About 50 teachers came to Skyview High on Saturday morning to learn new ways to integrate technology into their classrooms.

The idea of Camp Cadre was to learn from the trainers and from one another. And not too long into the day, that’s exactly what was happening.

Rich Honea, a history and English teacher at the Billings Career Center, sat chatting at a table in the Skyview library with music teacher Aaron Schendel. Honea talked about using a computer application called Google Docs.

“I can go in while my students are writing and see what they’re writing and make suggestions,” he said, explaining that he’s on one computer and his students are on their own computers.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Schendel said.

All around Honea and Schendel, teachers were talking about what gadgets and software they find most useful as instructional tools.

Camp Cadre is the brainchild of Desiree Caskey, technology integration specialist for School District 2. The teachers, some from schools outside the district, will meet six Saturdays throughout the school year.

The camp is an expansion of TILT, or Teachers Integrating and Learning Technology, which involves a smaller group of teachers who meet with Caskey on district time. She started the TILT program four years ago.

Now the teachers who have been part of TILT are helping Caskey teach this new batch of learners.

On Saturday, teachers brought any kind of gadgets they thought might be useful, such as laptop computers, cameras, cell phones, GPS units and video cameras. But Caskey said the camp isn’t about using technology just for the sake of using it.

“It’s a whole combination of looking at tools, looking at the curriculum, how you teach, your classroom environment and saying ‘How can I do this differently, how can I reach more learners, how can I engage more?’ ” she said. “What we want is to use the tool that works best.”

While discovering new ways to teach kids is serious business, learning doesn’t have to be, Caskey said.

“The atmosphere surrounding all of this is exploring and having fun,” she said.

An important part of TILT is an online social network where teachers can post their ideas to a blog or a forum, as well as upload photos and videos. All of the campers will join that network, Caskey said, in an effort to keep learning from one another.

“It started with 40 members, and now we’re at 100,” Caskey said. “The network acts as an area where they can learn.”

Caskey also has posted all of the tutorials she has put on YouTube on the TILT network, which is available to members.

She began the morning Saturday in the Skyview theater, telling participants the goals of the camp. Everyone then moved to the library, where the teachers broke into groups to decide how to act out some national educational technology standards.

They did it with pantomime and no words, but it sparked laughter and applause among the groups and their audience. Next, the teachers got their assignment for the afternoon.

Kathi Hoyt helped explain it by taking them to a Web site, geoGreeting, where words are spelled out using satellite images of buildings.

“A series of buildings look like actual letters,” she told her audience. “It also shows you where they found those buildings.”

The teachers were to go off in small groups and photograph the letters of the alphabet — with any object they could find that formed a letter. For example, Hoyt said, a ladder or a sandwich board could form the letter A.

Back at the library later, they would download their photographs into laptops. The letters would then be used to form words that would reinforce the principles they had learned earlier in the day.

June Jeziorski, a third-grade teacher at Arrowhead Elementary, said she loves dabbling in all the new technology. She already uses a software program to help her students enjoy practicing their spelling words.

Jeziorski finds it helpful to collaborate with other teachers to come up with ideas to use in the classroom.

“It’s just plain fun,” she said. “It makes my role of teaching more fun, and it makes it fun for students to learn.”