Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Help us Google Chromebooks, you're our only hope!

In my school district, Chromebooks have become the new iPad. They're the hottest item with our teachers and our students are learning to rely on the web-based apps for their daily classroom experiences. It's really exciting!  Where we're starting to see the most overwhelming teacher response is on our elementary campuses.  Principals are buying up Chromebooks for their classrooms because of their gift-of-a-price and because they're easily managed by their staff (<---as many of you know, Chromebooks need virtually no maintenance from the user's end), so I had to come up with a face-to-face training that helped our teachers shift from using the traditional PC to a Chromebook, which is sometimes quite a departure.
The biggest obstacle for most teachers, and I suspect it will be for elementary students, is the dual-finger click which replaces the "right click".  Just remember, use your fingertips and not the pads of your digits. That's the way to practice! Check out the training notes I created and shared with teachers after our initial face-to-face meetings last week (see below).

I am so excited about this implementation in my district. Technology is imperfect and no device can be 100% inclusive of our needs: devices with "everything" are generally so cost prohibitive they become useless to us and devices in our price range generally have gaps in the laundry list of functions they need to be able to do. Chromebooks are going to help us transition onward and upward!