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June 12, 2014

Chromebooks in Kindergarten

Are you wondering how Kindergarten students might be using Chromebooks? 

This year, we received one tech tub with five Chromebooks in our class.  The students loved using these fast computers to learn all year. 

First, the students have learned to take their log-in information cards and independently type in their usernames and passwords. Next, from the home page that has been set up by our learning technology department they can choose Raz-Kids or Dreambox by clicking on the icon. The students can go read a book or master the key concepts of elementary math anytime during learning centers. Then, they have learned to use Google Voice to ask various questions. They can discover how to say new vocabulary in French (e.g., Say friend in French), get answers to their wonders (e.g., Caterpillar picture), learn how to spell words (e.g., Spell dog) or discover how to represent numbers using numerals (e.g., What is 5?). In addition, we have caught students going to YouTube for purposeful learning.  The students found the YouTube icon, typed various titles of songs that we had previously learned, had fun singing and dancing to them. 




The students are using the Chromebooks very well. They are responsible!   No Chromebooks have been accidentally dropped on the floor.  They share and work together to problem solve when they encounter difficulties (e.g., typo in username when logging in).  Observing how the students use the Chromebooks is impressive and I realize that there are many possibilities for 4 and 5 year old children to use them to learn.








Here are more possibilities that I will explore with my Kindergarten students:


  • explore Google Drive-Drawings (e.g., make a plan before building at the block area)
  • explore Google Drive-Document-Research-Images  (e.g., labeling the doctor's office at the dramatic play area) 
  • show them how to navigate to the class blog and select learning links (e.g., ABCya)
  • explore apps (meegenius, pbskidsplay, scootpad, spell up)

How are you using Chromebooks with your Kindergarten students?

5 comments:

  1. Very nice and beautiful pictures!! I have observed that in Phoenix pre-k students are given best care and best arrangements than other kindergartens. It's truly feel so proud being working in kindergarten as an instructor.

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  2. I came across this while looking for ideas on how to get reluctant Kindergarten teachers to feel comfortable with letting their students use the Chromebooks in our district. I love that your first step is simply to let the kids log in! I've been trying to convince some teachers that this is possible, despite the teachers' reservations.

    Do you have an example of the cards you use (with a fake username and password obviously)? I would love to see how you set this up so that the students can log in independently.

    Also, how long did it take before the students could log in independently? How did you go about training them to do this on their own?

    Thanks!
    Steve Harmon
    EdTech Instructional Coach
    Oak Grove School District

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for leaving a comment. It's priceless to see the students reaction when they successfully log in, they are so proud that they can do it!

      The log in card that I used 2 years ago, was simply a screenshot of what the chromebook looked like when the students flipped it open. The students had to type in the username which was their email address (e.g. first name.lastname@ocsbstudent.ca) & their password which was one number. It took some students 10 minutes and others students all year to independently log in. Every student is different. For the students that this was more challenging, they would type in some information & they would ask a friend to help them finish with the log in process.

      I had 4 chromebooks in my classroom, that were available all day for the students to learn with. In mid October, the educators would start to call the students 1 on 1 and show them how to handle a chromebook. The student unplugged the device from the tech tub, took it out, found a safe spot to work at (e.g., not at the snack table), find the log in card (great for name recognition), the educator would show them where to find the numbers, how to do the @ sign... It wasn't log that we had many log in experts in the classroom. Then, the educators released the responsibility to teach the students how to use a chromebook to those expert students. It was their job to teach their classmates how to log in. It worked very well! They can do it!

      This year, it is very, very, very easy for any student to use a chromebook. Out LT department has created a student portal. The student simply opens the chromebook & clicks on that icon which has many links available for the students to choose from (e.g., Dreambox). If the student wants to access their Google accounts then they would need to log in.

      Hope this makes sense, let me know if you need anything else!

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  3. Wow, thank you so much for all your feedback. I am energized and jazzed to give this a shot with our primary students. I will post cool kid learning as we progress. :)

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  4. I'm a K12 IT director... We're debating whether CB's are appropriate for Kindergarten, and one of the issues is authentication. We can have a shared login, but then google will start asking for captcha confirmation as it sees too many logins from the same account and considers that a potential security problem.

    How did you get around this issue?

    ReplyDelete