What students think of the 1:1 chromebook roll out in Council Bluffs, Iowa

As part of our district’s 1:1 study, we recently sent a team to visit the 1:1 roll out at Council Bluffs School District in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The visit included a lot of opportunity for student interaction such as a student panel discussion, tours led by students, and opportunities to talk with students in classrooms.   Here are some of the most frequent comments we heard from students….

1. I am so much better organized, I take better notes, I keep better track of my assignments. I don’t lose things like I did before.

2. Collaborations is so much easier now.

3. Teachers are more accessible – and the learning is much more personalized

4. Revision history in Google Docs is HUGE. Students felt that collaborative projects can truly take place with revision history because the entire team can CLEARLY see what each member of the team has done.  This impacts group work and collaborative projects, as many students commented that they used to hate group projects, but that it’s different now due to revision history.

5. Student commented that they receive more immediate feedback, which they felt was important and is so much easier when its done electronically.

6.  Student response:  “I get a lot more feedback on my writing. Teachers highlight the section in question and provide feedback… it’s so easy to see what they think and it helps guide me. In addition, there are a lot of papers where I get clear feedback from other students as well as the teacher.”

7.  Their biggest frustration….  occasional issues with connecting to the Internet.

8. What if you go home and you don’t have Internet access? What good is the Chromebook then?  Response:  We use the many offline features -so we are still able to access our Google Docs and Slides to be able to continue our work even without Internet access.

9. We love that we can close the lid on the Chromebook, and when we open it back up, it turns back on quickly and easily – so no time is wasted.

10. If you could change anything about the Chromebook, what would you change?  #1 response:  ability to download iTunes.

 

Also visit:  My notes from visiting 1:1 Chromebooks at Council Bluffs Schools

 

Changes to Infinite Campus Messenger

For our school offices…

Over spring break, an update to Infinite Campus has provided some enhancements and changes to how our school offices will use messenger to deliver notifications to parents and students.

For parents:  The only change is that you will now see an occasional attachment included with the messages that come from offices and/or teachers.  Otherwise, there will be no change from the parent view.

For school offices that send out notifications via Infinite Campus, there are two changes…

1) A messenger can now be composed and sent all from one single screen.

2) One attachment can now be included with each message. 

NOTICE about attachments:  You can only attach one file per email.  Also, please understand that attached files can cause problems with email delivery.  Please be aware of the size of the attached file’s size.  Large attachments may not be accepted by the recipient’s email server.  Some servers will also reject email with certain types of attachments(.exe .zip).  Typically, PDF and MS Office type files are pretty safe however.

Messenger best practices:   While copying and pasting text from Word is quick, it creates a lot of unexpected results (strange characters, etc…) that can really muddle up the message.  So, it is much safer to compose the message within the message builder tool.  If this is not feasible, here are a few characters that should be manually deleted in Message Builder and retyped manually: quotes, apostrophes, long dashes,  or anything else that Word might auto-change/format.

Please also remember that all Messenger emails are “from” a generic email address and not your personal address.  So, be sure to identify who you are early in the message otherwise parents and students may not know who the message is from.