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ARe any of your schools using Chromebooks? If so, in what areas? What apps have you found useful? How reliable is the Cloud? Are you tied in with Google? Thanks for your input.

My school does not currently use Chromebooks, but I own one personally, and my husband works with them in the school district he IT's for. We both greatly enjoy them; the Cloud system is easy to use, and I love that I can access the information from other computers. One free application I have liked is Science Penguin. This holds some interesting information and is in an easy to use format. *Be sure to assess the application for appropriateness for your students, as I'm sure you would for any resource.

Thank you, Rachel. Where do you teach? How cool that some schools are buying them on a one-to-one basis or for classroom carts. Do you know how Chromebooks are being used in other schools? thanks for you quick reply to the initial query:}

Hi there! Currently, I am in a school that is one to one with Macbook computers. Even though we have Macs, the Google Drive can allow students to simultaneously work on one document. It can be helpful for jigsawing a lesson together or for a power point where each student provides his or her own slides. To this point, Google drive has been reliable and we have had no issues. Unfortunately, I do not know of any great apps for the Chrome book. May I suggest looking for web based activities? Assuming there is Internet access at the time students would be using the activity. There are many great simulators for water cycles, Earth and Moon models, and weather topics. Good luck! And one word of advise, be sure to explain your activities prior to having the students grab the Chrome Book….I made the mistake of having a class open their computer too soon and the lesson did not go so great.

Good advice, Dan! Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving.

I was handed a cart of chrome books at the beginning of the school year. I share them with the other seventh science teacher. We just recently started using Schoology for taking quizzes online. The quizzes can be graded automatically and there are some nice analytics that are produced which enable teachers to compare data on class achievement or even on particular questions asked on a quiz. I am hoping to use it more to share information with students.

Hello! My school uses Chrome books and they are FANTASTIC. We are a Google school and all students have a google account through the school. The only apps we use are Gmail, documents, Presentations, and spreadsheets. The cloud is very reliable and it really gives students the "no excuses" option because it is very hard, if not impossible to loose something on the cloud. Best, Yelena

Hi Yelena, Your students must consider themselves to be very fortunate!! What do you teach, Yelena? Do your students gather and analyze any data with their Chromebooks? Do any graphing? Can you recommend any specific Chrome apps for science education. ~patty

One of my favorite Chrome apps for the classroom is the app by CK-12 Foundation. It has thousands of resources for math and science including videos, simulations and entire textbooks.

I attended the CETPA technology conference in Pasadena, CA this fall and heard a presentation from Google in Education Regional Manager Angela Mecca ([email protected]) about using Chromebooks and Google Apps in the classroom. You can find her presentation at this link: Google in Education.

Hey Laura, Thanks for the info on the CK-12 organization. I had not heard of it and was surprised to see what was available from this California site. http://www.ck12.org/student/ Are there specific items that you have used within your classroom? Patty ps. this resource is not limited to Chromebooks or using Chrome

Lisa, I love Schoology and have found great success with it. It is a wonderful, free program, with many really useful resources for students. https://www.schoology.com/home.php I upload a lot of the handouts, rubrics, links to resources, videos, and documents for students to access at home. This has been really handy because I don’t have to spend hours copying articles for students to use. They can access the resources online and view them as often as they need. The only limitation I can see with the chromebooks are you can’t use any of the Office products on it. Yes, I know Google has their own version of word processor, spreadsheets, etc., but the real world uses Office. I found if students began a document in word, especially if it has columns or other special formatting, Google strips the formatting to fit their format. This is really frustrating if they spend hours creating an intricate food web and then have it trashed when transferred.

Sandy, thank you for your input on Schoology. It seems like a useful resource. Also, thank you for mentioning the difficulty with using Word with Chromebooks. I was unaware of that because I have had students transfer data and graphs from Vernier's Data Share Web App to EXCEL and to make PowerPoint presentations with ease. Perhaps it depends upon the Cloud usage for the various machines. ~patty

I do not use a chromebook, however, I do use the Google Drive cloud for EVERYTHING and it has really streamlined the documents I need to access everyday at school and at home. Google Drive can be downloaded onto multiple devices and synced with your google account and allows you to access, edit, and save documents as though they are a part of your "my documents" folder on all these devices. I have finally ditched my USB drive and thus the panic I would feel when I couldn't locate it! Everything is in my Google Drive and I have never had any difficulty in accessing my documents and have found it to be extremely reliable -- I highly recommend!