I recently started my adventure in piloting a 1:1 classroom for my district with touch screen Chromebooks.  Within this pilot, I will also be working with Canvas which is a learning management system.  My techie heart is overflowing with excitement!

Part of my work with my district’s 1:1 team is compel quantitative and qualitative data to in a presentation to our Board of Education.  I thought this blog would be a great way to capture my journey and reflections in hopes to help others and perhaps learn myself.

Day One
My cart of 30 devices arrived on Wednesday, February 3 at the end of the day.  Wanting to ride the excitement train of my students, I did something very unStefanie like.  I decided to take a risk and just go for it! That next day my students were able to get their hands on their device.  Since I teach 2^nd grade, I wanted to spend that first day creating our Chromebook expectations:

We had great discussions and worked out a few logistics.  Afterwards, I had each students sign a copy of the expectations.  One copy hangs in our classroom, another copy was sent home to all families, and one was posted on my classroom blog as reference.

I then wanted to put the devices in their hands so I opened up the cart (before it was labeled and numbered), and passed out devices.  Upon further reflection I wish I would have labeled everything before that first use.  I also wish I had remembered they had to log on for the first time.  This meant they had to type in their district email address and password which was over 20 characters.  This was also the first time any of them had seen this information.  After they typed it all in, there was a mini lesson on how usernames and passwords must be spelled and typed exactly right.  It then prompted students to reset their password.  On the fly I was able to come up with one but I wish I had thought that through a bit more.

That first day of devices was probably 20 minutes for expectations and 30 minutes for logging in.  I feel now that I have things in place that time could be cut down.

Immediately after students went home I proceeded to label my cart.  I placed signs on the outside to help differentiate my cart from some of our whole school carts.  I then took masking tape and numbered all the slots and cords for each device.  I am huge fan of color coding and class number systems.  Every student in my class has a number and that number corresponds to the number that is on their device.  It is also color coded.  Even numbers are blue and odd numbers are red.  Each device also has a number on it (made with label maker).  Now my cart is set up to where students place their numbered device in corresponding slot making sure to plug it in with their numbered cord.

I can’t even begin to tell you the difference this made in students getting and putting away the devices!

Day Two
I wanted students to be able to find my Symbaloo: http://sososeussey.edublogs.org/1-fish-2-fish-seussville-tech-fish/

A Symbaloo is a collection of websites where instead of typing a web address, students merely click on the tile and are taken directly to the site.  I highly recommend making one of these.  Not only does it save time with typing in web addresses and help younger students, but it organizes your resources in a neat way. Symbloo even has a collection of Symbaloos for you to search for.  I was able to find other premade Symbaloos for students who use Chromebooks and came up with even more tiles to add to my own. Be sure to check out the Symbaloo website: https://www.symbaloo.com/home/mix/13eOcK1fiV

It probably took me 4-5 hours over a 3 day span to create my current one.  A big part of this though is my need to want everything to be visually appealing.  I wanted the perfect photo to represent each site.  Symbaloo will generate one for you that sometimes worked but sometimes I felt it didn’t provide my students with enough information to know what site that tile was.

Now came the task of teaching students how to access and use it.  In order to do this, students needed to be able to access my blog.  I wanted to show them the longest way to find it in Google Chrome so that if a problem ever arose, they would be able to figure it out independently.  Students were the ones that discovered shortcuts that I didn’t even think of or realize.  It is now a competition to see who can get to the Symbaloo the fastest!  I used the gradual release of responsibility to ensure they would be able to find this independently.  Part of their homework that night was then to teach their parents.

After explaining how to find the Symbaloo, I explained the websites that were available and stressed the importance of digital citizenship.  I especially stressed this with our class YouTube page.  I have a classroom YouTube page with playlists that provide students learning videos to refer back to.  We discussed how randomly traveling throughout YouTube requires more skills and safety considerations that I plan on embedding in my future lessons. I then allowed students to explore the different tiles.

This lesson probably was about 40 minutes and took the place of my JAM session (journaling about math).  My schedule on Friday’s allows for about 40 minutes of this time which worked out perfectly.  It really opened my eyes though to how this time needs to be restructured to revolve around 1:1 activities.

Phew! The first 2 days already had me feeling excited, overwhelmed, proud, and frustrated.  The key I realized right away is the amount of patient that will be required when this is first rolled out.  As with anything new though, after practice and tweaking, things such as logging in won’t seem as daunting.

Please follow our journey on Twitter:
@PitzersLearners
#2Pis1to1

Here’s to the adventure!