Student Highlight - Chromebooks - Student Perspective

Meet Ava F.  and Elisa R, New Century Middle 6th graders!

"Chromebooks are such a part of our daily routine, that we hardly ever think about having to do things on the computer, we just do it!" "They make most things simpler." Chromebook are our life!

Recently I sat down with these two 6th graders to talk about how the Chromebook has changed their learning environment. "I really like it better than doing classwork with a notebook and pencil. The computer makes it easier and more fun. I like using the Chromebook except for taking a test. This is not just because it's a test, it is hard for me to read the test on-line and make a choice."

Elise shared that in one of her Flex classes, she had to make a commercial. It was actually aired on the school news show. "That was fun. I learned how to use the green screen to record the commercial. I had never done that before and it was really fun. I had never made a webpage before, and I made one of those too. We worked as a group and designed a company and items to sell. Our webpage was about our mouse accessory company, MEMLA."

"We use our computers in class everyday. I have a Moodle account, an Edmodo account and we use Discovery Ed in Social studies every day! We don't use the computer all day long, I think it's a healthy balance. We usually use them more on Thursday's and Friday's because of tests.We use the computer in Social Studies every day because Discovery Ed is our Tech Book - we don't have an actual text book anymore."

Ava has Art for Flex. She uses the computer for research in Art. "For instance, we had to choose a college basketball team and then research that team. We wrote a report which included information about the college and the basketball team. We teamed up with the AIG class for this project. The culminating project was to create a poster highlighting the team (this was not done on the computer). I think it would have been really hard to make the poster on the computer and I don't think people would have shown as much effort. It would have been easier for the teacher to grade it if we had used the computer!  The posters are up on the wall and receive an large red X when the team loses. It's the big basketball tournament, you know." 

When I asked them how their responsibilities have changed since getting the Chromebooks, they said they had a lot of new responsibilities! First, we have to remember to bring it to school each day and to have it charged. We have to make sure we know where it is at all times, and we are responsible for them all day long. If something happens to it, our parents will have to pay for the Chromebook; that would not be good. I have always had a digital device such as a phone or an iPad so that part is not new. We also have e-mail accounts now and that is very helpful because we can communicate with our friends, e-mail the teacher if we have a problem or to ask about a project. We can't e-mail people outside of Moore County, so that makes it difficult when working on a project. We know that everything is being monitored, so we just do what is right. That doesn't bother either of us! 

Their words of advice were, "You know what is right, so just do that!"

New Century Middle School