As I write this post I’m sitting in the back of the 7th and 8th grade classroom of Grace Lutheran School in Oshkosh, WI. Many thanks to the students there and Principal Peter Iles for allowing me to spend a morning with them to observe their use of Chromebooks. After their initial envy of my white Chromebook vs. their apparently boring black ones, they went about their studies as if I wasn’t there. A great environment to watch students, and teacher, use the technology.
Currently the students are spending some time with their Chromebooks using KhanAcademy to practice math exercises. Very engaged. Very smooth. Principal Isles plays music while the kids work and shows the Khan Class Statistics on the screen in the front, displaying a line chart of classroom performance as they answer questions on their screens.
Grace Lutheran School has about 130 students. The 7th and 8th grade has 16 students. They were the very first elementary school in the country to introduce Chromebooks into the classroom. They have had a number of visitors so far this school year interested in watching their progress including the area newspaper. Of course, Google is very interested in their experience as well. Principal Iles was invited to Chicago recently to share his experience with education technologists and teachers.
As they started math class, the students were instructed to get their Chromebooks from a wheeled cart in the back of the room with slots for each laptop with a powercord attached. The whole process took about 2 minutes, and another 30 seconds later the kids had opened their Chromebooks, logged in and were working. Zero disruption to the educational process. Very important and impressive. The “instant on” nature of a Chromebook makes it a much better startup experience versus other more traditional netbooks some classrooms are trying.
The students seem to be very at home with the Chromebooks. Some use a mouse, others just the trackpad. All seem to be fairly proficient at the keyboard. Gone are the day when later years of grade school are spent in Mavis Typing Tutor to get the hang of a QWERTY keyboard. They still have “typing” practice, but not many use the hunt and peck approach I remember. They still also have a paper and pencil handy for scratching out math problems, etc, so it helps that their desks are about 2.5 feet wide. That will be something to consider in whatever computing device you want to place on the students desks. When classroom activities don’t include the Chromebooks (but they might be used later), the students are asked to close the lids. None of the students seem to be distracted by their presence. Just another tool at this point…like a textbook. Very natural.
There is very little technical infrastructure at the school. Basically they have internet access distributed throughout the school via wireless routers. No large file servers or other enterprise level network gear. Content filtering is provided through OpenDNS which Principal Iles manages by simply opening and blocking sites as necessary. They use the free version of OpenDNS and so far it has been meeting their needs. Most of our elementary schools are going to be in the same boat. The person in charge of technology is usually a full time teacher, so time spent administrating a network with proxy servers, content filters, domain servers and active directory management is not in the cards.
Principal Iles did relate that a couple of days ago a student came to him with a Chromebook that clearly had issues. After trying to work with it, he decided just to wipe it, restore the OS and re-enroll the machine on their Google Apps domain. Presto. Problem solved. BTW, that whole process takes about 5 minutes. All the apps, etc. are restored along with. No further configuration or installations necessary.
Note: Thanks for the cookie (I’m talking a real one here) from the young lady celebrating a birthday!
The students are now in the midst of History class. Principal Iles asked them to open their Chromebooks and then use the “Cornell Notes” template from Google Docs. He has assigned a specific naming convention for their notes (i.e. 20-1), so they can all “be on the same page” when referring to their notes related to a specific class and topic. Again, the entire process from sit down to start note taking was about 30 seconds. Toward the end of the class each student was asked to write a lesson summary.
The teacher doesn’t share his PowerPoints currently, but is considering using the new and improved Google Presentations tool, which he would then share with the students. He tries to keep the slides fairly simple, which then encourages the students not just to type everything they see on screen, but also listen for important points and type those into their notes.
Now the students have “computer class” which starts with touch typing practice using a free app called Touch Typing Tutorial from Typing Club.com. This is still important to speed/optimize note taking and paper writing. Principal Iles then went through a worksheet on Password Tips. A great idea to have class time devoted to essential computing best practices. The assignment is to create three “strong” and “weak” passwords that historical figures might have created (i.e. Albert Einstein and Mark Twain). So Twain might have created Huckl3b3rryFinn (strong) and beckythatcher (weak). The students used their Chrombooks to search for and research historical figures. Wikipedia seems to be a popular resource. Nice mix of tech and history. Some of the kids came up with -!raccoonboyH<3boots!- and TrigrHapy3 (Davey Crockett and George Eastman respectively). Fun.
During their research one student stumbled on a site that had a video that was set to autoplay. She quickly stopped it, but I can imagine that happening quite often during surfing exercises. Just something to be aware of. BTW, the students do have headphones available if they want to play a video they find.
The students only use the Chromebooks while in class, but as most students have computers at home, they will have access to all their Google Apps files from their home computers. This prevents lost and damaged computers, but still allows anytime access to assignments, notes, etc. No need to allow access “into” the schools network. It’s all on Google Apps.
Principal Iles uses other tools to interact with his students including the built in email and even Google Talk/Chat to address questions from the kids. Over lunch with Peter I explored a number of other topics including printing, paying for the devices, the relationship with Google and many other topics that I’ll share in future posts.
For now, I’d like to again thank Principal Peter Iles and the students of his 7th and 8th grade classroom. You guys were great. I had a good time and learned a lot. Blessings on your continued use of Chromebooks and your growing in knowledge and faith!
This past week Apple introduced electronic textbooks through their iBook store and available in the iTunes University (iTunes U). iTunes U had previously been available only to higher education institutions. It is now available for K-12.. Also a part of the announcement was the introduction of a new iBook / Textbook authoring tool called iBook Author. With textbook publishers like Pearson “signed up” to populate the offerings, Apple is getting serious about getting electronic textbooks in the classroom.
