Roll Out

We implemented our roll out for our fifth graders.  Although many things went well, lots of things didn't.

 First we found that all Google passwords should have been reset before we allowed anyone to login.  Many, many children forgot their passwords from fourth grade and far too much time was spent individually resetting passwords and thus much of the content we wanted to teach them wasn't taught. 

Second, we found that we aren't using the shared folder's for sharing of work.  We have found it much more helpful to have the kids name documents with a specific naming convention so that we can search for documents by name and then save them in a specific folder of our choosing.  So we won't have them set up their folder that way next year.

Third, we are finding it very difficult to keep fifth graders from messing with their desktops.  We have had complaints from our librarian, and study hall teachers that kids are messing with their desktops.

We are finding that although the idea of a single computer assigned to a single kid might be attractive to some, it is not working well in the fifth grade.  The amount of time spend casing, uncasing, retrieving, and putting back is far out weighing any benefit of the having just one child on a computer.  We are losing a lot of instructional time.  I would again advocate for a cart per homeroom to be used by 2 students.  We had few problems when 5 kids shared one computer, I think two kids would be fine and the streamlined use and fewer transitions and storage issues would far outweigh any perceived problems.