Select and Speak

On Thursday night, our school had its open house where all students and parents could meet the teachers. To each group of students and parents I shared who I was, a little about our class, and some of the housekeeping things that they would want to know. It was energizing to see students in the building again, and it was nice to meet with their parents as well.
I got a chance to speak with one student who shared that he/she had some difficulties with reading. The student expressed the desire to work through the learning disability when possible. Still, the student was a little worried about the accommodations for online testing and reading with the Chromebooks. At that point, I remembered that I had bookmarked a Chrome extension that might help. With the student and parent, I added the Select and Speak extension to my Chrome browser. It was really cool. The extension allows the user to select text from any website, click on the Select and Speak icon, and the text is read aloud. Hopefully, it eased the student's apprehension a little. I think we'll include it on our list of pre-installed extensions.      

We're In!

With school starting on Monday, we now have all of our Chromebooks ready to roll! To obtain our own domain (Thanks, LunarPages), begin a Google Apps account through that domain, customize our own GApps settings, get Google Enterprise support, transfer the technical contact for our order, create 350 email accounts, obtain "Google Apps for Education" status through our sfmemorial.com domain, redirect our domain's email MX records to point to Google, reprovision our Chromebooks to our GApps domain, add 350 new GApps user accounts, and enroll 60 Chromebooks was a ginormous undertaking. Phew! The Google team (Emma, Michael, Andrew, and Tom) worked so well with our state's domain administrator (Thanks, James!) to make things happen for us. We did do things the hard way (having to switch the domain to our own), but now we will have great access to manage these devices and our learners' experience with them.