Technology in Middle School: A Journey With Chromebooks: Welcome

I need to also welcome myself to blogger. :) This is my first attempt at a blog and wanted to create it to share my journey piloting Chromebooks in my middle school classroom.

Samsung Chromebook 550

I started the pilot in March 2013 with a lot of bumps along the way, as anticipated. Throughout the last three and a half months of the school year I felt defeated, discouraged, encouraged, excited and surprised while using the Chromebooks in my classroom. I plan to share the journey with you with the gift of retrospect. I wrote everything down in a good, old-fashioned spiral notebook and will re-live each Chromebook lesson with you, even the bad ones since those were the ones that ended up being the most surprising and eye-opening for me. The one thing that I need to share with you now is my biggest lesson learned in those months: students are awesome at technology and helped to save the lesson a lot of the time! When I was at a training at the Macomb Intermediate School District a few years ago (probably 5 now) for educational technology (as in how a teacher can integrate technology to use as a class and for accommodating all students, not 1 to 1), they told us that students are "digital natives" since they grew up with technology in their hands unlike us adults who are "digital immigrants" trying to learn and catch-up to them. I never realized this more until I piloted 1 to 1 Chromebooks in my classroom. I learned to grab a life vest (tech guys are awesome), jump in (created my first lesson over a weekend), and hold on tight. We all need to ride the technology wave or we will be left behind.

Especially since our district passed a bond for each student to receive a Chromebook grades 6-12 and an iPad grade K-5. We are so lucky!!! See the Facebook page (click on the link below the picture) that keeps us updated on the progress!