At McKinnon Secondary College we rolled out ~700 Chromebooks to our Year 7 and 10 students. The real story of this success was in the planning. Since introducing chromebooks we’ve seen Google Apps and technology usage skyrocket, Chromebooks have been a success story for technology usage at McKinnon Secondary College

So we decided to go Chromebooks and the role of the ICT team was to facilitate a smooth deployment. For us, this meant not just getting devices into students’ hands but to create an environment for driving meaningful adoption of the platform. We placed a big priority on building a process and system that would mean students are never without a device. If one breaks, didn’t charge or wasn’t working for any reason we’d have a spare ready to go.

Investigation

We looked at the various models of Chromebook and performed a small trial with a few students providing them with a Samsung Chromebook for a Month. The students filled in a survey each week citing how many times they used the device, what the experience was like, where they ran into trouble and anything further they wanted to add.

This little experiment uncovered 3 things:

1. Students were reaching for the device and repeatedly using it over time
2. They weren’t noticing the deficits of only having access to a web browser. In fact they liked the simplicity more than we had predicted.
3. The devices came back well-worn only after a month — a sign of the Samsung’s cheaper build quality.

This experiment gave us confidence that the devices were a viable personal computing solution and would satisfy the needs of most students.

In choosing a device for a one-to-one program, we needed to weigh the following factors for our school community:

• Funding Model: We decided on a parent portal setup where parents pay directly to our chosen supplier (Staples), this was designed to reduce the administrative burden on the school. Staples did offer a flexirent option, but it was ultimately a very expensive option over the life of the device.
• Chromebook Models: The Lenovo X131e, while costing more, made more sense given the wear and tear to the Samsung chromebook in just a month! The Lenovo’s ethernet port, durability and generally faster processing power made it a sound choice for us.
• Supplier: We had little choice here as Staples were the only Lenovo supplier able to procure the devices on our timeline. We got the very first Australian shipment of X131e Chromebooks to our front door.
• Device enrollment: We decided to purchase the admin console for each device, as rolling out a preconfigured network to a login screen saved us a lot of time.

Communicate and plan

I can’t stress enough the importance of communicating to each stakeholder and offering them relevant professional development, time and resources. In my experience it’s this communication that makes the biggest impact for adopting new technology.

Teaching staff were the first group to tackle — many had heard whispers of these devices that could only browse the web and weren’t particularly pleased with what they’d heard. We ran an all-staff briefing where I presented on the reasoning for getting Chromebooks and what the key benefits were to be for teachers. These benefits included super-fast boot time, all students will have a working device, no re-imaging and a large and growing range of apps to explore. You can check out my presentation and presenter notes here. We also ran a Google Apps day hosted by Mike Reading to explore some other Google tools and generally get staff excited and talking about the possibilities.

At our Year 7 parents’ information night in 2013, we provided a broad overview of the clear benefits for the students and set out expectations about these devices and their place within the schools’ greater technology strategy. We explained the process for purchasing the device and their distribution to students. The device came out to around $600 after extended warranty and Google Admin Console. Letters and FAQs about the Chromebook initiative were sent home to all families of Year 7 and 10 students, supported by explanatory articles in our online newsletter and on the College website.

This careful communication with parents helped us drive a 94% initial update across all year 7 and 10 parents. The remaining 6% were directly contacted and reminded of the need to place an order; when necessary, we worked out payment plans and/or financial assistance from our student wellbeing budget to support families in difficult financial situations. We wanted to ensure all students had a Chromebook in their hand, no matter what their family’s situation.

Be prepared for parents to call, citing cheaper prices, reasons for buying different devices and understandably complaining that they’d already purchased a laptop — why couldn’t they bring their own device? Our approach to this was explaining that Chromebooks are a key part of us delivering digital curriculum to students and the devices are coming from the one supplier to seamlessly integrate with the school.

The real power of Chromebooks is about leveraging the Google Apps suite.

By developing a basic skills checklist we created a mandatory requirement for all teachers to explore the basic set of Google Apps tools. This was designed to bring staff up to a baseline level and served as a big contributor to our exponential growth of Google Apps usage. Sessions were run each week to assist with completing the checklist. This quick and simple checklist really helped us drive the aforementioned exponential growth of our Google Apps usage.

Distribute

We negotiated with Staples (our chosen supplier) to have the devices delivered in batches so we’d be free to unpack and sort them. Each box was labelled with the student name and form.

Thankfully we planned so far in advance — Staples was plagued with delivery issues, mismatched paperwork and miscommunicated delivery times. Anyone who regularly deals with computer suppliers has probably experienced something similar.

We handed out ~360 devices to our Year 7 students and ~290 to our Year 10 students. Each device would last for 3 years and year 7’s will renew their device at Year 10.

Year 10 rollout

The year 10s knew their logins and were quick to pick up the Chromebook. We scheduled all the classes into one wing of the school and in one 45 period we simultaneously enrolled ~300 devices with only 4 technicians floating between rooms. Each room had been pre-sorted with the students laptop box and each teacher was given a set of instructions to follow through with the students[link]. Inevitably some students forget their passwords, had a defective machine or didn’t follow the enrolment process and needed some manual handling to reset them, this only happened for a handful of students and for the most part it went surprisingly smoothly.

Year 7 Rollout

The year 7s didn’t all know their logins and tended to be a bit overwhelmed transitioning to high school, so we decided to spread out each class consecutively across 3 days and repeated the process in the smaller groups. This was in part due to us having other responsibilities over the week and not being able to displace the entire ICT team. The year 7s took a lot longer than expected, with some classes barely able to complete the process within 45 minutes. It was a tedious process repeating yourself at a snail’s pace multiple times a day — but it did work.

The timeline

Learning for the future

We’re all about learning from the process and we identified some key issues we’ll improve next time:

• Distribution was a real headache at the start of the year with all the the other pressures of ICT support at that time. For next time, most suppliers offer a “white glove” service whereby they’ll enroll and connect the devices at the warehouse. We’d then get each box delivered direct to the students during the holidays ready to go out of the box.
• While our system for “hot spares” is working well and ensuring all students have a working device, a lot of the time they come seeking a charger. To address this we’ve since purchased some battery docks to simply swap batteries.
• While the checklist was a large success, the personal development (PD) sessions were extremely difficult to run with staff members’ competencies ranging from basic awareness to capable users. I’m currently working on a self paced website with screencasts and videos to walk staff through each section. This will also serve as a great induction resource for new staff unaware of Google Apps.

Chromebooks are delivering a ubiquitous experience where teaching and learning is the focus. The devices are seamlessly integrated into the classroom as a learning tool; for use when and where required. Coming from a PC one-to-one program where devices are often unavailable, being repaired or don’t work, staff are now empowered to develop some confidence around building curriculum and using computers in their teaching practices. After all we can rely on every student having access to working device as much as working pen and paper — this changes everything.

For further info read Google’s Case study or reach me on twitter.