“Our students and teachers already had Google accounts for school use,” Saleh says. “A lot of the foundation and hard work of setting up Google Workspace for Education was already there. We had some management structure in place, and we had experience with it thanks to rolling out Chromebooks to some of the upper grades earlier.”
Chromebooks Deliver Flexibility and Intuitive Boot Up
Not being tied to an in-classroom device opens up greater work-life flexibility for teachers. Because Chromebooks make use of Google Workspace for Education and ChromeOS, teachers’ classroom resources are in the cloud and accessible from anywhere.
“When you can access lesson plans and build lessons and assignments in the cloud, that’s a whole new world,” says Corey Gordon, education strategist at CDW. “You don’t lose access at 3 p.m. Teachers gain more flexibility and are able to do lesson planning and grading when it’s most convenient for them.”
Previous experience with large deployments made the rollout a smooth process for PPS. Initial management setup for teachers’ Chromebooks was a piece of cake. “It was just like, ‘Go! Take this and get started,’” Saleh says. “We set them up in different organizational units, with teachers getting different user privileges. The Chromebook devices we got for teachers are so intuitive; it made the whole transition easier.”
The district relied on early adopters to share their expertise with their colleagues. And as training resources were developed and shared, instructors were able to quickly get up to speed on using their new resources.
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