1:1 Laptop Roll-out & The New School Year

This past week at Brookings HS, we began to distribute laptops to the approximately 903 students set to enter the doors on the 25th.  Students are required to come to a "training" session in order to receive their laptops.  After three days of sessions, more than half of the students have their laptops.  For the most part, the roll-out process has gone very smoothly.

It was very helpful for Jarrod and I to pilot the laptop implementation in our classroom last year.  Many problems were alleviated.  The 1:1 laptop team and tech staff still had a number of items that needed to be ironed out throughout the planning process, but it has gone well.

Three final hurdles need to be cleared as the school year begins.
1.  The rest of the computers need to be distributed to the students.  There is a fear that a handful of students will flat out reject the computers and refuse to take one.  We're not exactly sure what to do if that's the case.

2.  The teaching staff needs to be trained on LAN School (our classroom management software).

3.  We need a day of school in which there is heavy internet usage to see how our network handles the increase in volume.


Speaking of the new school year, Jarrod and I are implementing a few changes to our team teaching model.  The first is that we will be using Google Classroom as our Learning Management System.  So long, Edmodo.  It's been a good ride.  But the ease of how Google Classroom distributes assignments and creates shared files with the students is too good to not use.

Secondly, we just saw our classroom numbers for our three sections of geometry.  Last year, our largest class when we brought both classroom together was 47 students.  This year, we're looking at 54.  I have a feeling that 54 is too many to comfortable fit into Jarrod's classroom at once.  We're going to test it out the first week and see how it goes.

Lastly, I am teaching two sections of Advanced Algebra 2 while Jarrod will be teaching two sections of Geometry Applied.  We still have mirrored schedules and will share our three geometry sections, but two hours a day we will be doing different things.

Let the fun begin!