Phase 1 & A Little Time for Reflection

Phase 1 Nearly Complete

Now that we're almost finished getting 3,800 Acer 710 & 720 Chromebooks into production I can take a minute and reflect on the first 5 weeks of our 1:1 Chromebook  - One Classroom at a Time Initiative. Our district made the switch to Google Apps for Education in the middle of the 2008-2009 school year during the winter holiday. We haven't looked back since, and that one singular move has allowed us to implement a 1:1 initiative today. In fact, moving to Google Apps for Education has made us (the leadership team) look a lot smarter than we actually are!

Our district, like many school districts, has a small staff. We have one technician, +Les Petrarca , that handles all of our machine break/fix helpdesk tickets, and production rollouts. Lester had the help of many teachers, custodians, secretaries and administrators across the district that rolled up their sleeves and helped us get machines into production within the first two weeks of school. Lester and custodians at the middle school delivered shiny Acer 720 Chromebooks still in the boxes to close to 50 classrooms. Teachers guided students in unboxing the units, and enrolling the devices in our GAFE environment. Part of the process for students was to place 3 labels containing their email address, and their student ID (part of their password) on their Chromebook, and AC adapter. 

+Philip Solomon, WWHS Principal, and +Rosemary Sanborn, WWHS secretary, were responsible in getting almost a 1000 units into the hands of our high school students. We employed the same process of dropping off a classroom set of Chromebooks still in boxes in our third and fourth grade classrooms across 3 elementary schools. Like the teachers at the middle school, these teachers guided their students in the enrollment process. Remarkably we only had less than 50 units that weren't enrolled properly. That's a 98% success rate with little more than a set of screenshot directions to guide the teachers, and students in the enrollment process. That statistic alone illustrates how friendly the Chromebook environment is for K-12 environments.

Getting the Chromebooks out to our K-2 students has been a much slower process. Lester unboxes each machine, removes all of the packing materials, places one sticker adjacent to the trackpad (for student reference), one sticker on the outside cover, and logs each student username and password into the Chromebook. This process allows each of our K-2 students to just enter their password to access their Chromebook. We've had a lot of success using this method, and even our kindergartners can handle it independently after the second or third logon. 

Eliminating our Windows XP Machines 

Our district was supporting close to 1400 Windows XP machines across the district. During the summer we pulled all of those machines out of production due to security issues with XP. We were able to salvage approximately 200 machines to upgrade to Windows 7. We populated our computer labs at WWHS, and we are in the process of swapping out our secretarial staff with Windows 7 machines. On the first day of school for our staff we handed out Chromebooks to our teachers, and explained the elimination of our Windows environment. Yanking our Windows machines from production has had the most tremendous impact on accelerating the growth of our teachers. Across the district our teachers and their students are teaching each other about the functionality of their Chromebooks and the Chrome OS. They inspire me! It is truly exciting to see everyone so alive with learning. Our staff and students have embraced this idea that we are a community of learners, and we can support each other as we grow into the technology. Leaders across the district are still emerging as we enter into our second month with Chromebooks. Now that we are finished with the rollout we can dedicate more of our efforts on pedagogy. I must say that our district has been using GAFE for years, and our teachers use these tools during professional development opportunities and weekly common planning time. This has helped ease the transition to a completely Chromebook environment. 

Professional Development

Our district is fortunate to have our professional development and curriculum staff integrated with our technology staff. Our district coaches are well versed in all of our technology initiatives (GAFE & Aspen), and they provide our teachers with a lot of "just in time" learning opportunities. They always use GAFE and Aspen tools integrated into their PD efforts. In addition to our PD staff our district was able to run several sessions of GAFE workshops this summer for our district and other districts in the state of Rhode Island. These workshops were facilitated by our teachers and administrators, and this helped us build our internal capacity to support our staff and students. In the next couple of weeks we will be announcing a series of district sponsored Unconferences for our staff. We've had great success with this format, and we'll keep you posted as to our progress.

Anecdotal Evidence & The Weeks Ahead

It is remarkable to see how this simple technology has created a buzz and spark in our schools. When I walk through the hallways in our schools I see students and teachers huddled around their Chromebooks together. I'm thrilled because they are not just working on fluency activities, and locked onto their own screens. They are actually building content together, and the rooms are alive with conversation. Students and their teachers are milling around the classrooms with a sense of purpose that is inspiring. I've had teachers across the middle school and high school tell me that they've already committed their classrooms to be paperless. We have some first & second grade teachers like, +Sandra Cappelli & +Alicia Sullivan , blogging about their classroom exploits. I can't wait to use the next couple of weeks to show some video clips of our classrooms in action. I'm invigorated by the learning buzz that's palpable in the buildings across the district. I can't wait to share the phenomenal learning that's taking place in our classrooms. I'm hopeful to have a few of our teachers and students serve as guest bloggers, and provide their first hand experience as we continue our 1:1 Chromebook adventure.