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Using Aspen to Run a 1:1 Chromebook Initiative

Using Aspen to Run a 1:1 Chromebook Initiative: How We Saved Ourselves and Possibly the World!

Post One: What's the Big Deal?

The West Warwick Public Schools started our 1:1 Chromebook initiative in the spring of 2012-2013 school year. We outfitted a single kindergarten classroom with 25 Chromebooks that they brought back and forth to school each day. In the next school year we outfitted an entire K-4 elementary school with over 400 units, and our district was off and running. In addition to the one school we added close to 800 units across the district in individual classrooms. We called our initiative, "One to One, One Classroom at a Time". The plan was to use the next couple of years to ramp-up the rest of our students using the one classroom at a time model. Early on the school committee, building level administrators, and central office staff felt a lot of pressure to really get things moving. In September of 2014, the West Warwick School Committee, decided to go all in, and everyone of our K-12 students, and staff received a Chromebook. In two short years our district achieved our goal of providing a Chromebook to each of our students.

Our First Shipment!
Our district was very purposeful in thinking about our vision behind our "1:1 -  One Classroom at a Time" initiative. We wanted to keep our work centered on what we could do versus getting stuff, and I believe our thoughtful work initially allowed us to move so swiftly when the opportunity arose. Our district always centered our work around the idea that these tools should allow us to communicate, collaborate and create content together. This vision always kept us focused on what teachers and students could be doing versus just dealing with the logistics. In fact, we never let logic get in our way!😅

We were fortunate because we had some important structures in place that allowed us to focus our energies in the right places. Our district already had a staff that was accustomed to using technology to support their work. Our district's professional development team used the collaborative tools in G Suite to support our work. We also expected teachers and administrators to use technology tools to support our work together. Lastly our district was a heavy user of Follett's Aspen as our Information Management System (IMS).

End-users in our district have been using Aspen to submit helpdesk tickets since day one in the system over seven years ago. Our ability to use Aspen and Pando as our helpdesk ticketing system means that we have a strong tool to help manage our 1:1 Chromebook initiative. We can spend our time supporting teachers and students to reach our vision of communicating, collaborating, and creating content. In fact, it allows our students and teachers to have moonshot ideas such as Austin Laramee's Computing for a Cure initiative.



Austin wanted to use our older decommissioned hardware to create a computing grid that would be used by the Stanford University researchers. Austin setup older laptops, servers and older Chromebooks to be used by Stanford researchers to crunch cancer and Alzheimer's data.  During the summer months of 2016 scientists around the world analyzed over 3.8 million files using the grid computing network created by Austin and his peers. Using Follett's Aspen and Pando tandem allows district personnel the ability to support moonshot thinking versus being caught in the weeds.

Future posts of this blog will provide step-by-step directions in how we utilize Pando and Aspen to help manage our 1:1 Chromebook initiative.

Take a look at this Google Slide Deck to get an overview of each of the topics that will be covered in this blog.


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