District Administration - November 2012 - (Page 22)

DistrictProfile Leyden (ILL.) HIgH ScHooL dIStrIct 212 By Jennifer E. Chase Collaborative learning is made easier in an Illinois district. or students of Leyden High School District 212, two miles from O’Hare Airport in Illinois, Aug. 14, 2012 felt more like their birthday than the first day of school. The district, comprising East and West Leyden high schools, realized its long-planned hope of providing a computing device to every student and gave out 3,500 new Google Chromebooks. The laptops, made by Samsung, connect wirelessly to the internet, include thousands of education apps, and allow students to work from anywhere—to help support student instruction, teach students about internet collaboration, and better prepare them for their posthigh school future. At the January 2012 Florida Educational Technology Conference, Rajen Sheth—group project manager for Chromebooks—announced that Leyden (pronounced “lie-don”) was among a handful of districts in the country to commit to a 1:1 Chromebook program for 2012-2013. Because 1:1 initiatives are fairly new (only two other districts in the Chromebooks Help Raise Bar F An East Leyden High School student selects a Chromebook from a charging cart. With Chromebooks, students can work on any device in any class period and access their work from anywhere, including from the Chrome browser installed on a home computer. Leyden (ILL.) HIgH SCHooL dIStrICt 212 Schools: Two high schools— East Leyden and West Leyden Students: 3,450 Staff and faculty: 520 District size: 26 square miles Per-child expenditure: $17,800 Percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches: 53% Ethnic breakdown: 57% Hispanic; 37% white; 2% black; 4% other minorities Budget: $75,087,505 Website: www.leyden212.org country are using Chromebooks), the rollout was reported across the internet on sites like HuffingtonPost and CNET. According to Superintendent Katherine Robbins, the total district cost of the Chromebooks per student is approximately $100 per year for each year they are in school, for a total district cost of $1.4 million. Robbins says Leyden spent nominal money strengthening the district’s infrastructure so 3,500 kids could hop on the network without hiccups. “I don’t think the cost of the device is a barrier,” says Robbins. “When you’re talking about that kind of return on investment, it’s a no-brainer.” Why Chromebooks? “When we started on our digital evolution path we were looking for just the right tool—one that is invisible and gets out of the way to allow students and teachers to focus on learning and collaborating,” says Bryan Weinert, Leyden’s technology director. “From my perspective, it also was important that they be easy to manage and secure.” If a traditional laptop is lost or breaks, students must wait for a new laptop and/or lose their valuable work. With Chromebooks, everything is in the cloud, he says. “I can give a replacement device and, once the student logs in, all of their settings and work is refreshed instantly,” Weinert says. “It’s magic, and it makes my life, and the lives of students and teachers, easier.” Educational apps are available through Google’s Chrome Web Store— apps like Google Docs, the collaborative document editor, and Picasa, the app for storing and sharing photos. All apps update automatically when the device is connected to the internet just as many smartphones do. But for Leyden, Chromebook’s key selling point is how it pushes student work to the web. By using apps that store students’ work in the cloud, students may research a project using Google’s browser, Chrome, in class Monday and save those bookmarks for later reading; open the bookmarks District Administration 22 November 2012 Anna Reed http://www.leyden212.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - November 2012

District Administration - November 2012
Contents
From the Editor
News Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Flipping the Script in K12
Sustainable Professional Development
Brave New World of Teacher Evaluation
Philadelphia’s “Servant- Leader” Superintendent
Enhancing School Access Control
New Products
Professional Opinion
New Directions

District Administration - November 2012