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This year our 5th grade students at Lewis Elementary are 1:1 using Chromebooks and Nexus 7 tablets. Basically for each 5th grade classroom we have a half set of Chromebooks and a half set of Nexus 7 tablets. So for every two students, they share a Chromebook and a tablet, and at any given time there is a device available for every student. We chose this option because of cost, and also because we wanted to take advantages of the strengths of each tool and have devices that tied into our Google Apps for Education ecosystem.
timlauer's photo on Instagram
The Chromebooks provide a traditional laptop experience. The tablets allow us to utilize a good quality camera, along with easy audio recording. Quite a few students also use the Nexus as a writing tool. They dictate a first draft using the voice to text feature to convert spoken words to text into Google Docs. They then can easily open up the doc on their Chromebooks for more editing.
All in all we are very happy with our mixed environment. As I mentioned we use Google Apps for education and the ability to login to multiple accounts on both the Chromebooks and the Nexus 7 tablets makes the process of students accessing their work a pretty easy process.
We also utilize the Hapara Teacher Dashboard which helps teachers easily keep track of student work. I'll have more to say about Hapara in a future post.