Week 8
Chromebook Unit of Work

This week the Year 4 students will be involved in a unit of work that involves Chromebooks and using their Google Drive. Students will work independently through a variety of activities where they have to plan their day and share their documents with the Year Four teachers and their peers.
Last Friday Lisa and Jo worked with the Year Four students on 3D printing. Students watched as Kieran demonstrated the endless possibilities when printing in 3D. This week the students will begin to design an object they believe will 'change' their life.
The students have been exploring change this term. Changes in the environment, technology, migration and food chains. This independent work will enable students to develop their collaboration and time management skills. We look forward to sharing our work on the BLOG.

Discovering the Chromebook Lesson

Last weeks lesson at St Aidan's Rooty Hill was around discovering the Chromebook.

The lesson was for 60 minutes. Students were asked to create a Google Doc and in groups research the features of the Chromebook. They will be using Google Drive, Docs, Blogger and Google Forms and accessing the Drive App and the camera on the Chromebook.

The Task:
Each group will research the features of the Chromebook and include the images from the internet and a group photo with the Chromebook.  The group will provide an explanation on the differences between a laptop and Chromebook and blog their first impressions of their time with the Chromebook.

Students were given access to this handout:  (Click on the image to view the document)

 

Students using the Chromebooks for the task, collaborating on the document and using Apps like th photo App.

On Friday we had an introductory session with the students. This progressed well with a few issues.

Some of the things we did before the session follow:

• ensured that all chromebooks were charged
• checked student logins - we realised that the students need to know their email address to login to the chrome books. As the email addresses have a set format i.e. user id followed by @ parrastu...., it was straightforward to have the students work out their email. Once this was done the students were able to login.
• We had some students who had not used the user id for a while, so their password had to be reset. Once passwords are reset takes at least 12hours before Google Apps can be accessed.
• Our students from year three up all have their own passwords, so it is important that students create passwords that they will remember.

The session began well, the students seemed to be able to complete the tasks without too much assistance.

We found that the 30 chromebooks on the go at once, as well as other devices, it seemed to have caused the chromebooks to lag a little especially when sharing documents.

This will be something we will monitor to see it was a one session problem or an ongoing one.

A great session.

Chromebook trial at St Aidans

St Aidan's at Rooty Hill are the first school in the Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta to trial a set of chromebooks with students and staff.

St Aidan's were provided with 30 Chromebooks for students and 5 Chromebooks for staff.  Students and teachers from Year 4 will trial the Chromebooks over the next two terms.  There are approximately 50 students in Year 4.

The Chromebooks have been enrolled in the Chromebook Management Console by the CEDP ICT team and the Google set of K-6 Apps have been pushed out to the Chromebooks.


Last week the Chromebooks were delivered to the school and Learning Exchange spent some time with staff to briefly introduce them to the Chromebook.  We covered:

• What is a Chromebook?
• Uses in Education
• Navigating the Chromebook

The students and teachers will be exploring the use of Google Apps and Chromebooks Apps via the Chromebook.  Teachers at St Aidan's recently attended a Google Apps Bootcamp to equip their school in the use of this cloud based virtual learning environment.

Both students and teachers will be expected to blog at least once a week about their learning and experiences in using the Chromebook.