The Chromebooks Have Arrived!

My students and I are so excited to announce that our new Chromebooks have officially arrived!  As I predicted, they were dropped off after a long day of testing, which just added to the excitement.

We got to work right away pulling the boxes open, getting the cords separated, and organizing the devices so that we could set-up the cart.  I am lucky enough to be at a school that really supports and understands teachers, so they supplemented our funded projected by providing a cart for the Chomebooks.  But I have to be honest, I did not anticipate how much work it would be set it up!

I am also fortunate enough to have a very loving husband (what is also a technologist) and was willing to give up his Sunday to help me get the cart and devices ready for student use.  So we set to work last weekend and our computers are now safely housed in a neat, organized, and fully functioning home.

The next step is automatically or manually enrolling each device so that they are linked to our schools Google Apps for Education account.  I was able to manually enroll two older devices I had previous to this project, but was unsuccessful in automatically enrolling the new Chromebooks.  My plan was to work on it this afternoon, but our school's server went down (go figure) around 3pm, so it looks like that will have to wait until tomorrow.

With state testing taking place this week, I have a little time to finish getting everything in order before we jump into Google-land and using the Chromebooks, but I can not wait and my students are equally as excited.  I plan on setting up some basic tutorial lessons for both our students and staff, since most of them will be using the Chromebooks and Google Apps for the first time.  Since the majority use Gmail already, it should not be a difficult transition.

I hope to use this space to document the use of the Chromebooks in my classroom, as well as offer and receive feedback from other schools and educators using these devices in innovative ways.  Please feel free to contact me or comment if you have suggestions or want more information about our Chromebook Project!

Getting Started :: A New Blog

It has been a goal of mine to start a professional blog for a while now.  Anyone that teaches knows that there isn't much time in the day to accomplish all the "other stuff" we want to do, and blogging has seemed like a pipe-dream for me.  But, I got some amazing news the other day and it forced me to make time to create this blog and to get started.

I found out earlier this week that I will be receiving 25 Chromebook computers to use with my 7th and 8th grade students.  They will belong to us and live in our classroom.

This is huge.

Let me give a little background about the journey I have been on over the last six months and how this amazing opportunity to get these resources came to be.  Over the summer I was fortunate enough to become an EdTech Fellow and "work" for the Digital Harbor Foundation, which is a new non-profit located in Baltimore City, Maryland.  I say work in quotation marks because it was the greatest career experience I have ever had and rarely felt like work.  I traveled to ISTE in San Diego, learned how to build websites and mobile apps, explored curriculum and instruction, along with gaining an incredible network of people from all around the world.

EdTech Fellows at ISTE 2012

Among all of these experiences that came with participating in this fellowship, my beliefs and personal goals as an educator were completely transformed.  I began to look at myself, my instruction, and my students through a very different lens, understanding for the first time what education for my students must be like in order for them to succeed.

To make a long story short, I knew my students needed to have meaningful, collaborative experiences in my classroom, and I made it my mission to gain the resources we would need to make these experiences authentic and relevant to their lives and their future.  Here came the conflict-- I teach in urban Baltimore, where the public school's technology infrastructure relies on carbon copy receipts and mysterious people in the central office hold complete control of Internet access.

I started small, getting two Chromebooks from DonorsChoose, and relying on the donations and support from people outside of the public school system.  I was hoping we could have more access to resources, but in the mean time I began doing some amazing things with my students (I will touch on this in future blog posts), and we were making due with the laptops my school has for student use and our two new computers.

Students thanking our donors

In December, DonorsChoose offered Chromebooks for $99.  Wow, cheap, right?! Even more amazing, they were allowing teachers to request up to 30 in one project.  My tweet deck was bombarded with people form my network that knew this was something I would love to take advantage of.  I decided to request 25, as I did not want to seem greedy, even though I am really skeptical about the chances of this project ever getting funded.  But I figured, what's the worst that could happen?

Within one week the project was more than halfway funded.  I was floored.  People i knew personally, colleagues, business people and venture capitalists that never met me, all donated to our project.  And last week, it was funded.

So, what does this really mean for me and my students?  Does this really change anything for them other than a device they can use to find stuff and type stuff?    As a teacher, what are my new responsibilities given these resources?

To just scratch the surface, I believe that these resources do something extremely important for my students in terms of access and education.  My students live in zip codes from all over Baltimore City, and 89% of them live below the poverty line.  They will be given a chance to access and learn with the same resources as students from the best private schools in the state.  My students, attending a urban public school, will be able to connect globally with students and experts from South America and Norway.  They will be able to blog and have their voices heard around the world.  My urban students will take part in closing the digital divide that is astoundingly oppressive in Baltimore City Public Schools.

In ending this ridiculously long blog post, I just want to express my excitement and gratitude for being able to offer my students this amazing opportunity to stop "learning" and start experiencing and creating.  I will be posting the ongoing journey on this blog, so check back to see what's happening!