Learn About Chromebooks Through Project Chromebook

Last month Google announced that 27,000 or more Chromebooks were headed into U.S. schools. If you or someone in your school heard that announcement and became curious about using Chromebooks in your building, you should take a look at Kevin Jarrett's new blog, Project Chromebook.

Project Chromebook is an on-going record of a 60 day trial of 25 Chromebooks in two fourth grade classrooms. The blog covers topics like deployment and administration of Chromebooks as well as information about Chrome apps for education.

While exploring Project Chromebook one of the things that I learned about Chromebooks in education is that you don't have to sign a year-long lease with Google, there are other options like month-to-month rentals of Chromebooks. Month-to-month rental is the route that Kevin's school took. If you're not 100% sure that Chromebooks are the right solution for your school a short-term rental makes sense to me too.

If you're curious about what it looks like to deploy Chromebooks and use them in the classroom, Project Chromebook is a blog to which you should subscribe.

Peep and the Big Wide World - Educational Games for Children

Peep and the Big Wide World is a nice resource for pre-K and early elementary school that I learned about through Kevin Jarrett's most recent Last Week in Lab post.

Peep and the Big Wide World, produced by WGBH, offers a great collection of online games, videos, and offline activities designed to help students learn and practice skills in math and science. One emphasis of the games that I tried is recognizing patterns. In all there are fifteen online games available through Peep and the Big Wide World.

The offline or Anywhere Activities section of Peep and the Big Wide World offers dozens of activities designed to extend the science and lessons provided in the Peep and the Big Wide World videos. In fact, when you're on the video page you will notice that there is a suggested Anywhere Activity listed with each video.

Applications for Education
Peep and the Big Wide World looks like it could be a great resource for pre-K and early elementary school science and mathematics lessons. Kevin Jarrett is one of the first people I started following when I started this blog and I've always found his work to be insightful and helpful. If he's using Peep and the Big Wide World, I'm inclined to think that it must be good.