique tasks. Here's a link to the slides for this session: bit.ly/uengems

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: Mac Laptop; Windows Laptop; Chromebook

🎉 Get $200 for your classroom! Just attend any 3 of the 8 available USBE+Google sessions in ED 104 to qualify for a USBE-sponsored $200 DonorsChoose classroom credit! 📝🚀

Feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list of emails, lesson plans, and administrative tasks? This hands-on workshop demonstrates how Gemini can become your productivity partner, streamlining your academic workflow. We will dive into the essential skill of prompt engineering, teaching you how to craft effective commands to get the results you need, fast. You'll learn practical strategies from drafting student communications and generating creative assignment ideas to summarizing research and managing your schedule. This session is dedicated to hands-on exploration, giving you the time and guidance to discover how AI can support you professionally and personally. You will leave with a toolkit of ready-to-use prompts and the skills to confidently use Gemini to save time, spark innovation, and reclaim valuable daily hours.

Session slides

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: Not applicable

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: Any web-enabled device is recommended.

This presentation will provide attendees with the brain science behind how brains develop and why students have specific behaviors.  The brain science will then lead to practical, real life application on how to actually use the science to increase academic output and decrease negative behaviors.  Attendees will leave the session with skills they can apply the next day in the classroom.   

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: None

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: None

Stop me if you’ve been here: it’s 3:30 PM, the fluorescent lights are humming, and you’re fighting the urge to check your watch (or the back of your eyelids) during another one-size-fits-all staff meeting. If that sounds familiar, it’s time to flip the script on Professional Development. This session offers a fast-paced "peek" into how we can kill the "yawn factor" by moving away from "sit-and-get" models and toward a personalized, choose-your-own-adventure experience for your entire school. You will go beyond just hearing about personalization—you’ll actually experience a unique learning path firsthand. By brainstorming with peers and exploring new strategies, you’ll walk away with a toolkit to make educator learning purposeful, relevant, and—dare we say—actually fun.

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: Mac Laptop; Windows Laptop; Chromebook; Windows Tablet / Smartphone; iPad / iPhone; Android Tablet / Smartphone

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: Mac Laptop; Windows Laptop; Chromebook

🎉 Get $200 for your classroom! Just attend any 3 of the 8 available USBE+Google sessions in ED 104 to qualify for a USBE-sponsored $200 DonorsChoose classroom credit! 📝🚀

Stop spending your summer planning! Learn how to safely ground Google’s free AI tool in your own curriculum files to build print-ready worksheets, quick flashcards, and hands-on, low-screen activities in seconds.

Imagine having a brilliant, zero-cost teacher's aide who handles your heavy-lifting prep work while you focus on your students. Welcome to Google NotebookLM. In this relaxed, hands-on session, we’ll show you how to feed this secure AI tool your actual lesson plans, state standards, or favorite textbooks to instantly spit out high-impact classroom resources.

Instead of staring at a blank screen, you’ll learn how to generate paper-based reading scaffolds, localized vocabulary lists, and creative offline activities that keep you fully compliant with Utah’s new early-elementary screen time rules. Whether you need a quick 10-minute printable extension activity for 2nd grade, a Socratic discussion guide for 6th grade, or tailored support for your English Language Learners, you’ll walk away with a bank of ready-to-use shortcuts to win back your prep periods this fall.

Session slides

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: Not applicable

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: Any web-enabled device is recommended.

Tired of typing the same prompts over and over? It’s time to meet Gems — your customizable chatbots designed to handle whatever task for you. Whether you need a persistent lesson planner, a student feedback coach, or a schedule sorter. Gems allow you to package your best instructions into a single, reusable tool.We’ll cover the breakdown of a Gemini Gem, use cases for educators, tips and tricks and have time to live build! In this hands-on session, we will start with the basics to then begin building. By the end of the hour, you’ll have a custom AI assistant ready to go to work for you!  Note: Participants will need access to Gemini Gems through their Google account. Skills may be transferable to over AI platforms with custom chatbots (SchoolAI, MagicSchool, etc.) 

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: Mac Laptop; Windows Laptop; Android Tablet / Smartphone; iPad / iPhone; Windows Tablet / Smartphone; Chromebook; Other (If not listed above, please indicate what device(s) would benefit attendees in your session description)

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: None

Last year, the Student Data Privacy team at the Utah State Board of Education introduced an asynchronous Canvas course that many districts and charters have used to meet requirements for data privacy training. This session will be a special live edition of that training! We'll walk through all the most critical info you need to know about Data Privacy Basics; including Data Privacy Rights, Sharing Data, and Protecting Data. Pro-tip: Check with your district or charter ahead of time to see if this course will be a requirement of your back to school training. If so, you can leave this session with a certificate of completion so you can skip that step in the fall! If you would like to get a certificate of completion, please bring a device to participate.

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: None

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: Any of these

Papers can often feel like a disorganized mess of open tabs and lost citations. Scrible—free for all Utah public and charter schools—is a powerhouse platform designed to scaffold the entire research and writing workflow. Whether you teach 5th-grade ELA or 9th-grade History, Scrible provides the scaffolding your students need to master close reading, organize their thoughts, and cite sources correctly. In this hands-on session, stop by to learn how to manage the chaos of research projects in one simple platform. You’ll hear success stories from Utah classrooms and walk away with a toolkit for tracking student progress and building media literacy skills that stick!

In the Snow College Integrating Technology into Education courses students study the concept of Gamification, the bringing of gaming principles into Education. As part of this lesson students have to prepare a lesson with a game and then teach it to the rest of the class. A common feedback from these students was to express just how much they needed the experience of playing a game to make them feel better in the middle of a busy semester. It is often discussed how Gamification can help students learn but it is also important to realize how the relief from playing a game can also have a positive impact.

In this presentation, we will talk about Gamification and how it can help students. We will then divide into groups and go through the process of teaching each other to play a board game, actually play it, then study a lesson plan that has been prepared for it. We will then reflect on how we might be able to use a game like that in our classes and how taking a moment to play a game made us feel. Through this experience, we hope to be able to use Gamification in a more purposeful manner.

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: Not Applicable

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: Not Applicable

When faced with new challenges and uncertainty following pandemic-related disruptions, some Utah schools beat the odds in their student academic recovery. What school-level factors made this possible? In this interactive session, the Utah Education Policy Center (UEPC) will share findings from a statewide mixed-methods study of eight schools that demonstrated strong post-pandemic recovery. Conducted in partnership with USBE and ULEAD, the study examined the school-level factors that leaders and educators identified as most important to academic recovery in their schools. The findings point to reinvesting in the fundamentals rather than adopting pandemic-specific interventions: adaptive school leadership, high-quality PLCs, data-informed instruction, and other aligned support systems coherently working together. Adaptive leadership emerged as a key driver in these contexts, as leadership promoted the central coherence needed for these schools to improve outcomes through the strategic, sustained use of the people, structures, and practices already available to them. Session OutcomesParticipants will:Learn about key findings from the UEPC Pandemic Recovery study.Explore school portraits of success that make the study’s findings more concrete within school contexts.Reflect on their own school's strengths and opportunities for growth in relation to the study's findings.Develop action plans for high-leverage next steps, key partners, and needed supports.Why This MattersThis session translates research into actionable insights for schools, offering rural educators and leaders a research-informed starting point for strengthening the systems and practices that support student outcomes. All participants will leave with printed school portraits and a conversation guide to support continued reflection.

Participants MUST HAVE one of the following platforms/devices in order to participate in this session: None

Participants MAY FIND IT USEFUL to have one or more of the following platforms/devices during this session: Any of these