By Ashley McLeod, Staff writer
Mar 30, 2016, 13:39
COLONIAL HEIGHTS — After initiating a pilot program with seniors at Colonial Heights High School, the school will now push forward and increase the use of school-provided Chromebooks for student use.
The program will move forward following the School Board’s approval of the FY 2017 budget, which included an expansion of the Chromebook program.
The Chromebooks are a simplified version of a laptop, and contain no software, but are solely used for Internet browsing.
Last summer, the school system purchased a total of 100 Chromebooks for student use and distributed some of the computers to a small group of students at the high school.
The pilot program gave the school system an opportunity to test out the products and get feedback from the students on how the computers fit into their schooling.
At the beginning of the spring semester, the rest of the laptops were distributed throughout the senior class.
“I wish I would’ve had Chromebooks all of high school,” said Hank Rosser, the student representative at the March 22 School Board meeting. Rosser was among the small group of students to receive Chromebooks in the fall.
Rosser said he liked having the Chromebook available, because using a computer for assignments and other work, as opposed to using pen and paper and flash drives, is one of the things he’s looking forward to heading into college.
The computers give students access to several applications used by Google, including Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Hangout. The different applications gave students easier access to assignments, as well as an easier path of communication between teachers as well as other students.
“They’re utilizing a lot of different aspects of Google apps that students would have not found on their own,” said Tim Tillman, the Director of Technology and Learning for Colonial Heights Public Schools.
“We gave all of our faculty and students the ability to have this wonderful new set of apps that they could use to collaborate with each other, so that they could use the same tools at home that they use at school, and so that they could really start using the same tools that they would end up using in college and a lot of businesses as well,” said Tillman.
Following the initial usage of the Chromebooks, the department surveyed the students to find out what they thought about using them. 73 percent of the students said that they felt more engaged with the curriculum than they would have been without using the Chromebooks, and most students were highly satisfied.
But some students felt the Chromebooks were distracting, both to themselves and other students. Also, some students complained that the filter for blocking sites was sometimes too strict, and blocked too many sites.
Tillman said that one of the biggest challenges with this program was figuring out the level of content to be filtered on the Chromebooks.
Overall, both teachers and students were happy with using Google and the Chromebooks to better their system of education.
“The teachers who are using this, that are really exposed to having Chromebooks in the classroom, are loving this,” said Tillman.
Following the expansion of the program, the technology department hopes to put
Chromebooks into the hands of all English students, beginning with seniors, and working their way down. The department is also researching mobile Chromebook labs for both the middle and high school, as well as replacing entire computer labs with Chromebooks, which Tillman said would cost half as much as replacing the old desktop computers with new desktops.
