Google Classroom & Chromebooks

An exciting new app introduced by Google just in time for this school year is Google Classroom. Google Classroom enables students and teachers to collaborate, discuss, and share their work with each other, much like Haiku, the cloud-based online learning tool that the students in the middle and upper schools use on a daily basis. Click on the video below to watch how Google Classroom works!

To get our students started on Google Classroom, we gave every 3rd and 4th grader a Brooklyn Friends Google account. Apps that have been enabled on these student accounts are Google Classroom and Google Drive. Email, Google+ and other functions have been disabled.

We talked about what cloud-computing really is and the advantages and disadvantages that are associated with its use. We also learned that netbooks, like our new Chromebooks, use cloud-computing to help us store information.

To login to their Chromebooks, students created their own passwords based on what we had learned in our Internet Safety unit about what strong passwords should look like.

The students were then introduced to their brand new Chromebooks and, with much excitement, logged into their BFS Google accounts for the very first time.

Students will be introduced to the functions of Google Classroom and Google Drive next week, as we begin to integrate classroom assignments into Google Classroom.