New Technology at Summitt

New Chromebooks at Summitt!

You may have heard already… Summitt received 200 Chromebooks and 50 Dell Latitudes as part of the 2013 Technology Bond!  We also purchased a few iPads that will be in the Lifeskills/PPCD classrooms, and 70 Samsung Tablets that will go to our Prek, Kinder, and 1st grade teams. We are hopeful that these will arrive soon.  All schools had a small collection of mobile devices to choose from.  Summitt decided to go big with Chromebooks for several reasons:

• Chromebooks are inexpensive, allowing a higher number of devices to be purchased
• they are significantly easier to manage and require minimal support
• Chromebooks provide single sign-on access to Google Apps for Education making their account easier to access and more secure
• several classes became early adopters of Google Apps this year (Lamon/Willett’s 4th graders and Le/DaMommio’s 5th graders) and had lots of success
• Murchison and Anderson both chose Chromebooks as well which means our students will be using this technology for years to come.

Our students will consistently use Google Apps for Education (GAFE) through AISD’s network from now until the day they graduate from AISD.  Google Apps for Education includes Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Drive, Gmail, Classroom, etc. etc.   Students in all of our 3rd-5th grade classrooms have been trained on how to sign on and operate the new chromebooks.  We have also discussed how their conduct using this account must follow AISD policy (whether at school or home).  A few things to know about this new method:

1. This is cloud computing.  When students sign in they are accessing remote servers where all of their content is automatically stored.  This means that students can access their work from anywhere in the world and from any type of computer device.  This saves paper/ink and makes it easy to keep all of their work from 3rd grade to 12th.
2. In order to sign in to the chromebooks students use an AISD email account that is issued to them when they enter the district.  This email account can not receive or send email until that student begins middle school; it only allows access to the other GAFE features.
3. The activities that students engage in online using this account must be in accordance with AISD’s Acceptable Use Policy.  Visit AISD’s Cyber Safety page for more information about this.  This was discussed with all of the classes during training.
4. There are two ways to sign in from home:
1. Using any browser, sign in to the AISD cloud portal using their district student ID and password.  Your students have been doing it this way before the Chromebooks arrived.
2. Sign in to the Chrome browser using their AISD email address (e.g. firstname.lastnameXYZ@stu.austinisd.org) and password.  This is the user/password that they use on the Chromebooks.

5. If you have a gmail account and your student signs in to Chrome to access their account you will want to keep your data easily separated from your child’s.  This is a quick 2 minute video that will show you how to do this.  There are other, longer videos on Youtube that explain this in further detail.  What is important to remember is that if you do choose to have several users signed into Chrome it is a good habit to always sign out when you are done.
6. The student default password follows this formula: Capitalized Last Initial, birthday MM-DD-YY, followed by lowercase ‘s’.  We do not recommend elementary students changing their password unless they do it from home with a parent/adult. The student should give this password to someone to keep safe in case it is forgotten. Since this is easy for older students to figure out once they know each other’s birthdays it is highly suggested that middle and high school students change their password.  Make sure it is something that they can easily remember.

Moving our students into using new software and then introducing new hardware was not a light task.  This was a transitional year that involved a lot of learning and training school-wide.  From next year forward, all of our 3rd, 4th and 5th grade classes will use Cloud/GAFE accounts. We will look at introducing these concepts to our 2nd grade classes, possibly mid-year, after 3rd grade is trained and proficient with Google Docs. Many thanks to all of our teachers for their hard work and enthusiasm this year.

For more information contact Barbara Neill if you have any questions.

Get Your Google Going!

This summer, when I'm not out fishing, I have been researching, and learning a lot about Google. This blog will be dedicated to All Things Google.

I have met some wonderful teachers who are creating and sharing very cool information. Today I came across a link to Alice Keeler's blog ,she is a serious Google tech. One of the activities she created and shared is called Gamify Searching Google Drive , it is a great exercise for learning how to navigate your Google docs. 

Another person that I have learned a lot from, Bob Petitto,  shared his activity to help teachers learn some tricks about Google Chrome, 30-day chrome challenge for staff.




I will share what I find, hopefully you will find this information helpful.