Titans Test Chromebooks for BYOT

As our school shifts to supporting the “Bring Your Own Technology” (BYOT)program, students are encouraged to use their devices for instructional purposes in the classroom environment.

To achieve the BYOT budget to make technology more accessible to any students held in the facilities, a $50,000 budget was planned to be used to buy all the equipment necessary ranging from any kind of devices such as tablets, and laptops.

When choosing the first device to be used from this budget, Mr. Ajima the technology resource teacher and the school departments brought in three devices that teachers considered for their students that would help in the studying environment, with a keyboard, internet access, and fast loading.

First, ATLAS made a donation of about $15,000 as the first chunk of money to fulfill the budget, then the school participated in the WTOP program where we won $20,000 towards the budget, and the remaining amount budgeted to raise the money was collected in a gofundme.com page where the school raised $12,000 out of the goal of $15,000.

“Phones aren’t the best tool for the classroom because it’s harder to create things and can be used as a distraction due to social media and texting,” explained Mr. Ajima when looking for the right device for classroom use.

Teachers evaluated their use and ultimately choose the model “Toshiba CB35-A3120 13.3-Inch Chromebook” that costs $330 per device, some of the positive comments included good screen resolution, brightness and convenient size.

“The idea behind the chromebooks is that they would be most helpful to our vulnerable students, that don’t have a device that is useful for the class,” said Mr. Ajima when explaining the purpose of the BYOT program.

After choosing the right device, a set of 20 was bought along with a cart and is currently used in small classroom environments with certain teachers to test if the setup is helpful, receiving feedback for them to change the configuration to get more advantages from it.

A chromebook is a computer with the purpose to connect to the internet instead of using storage, different from the instructional laptop. When you open it, takes you to a public session when connecting to the web browser, taking 15 seconds to open up instead of five minutes of loading from the currently used laptop.

Before closing and exiting the session, students must save their work in OneDrive, a form of online storage, because otherwise it would go away.

A cloud form of Office is also available, for students to use when being connected through the internet.

“Fast, quick and easy,” was how Mr. Ajima described this type of instructional laptop, showing how its also got a camera for webcalls and can record audio and video all for a low price.

Mr.Ajiima explained how soon we may see classrooms filled with half the class with their own devices and the other using chromebooks, allowing them to use what’s appropriate to complete classroom tasks.

“All of the hardware is great but it is all about how it’s being used in the classroom, I think that’s what teachers and students are in the process of learning right now, is how to use the technology to improve learning in the classroom,” said Ajima, explaining how it is up to the students and how they put the devices into use.