The Chromebook 1:1 Pilot Begins!

In the spring of 2015 we decided to pilot a 1:1 Chromebook program with one of Patton's 6th grade teams with the goals of increased opportunities for collaboration, communication and creativity,  increased student engagement in a personalized learning environment, increased use of technology to enhance teacher instruction, and improved access to both teacher content and robust internet

resources to foster acquisition of knowledge and skills.

We chose the Chromebook for many reasons.  Over the past two years, we have found that the teachers and students preferred the Chromebook over other devices we have to offer at school based on usage patterns of the different devices and informal polling of classes.  Since our School District uses Google as a platform for communication and workflow, Chromebooks fit seamlessly into our instructional environment.  Our students have gmail accounts and have received instruction on how to effectively use their gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, and other Google applications as a part of our sixth grade computer course curriculum.

We selected a 6th grade team because it is one of the grades where we have mostly pure teams.  This means that the majority of their classes are taught by the same group of teachers.  This allows us to capture more reliable data regarding the integration and impact of introducing a device to their daily environment at school. Additionally, our sixth graders have a computer course and a digital citizenship course through their special areas offerings to help support our teachers and students to appropriately and effectively use these devices for education and learning.

We will be collecting data on how the Chromebook impacts the learning environment for the students and the instruction provided by the teachers.  We will be collecting data from all stakeholders to make recommendations to the Board to guide our vision for technology integration for the 2016-2017 school year and beyond.

We look forward to telling you more about this pilot in the coming weeks!