C(hr)ome Explore 64 Pickup

This year our school district is going 1:1 with Chromebooks! (I'm just a little excited.) There has been a lot of work put in to prepare the students, teachers, administrators, community, and our network over the past several years. And this past week all of that hard work came to fruition, we had our first two nights of Chromebook pickup for the two middle schools. We'll have another two nights this coming week for the rest of our middle schoolers to get their Chromebooks, and the elementary students will have a device on their desk when they walk in the first day of school. The pick up nights went so smoothly, I just wanted to share some of the things that made it so successful.

Over the summer the instructional technology coaches met and created a video that outlined the 1:1 for students and their families. It explained why the district chose to go 1:1, what they could expect it to look like, and what was expected of them. (Shoutout to +Caroline Schaab for pulling everything together!) After families watched the short video they completed a Google Form to show that they understood the key points from the video. Although there were several communications with the community prior to this video about our 1:1 initiative, having families complete this together and fill out the form helped. Also, before they arrived at the pickup they were supposed to pay the $30 maintenance fee and sign the Chromebook Pledge. They were to bring a printout of the form submission, Chromebook Pledge, and the receipt.

The day of the event there was setup into several different stations: Check-in, Device Pickup, Chrome Island, Chrome Depot, and Video/Payment. Each station was manned by district administrators, teachers, staff, and PTO parents wearing the color of that station.

At Check-in families handed in their paper work that they were to complete at home which was then stapled to a Explorer Checklist. At that point if a family was missing any of the paperwork they were directed to the Video/Payment station, which was in the computer lab, to complete the missing piece.

Once their checklist was complete they went to the Device Pickup station. All of the devices had already been enrolled in our domain and tagged with district asset tags and name labels. (Shoutout to our technology department and the building technologist for all of their hard work on this!) Families presented their completed checklist and a runner would go back and find the box that was labeled for the student and their case.

After getting their device and case they came over to Chrome Island where teachers, librarians, and instructional tech coaches were there to help them unbox, login, share information, and answer questions. There were technologists and our network manager at the Chrome Depot to assist with any problems. and After the students had logged in and accepted the Securly filtering we again shared the expectations and discussed things like tagging their cases among other things and answered any questions. The last thing that they received was a Chrome Explore 64 Treasure Map. All said and done it took families about 15 minutes to get through all of the stations, and everyone left excited!

As you might have noticed our theme for this year is C(hr)ome Explore 64! We are recognizing that this year is a year for growth and exploration of the opportunities that having these devices in our classrooms will create. We have laid a lot of groundwork to make this year successful and I am very excited to see all the awesome things that our students and teachers will do with this new tool in their toolbox!