Chromebooks are being rolled out to schools across Palm Beach County.
BOCA RATON, FL (BocaNewsNow.com) — Many elementary school students in Boca Raton and Delray Beach were delighted to find brand new Chromebooks on their desks as they attended “meet the teacher” events on Friday. The Chromebooks — which, in the simplest of terms, run Google’s GSuite business software tailored for educational use — will permit students to email each other, their teachers, work independently in Google Docs, and allow teachers to move towards paperless classrooms.
And anything students start in school in the Google environment can be viewed by parents at home.
But for every classroom full of Chromebooks, there were several without, leading parents of students in Chromebook-less classrooms to wonder why those classrooms are less important.
“Our Tech Trailblazers who have been trained on integrating technology into their classrooms and will be training other teachers on their campuses on how to as well received the Chromebooks for their classrooms for the start of the year,” says Palm Beach County School District Spokeswoman Julie Houston Trieste.
“More than 25K Chromebooks are being rolled out to classes across the District this school year thanks to the Penny Sales Tax. Because parents don’t see them on day one doesn’t mean they aren’t coming.”
Several teachers in Palm Beach County have been certified by Google as “Google Certified Educators.”
While it sounds like a marketing ploy, the certification proves proficiency in using “Google For Education” tools. Read more about it here. It is a multi-hour course that teachers opt to complete on their own.
The school district is also adding high-tech whiteboards.
“We also have 600 touch screen ‘white boards’ in secondary schools and 700 elementary schools for the start of school,” adds Trieste. “Over the next two and a half years, touch screens will be installed in all classrooms in the District in PBC thanks to the Penny Sales Tax.”
