Bridgeport Public Schools chooses Google for Education to bring affordable technology to their students
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Editor’s note: faculties bought quite one million Chromebooks within the second quarter of 2014. Today’s guest blogger, David Andrade, the CIO for the Bridgeport Public faculties district, that serves twenty three,000 students in Connecticut, shares why they chose Chromebooks. Learn additional concerning going Google and follow our Google for Education Google+ page to examine a variety of tips from David.
When I started my role as CIO a year and a half ago, I found that our technology wasn’t up to scratch to fulfill the requirements of our students. we have a tendency to solely had many desktop PCs placed in every elementary and lyceum room, and solely many in our high school laptop labs. we have a tendency to positively required additional machines thus students would get longer to figure on category comes and do analysis.
Our district doesn’t have plenty of cash for purchasing new technology, and grants is exhausting to come back by. Adding to our challenges, Bridgeport Public faculties ar primarily based during a working-class community with high state (95% of scholars receive free or reduced lunches). Most students do not have access to computers outside of college and, at the time, there was a restricted offer in our faculties.
Bridgeport uses a spread of Chromebook models as well as devices from Samsung, Acer and power unit.
When the technology committee for Bridgeport Public faculties raised the concept of delivery reasonable computers into our lecture rooms, I steered we have a tendency to take into account Chromebooks, not to mention Google Apps for Education. i used to be an acquaintance of the Chromebook right from the beginning attributable to their reasonable value and simple use. In 2010, Google sent ME one in every of the primary Chromebooks to review on my web log, instructional Technology Guy, wherever I pen technology resources for lecturers and students.
The affordability and simple maintenance of Chromebooks clenched the deal – we have a tendency to may get 3 Chromebooks for the worth of one PC and also the district’s little IT team wouldn’t have to be compelled to struggle to stay up with the repairs and updates on aging PCs. we might conjointly save on support time and prices since Chromebooks update mechanically. Initially, we have a tendency to bought four,000 Chromebooks for our high faculties, wherever each room currently encompasses a Chromebook for every student. At an equivalent time, we have a tendency to set to begin exploitation Google Apps for Education thus each student would have Associate in Nursing email address, one thing we’d ne’er been able to do before. we have a tendency to conjointly used Google Drive to maneuver student documents off of our internal file storage system – in a different way to save lots of the IT team time and cash. so that they will currently work along and communicate with lecturers even whereas not within the room.
When we received some hard-won grant cash, we have a tendency to bought additional Chromebooks, and we’re currently at nine,000 district-wide. Our goal is to bring Chromebooks to each room in grades four through twelve. The Chromebooks have already modified however lecturers teach and students learn: there’s less “listen-to-me” teaching, and additional active student involvement in making their own comes.
Now that we’ve been exploitation Chromebooks for a short while, we’ve been able to give our students access to technology and take the strain off of our IT department, however what makes this actually sure-fire is that the what our students say. one in every of our twelfth graders told ME she loves that she will be able to “take college work anywhere” or collectively of our tenth graders told ME, “they build it easier handy in work and reduce your probability of failing.”