Monday, January 23, 2012

Getting started with our Google Chromebooks

Our school recently purchased 30 Google Chromebooks.  I have set them up and enrolled them, which was very easy.  We plan to put 25 of them on a cart for and make them available for teachers to check out.  We are still waiting on the cart, but my Google rep has assured me that it is coming soon.  I am also waiting for Google Accounts to be set up for students.  There are some issues with Postini that need to be resolved before the accounts can be set up.


But in the mean time, they have been used a little bit.  The students really like them, and it is amazing how quickly they boot up. A 4th grade class used them to collaborate on Google Presentations.  Because they don't have Google Accounts, I created the presentations, then made them so that anyone with the link can edit.  Then I put the links on our website.  Unfortunately we had some problems with this.  For whatever reason, we were having connections errors, and it was very hard for them to edit.  Also anonymous users could not add images to the presentations.  The option did not appear in the menus.  (To troubleshoot, we had the students try editing in on windows based machines in a lab, and we had the exact same issues.)  So fortunately, this is not a Chromebook issue, it is a Google Docs issue.


Most issues were resolved by having the teacher and I log into all of the machines.  Hopefully we will get those Google Accounts soon.



No comments:

Post a Comment