Chromebooks in Primary

[CharlesGreig]

Hi All, I have a primary that has purchased 20 chromebooks without asking IT about them, now, that ship has sailed and it is what it is, what I want to know is, do any of you have chromebooks in a primary and if so, how are you using them? The staff at the school think that having the kids log in using an email address will be too complicated for a primary age student.

 

I realise this is kinda closing the gate after the horse has bolted, but do you just make a '[email protected]' for each chromebook and just leave them signed in kind of thing?

 

Honestly, I have not used Chromebooks before so if anyone has any tips or places to find particularly good guides / tips for chromebooks in general / in a primary I would be everso greatful.

 

Apologies if I have posted this in the wrong area, I couldn't find a specific Chromebook forum.

 

Thanks

[dhicks]

Honestly, I have not used Chromebooks before so if anyone has any tips or places to find particularly good guides / tips for chromebooks in general / in a primary I would be everso greatful.

 

We have 300 or so assorted Chromebooks around our prep (primary / middle) school. If you haven't already, sort out a Google GSuite For Education Domain (free for schools), that will give you user and device management facilities. There's an additional one-off license fee per device of about £30 for device management capabilities.

 

We find our younger pupils (Y3-ish and below) struggle a bit with typing usernames / passwords. For managed Chromebooks in junior classrooms we tend to have them boot straight into "guest" mode. We're also looking at using Wonde for user login cards, so you can hold a card with a QR code on in front of the device camera for it to log you in.

[mavhc]

Enable Domain Name Autocomplete in GSuite admin to help shorten what they have to type

[DavR]

Definitely claim your free G Suite for Education, you get unlimited storage and lots of management options. Ditto the device management license (top tip - buy before March 9th as the price is going to go up).

 

Top tip - you can use the management console to pre-complete the domain part of your gsuite logins, so "@gsuite.school.sch.uk" or whatever already pops up at login, so the student just needs to remember username and password, not email. Our Year 5s cope just fine, our Year 3 and 4s are a little more reluctant - although that is in part their teachers!

[mlosk]

Deployed Clever to address this issue with Elementary typing issue. Clever is free & ties to AD & SIS. QR code and supported for login. Can tie other software to it as well and carry the credential over seamlessly through that site. Made it easier for them to access the PC and Chromebooks in the Elementary without giving up an auto-login service account.

[Primus]

Deployed Clever to address this issue with Elementary typing issue. Clever is free & ties to AD & SIS. QR code and supported for login. Can tie other software to it as well and carry the credential over seamlessly through that site. Made it easier for them to access the PC and Chromebooks in the Elementary without giving up an auto-login service account.

 

Clever won't allow anyone covered by GDPR to use their product. Wonde have a similar offering though.

[lifeindubai]

They're great in Primary. We (an International 4 form entry primary in the UAE) have a 1:1 scheme with Y3-6 and we have shared devices in Y1 and 2.

 

Being on Google Apps for Edu is a must - we assign each child an email on a separate domain (so if the school domain is myschool.com we have a 2nd domain www.myschoolapps.com) - in the format name-first letter surname-school year in which they started e.g. JohnS19

 

We have all student facing devices automatically fill out the myschoolsapps.com bit so the children just need to remember the first bit. As it is simple and tied to their name - we have suprisingly good success rate at teaching it to Year 1 children from the beginning of Year 1.

 

By October half term we have approx 50% of Year 1 able to login independently. 100% of Year 2 and up login day in and day out using their own logins.

 

It is worth perservering with in the early stages rather than use guest sessions

 

This means that children can use OAuth logins for a lot of sites, that have Google sign-in enabled, and even for sites that don't such as TTRockstars and SpellingShed, the password manager in Chrome remembers their login and auto-fills it.

 

We are Google everything now, and have achieved Reference School status.

Edited January 30, 2020 by lifeindubai

[keyboards]

We use them, we have GFE, so every student has their own account, tbh it may be hard at first but it's good practice for them, with the right teacher it works fine

[EssentialRug]

We use them across our primaries of around 1200 students and they are excellent. As mentioned by others claim your G-Suite, enrol your devices and enable domain name autocomplete to make it easier for students to log in. In my experience students pick up logging in very quickly in KS2, but when it comes to KS1 as mentioned it depends if you have the right teacher who is willing to be patient. We don't use generic 'pupil1@...' accounts and I would avoid using them as then you are unable to accurately report on search history etc.

[edmokeski]

When you say "how are you using them" - are you asking just about login and management? If so, I'll just second all the above re getting your (free) GSuite domain and (cheap) device management licenses. If you want any recommendations on physically handling them, I quite like LapSafe and Zioxi's trolleys and cabinets. The former are a bit more indestructible, the latter a bit 'friendlier.' If you're asking about "how are they used in teaching," that's obviously a different sort of thing. I haven't got much experience w/ primary kids, but there are a couple of great (free) FutureLearn courses from the Chartered College of Teaching that go into this. I know they draw some of their examples from primaries, so the content's probably all pretty applicable to your environment. Are they one of the models that support Android apps? Probably opens some more doors functionality-wise. List is here: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps