Education Week - November 12, 2014 - 12

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
www.digitaldirections.org
Analysts Predict Growth
In K-12 Chromebook Sales
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11
that could take days.
Chromebooks haven't totally
changed the way she teaches, Ms.
Raspen said.
But they have made her classroom
more efficient, offering more time to
get students working together and
providing tools that allow her to
give more timely and detailed attention
to her students' work.
"They get so much more feedback,
and they use it so much more than
when writing by hand," she said.
"It's pretty huge."
Some Districts Skeptical
The device's power to support
collaboration has also extended
to Ridgeview Middle's staff, many
of whom now use Chromebooks
and Apps for Education to do joint
planning-often in real time, sometimes
from the comfort of their own
homes.
Some district technology leaders
also point to the administrative benefits
of going Chromebook. The devices
boot up quickly, have a long battery
life, are easy to update, and are
not prone to malware and viruses.
Because they provide storage on the
cloud, there is less file-management
and other back-end administrative
work for district technology staff.
"It makes a huge difference," said
Donna G. Teuber, the team leader
for technology integration in the
27,300-student Richland 2 school
district in South Carolina, which
has been fully 1-to-1 with Chromebooks
in grades 3-12 since 2013.
"When you go in for classroom
observations, learning is happening
because people aren't worrying
about technology," she said.
Despite such rave reviews, though,
some districts, including Montgomery
County's neighbor to the north,
remain hesitant.
Earlier this year, the Baltimore
County school system contracted to
lease 150,000 new digital devices for
students and staff over the next seven
years, at a total cost of $205 million.
After a series of conversations
with students, teachers, and others,
the 110,000-student system wrote
its request for proposals in such
a way that essentially excluded
Chromebooks from consideration.
"One thing came out loud and clear,"
said Mr. Imbriale, the Baltimore
County administrator. "They wanted
Students use Google
Chromebooks during
an advanced
6th grade reading
class at Ridgeview
Middle School in
Gaithersburg, Md.
The inexpensive,
cloud-based laptops
are making inroads
into K-12 schools.
a device that could both function as a
full laptop and act as a tablet."
Furthermore, Mr. Imbriale said,
the Baltimore County district
wanted to "ensure there was not a
massive chasm between the new
technology we are bringing in and
the thousands and thousands of machines
already in the system." That
meant limiting bidders to those
using the more-established Windows
or iOS operating systems.
Student Privacy Concerns
Infrastructure was also a concern.
"We needed a machine that is still
a viable device," even when not connected
to the Internet, he said.
The district ultimately selected
the hp Revolve, a new hybrid laptoptablet.
Those
devices will cost the district
about $1,100 apiece.
Mr. Collette, the chief technology
officer in Montgomery County,
acknowledged the concerns about
infrastructure, saying that a
Chromebook deployment and wireless
upgrades are "necessarily intertwined."
The district has already
spent $7.5 million on wireless upgrades
for its buildings, with plans
to spend as much as $14 million
more on related modernization efforts.
But Mr. Collette was largely
dismissive of concerns about shifting
to the Chrome operating system, as
well as worries about student-data
privacy in Apps for Education.
Earlier this year, Google acknowledged
it had been scanning and indexing
for advertising purposes the
contents of student emails sent using
the application, a practice the company
says it has since stopped. But
it remains unclear whether Google
is continuing to data-mine student
emails for other commercial purposes.
(See Education Week, March 26, 2014.)
"It's the bogeyman of the moment,"
Mr. Collette said.
The numbers suggest that many
in K-12 education are similarly nonplussed
by such concerns.
More than 729,000 Chromebooks
were sold to K-12 schools in the
United States in the second quarter
of this year, according to Futuresource
Consulting.
With common core and other online
assessments becoming a permanent
part of the landscape and
district budgets remaining tight,
that number is likely to continue
growing, the analysts predicted.
Ms. Wilson of the One-to-One Institute
agreed.
"The Chromebook is cost-effective, it
allows for a lot of multi-tasking, and it
can be a creation and content-production
device," she said. "A lot of districts
are moving in that direction."
The DIGITAL EDUCATION blog tracks
news and trends on this issue.
www.edweek.org/go/
digitaleducation
Schools Urge
FCC to Keep
Internet Open
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11
of the federal Telecommunications
Act to regulate broadband in the
same way the agency does phone
service, a step that consumer advocates,
and some school officials,
believe would give it greater power
to prevent Internet service providers
from playing favorites in the
speed of service.
Despite its inherent wonkiness,
the debate over net neutrality has
rocketed into popular culture.
The late-night television comedian
John Oliver, for instance,
recently devoted a segment of his
program to railing against the perceived
threat to an open Internet.
The host of "Last Week Tonight
With John Oliver" exhorted viewers,
in a now widely circulated clip,
to defend net neutrality through
public comments to the fcc.
"Focus your indiscriminate rage in
12 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 12, 2014 | www.edweek.org
a useful direction!" Mr. Oliver urged
his audience.
The fcc has not said when it will
release a final policy, though many
observers think it will be soon.
Not all comments flowing into the
fcc look favorably on the agency
taking a stronger role in protecting
net neutrality.
"Regulating the Internet is the
first step in regulating the people
who use it," wrote a commenter, one
of several using a pseudonym that
included the word "schools."
Speed of Delivery
Another commenter using the
schools moniker argued that government
oversight of the Internet
"has always been a solution in
search of a problem," and that the
fcc "is no longer acting in the interests
of the American people."
Others, however, are pressing the
fcc to ensure that nothing impedes
the flow of content to schools.
Zach Sims, the ceo of Codeacademy,
a New York City-based company
that provides Web-based
training in computer programming
to consumers and students,
noted that entrepreneurs already
face myriad barriers to bringing
online resources to K-12 systems.
Those include restrictions on videos
students can watch and the
overall diffuse nature of the education
market, said Mr. Sims, who
submitted comments backing net
neutrality.
School systems are "fragmented
and hard to get into," Mr. Sims said
in an interview. "The challenge is
worse when you have to pay more
to provide reliable service."
Jean Basquez, a special education
teacher at Laytonsville
Elementary School, in the 400-student
Laytonsville Unified school
system in California, said she
counts on online videos-from
movie clips to news segments
from cnn-to engage students.
Those resources are easier to access
and update than traditional
texts, which "don't differentiate
enough," Ms. Basquez said. She
told the fcc as much, in comments
to the agency.
"You have to be able to find
things to get [students'] attention,"
Ms. Basquez said in an interview.
"Visuals are big, [audio] is big, ...
[and] I want it to be available when
I want it."
T.J. Kirkpatrick for Education Week
http://www.digitaldirections.org http://www.edweek.org/go/digitaleducation http://www.edweek.org/go/digitaleducation http://www.edweek.org/go/election-event http://www.edweek.org/go/election-event http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - November 12, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - November 12, 2014
