Going 1:1... and not going gray! The Roll out

Our chromebooks arrived really late.  Three days before schools started, to be honest.  There was no way we were going to get the 900 chromebooks unboxed, taken out of the plastic, scanned into google's management system, organized and to the schools without some help.

Help came in the form of our amazing admin team.  Elementary, Junior High, High School, Alt Ed, and District office all came together for 7 hours and unboxed, took out of the plastic, tagged and loaded into the management system 700 chromebooks.  As you can see, we even made 4 years help us!

There was no way we could have done this without the help of Ron Everett, Steve Bolman, Mila Kell,   Deb Richardson, Fran Hansel, Linda Scheele, Bennett Holley, Becky Lofton, Sheila Garvey, Catina Haugen, Amy Fadeji, Emily Kleinholz, Ashley Williams, and Nancy Emanuale.

Then it was time to roll out the chromebooks to the kids.  It took us 2 days to organize 476 chromebooks. The first day was spent organizing the chromebooks into classes (they arrived not sorted).  This took 3 people to complete.  The second day was checking to see who had not attended a chromebook orientation meeting and marking those chromebooks.  Students did not receive their chromebook until they attended. (My last 2 chromebook meetings were packed!) The last step was putting the chromebooks into the cases and putting labels on the cases.  We did all hands on deck for this part.  We had 3 hours and 8 people working on this.  We hit the target.  At 3pm on Friday we were done.  Roll out started Monday at 8:30am.

During the actual roll out, our Assistant Principal, Mr. Holley, addressed the students.  He reminded them of the rules about the chromebook, where you could use them, to charge them, and to be careful.  Then students were taken into a classroom where we passed out the chromebook.  We made sure every student could log into their account and wrote their email address and password on a piece of paper  with also had the chromebook rules on it. They left ready to go!  Four months into the process and the kiddos finally have the chromebooks.

The "we" is the PCS 1:1 team of +ReneeSemik (@ReneeKSemik),  +LoriDeen (@lorideen), +JaneEscobedo (@jescobedo101) and me (Emily Dunnagan).

Going 1:1...and not going gray! Preplanning

This year my 8th graders are piloting 1:1 for the district.  It is a very exciting, innovative, and stressful time in my career.  I spent the summer learning and planning with my co-planners (Thanks +Renee Semik (@ReneeKSemik) , +Lori Deen (@lorideen) and +Jane Escobedo (@jescobedo101) .  (See summer posts).  We decided that one of the first things we needed to do communicated with the parents.

In July, we created a parent orientation.  The team felt we needed parents to understand the cost and the value (both educationally and monetarily) so that they would help their student be more responsible. We planned to pass out the chromebooks at orientation.  In August, we scheduled 5 or 6 parent orientationshoping that the Chromebook would be like a "Carrot" and get people to come.  Well, the chromebooks were late, really late. So late, that we passed them out the second week of school.  No chromebooks, no carrot.  Therefore, we needed way more than 6 or 7 meetings.  Personally, I did 20 chromebook orientations to get all 476 parents and students to attend them.

Each parent meeting was about 90 minutes of my time.  Between setting up, greeting parents and students, presenting, answering questions and collecting the technology donation, that was 1800 minutes or 30 hours.  Plus, I needed a Spanish translator at all trainings and someone to help me collect the monies.  (The technology donation is their insurance for first lost or broken chromebook).

Parents truly appreciated hearing why we were going 1:1 and how it was to help their student.  In fact, I only had 1 student's parent out of my 476 students say their student could not bring home the Chromebook and asked for it to stay at school.  I made sure they had access at home and accommodated this.  I was impressed that the other 99% were on board to this "new" thing for our area.


So far, so good.

The "we" is the PCS 1:1 team of +Renee Semik (@ReneeKSemik), +Lori Deen (@lorideen), +Jane Escobedo (@jescobedo101) and me (Emily Dunnagan).