Had a great couple of hours down at Otaki College today. They've been part of a trust that is providing the financial backing for students to buy their Chromebooks for a down payment of $45 and the $4 per week for 3 years. For this they get an extended warranty, insurance, Hapara dashboard and access to a spare machine should theirs need repair. This has been modelled on the Manaiakalani Trust in Auckland. The trust in Otaki is rolling out Chromebooks to all the schools in the area.
We went to see 2 of their year 7/8 classes that are digital. I was so impressed by how quickly the teachers have become so adept at working in a digital space. The students were fully engaged in their learning. It was awesome to see the way the teachers plan their students work on Google sites, this allows the pupils to better manage their learning and also means when the students are away they can connect and keep up. I also realised the importance of having access to a Google apps for education account to be able to create Google sites. Just waiting to hear back from our network support as they set up our Gmail accounts, to find out if the schools domain name is a Google educators one. Once that's sorted we should ready to rock.
After school 3 of the Belt team got stuck into planning our Teacher Only Day for next Friday- after attempting to create a timetable that suits all and discovering this was impossible, Katie created a google form which will do the job of getting everyone sorted into workshops, brilliant!
Come on Norcom... We need a GAFE account. And thank goodness for google forms!
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