Our GAFE Launch >>>3, >>2, >1 - GOOGLE !

Wow! What a term it has been - one term down into our Google Apps for Education and it's really transformed learning opportunities for our students in the senior team.
Part of our strategic roll out of learning with digital technologies saw us at the end of term 1 having a fantastic Chromebook and Google Apps for Education launching day in our senior school.  The Board of Trustees and PTA generously have supplied each of our five senior classes with ten Chromebooks.  All students have a GAFE account for their learning and teachers are using the Hapara teacher dashboard to manage and access student accounts.

The Chromebooks have been cleverly stored in lockable filing cabinets with dish racks as a cheap solution for security and storage.  Each Chromebook has been set up to only accept school domain log ins and we have created a sticker as a deterrent for would-be thieves to alert them to this fact.

Some of the kids reflections from Room 19 using VoiceThread of our launch:

I've had a few schools visit regarding how I went about deploying the Chromebooks and this has been some of the resources and steps I took:

GAFE parent letter: http://goo.gl/vnXjGB

Google Kids launch presentation: http://goo.gl/AYQqt3

Google Parent's meeting presentation: http://goo.gl/NmWQRK
VLN discussion on CMC set up: http://goo.gl/wSQvZb

Not used yet but link from +FionaGrant  to investigate Synergyse launches free interactive training for the Google Apps Admin Console - See more at: http://blog.synergyse.com/2014/07/synergyse-launches-admin-console.html#sthash.JuY9F1Ez.jsN5mQ64.dpuf

No point getting Chromebooks without paying the extra Chrome Management console $39 (approx I think).  You get whoever you are purchasing the Chromebooks through to get the licences for the CMC.  Then when you initially log into the Chromebook you set the wifi settings first and then Ctrl + e to enrol the chromebook on your domain (with your domain login is fine).

The process I took and timings for setting up 55 (initally) for the Chromebooks:

1. Got a parent helper to label all devices with the room and the date we got them.  As each class had 10 we labelled them 19/1 through to 19/10 and then date was just 201404.  She also labelled the corresponding box with the computer number (19/1-10) and these were on a Google Sheet. (This took about 2 hours)
2. Then we plugged in a bar scanner and with the Google Sheet opened with the class Chromebook numbers opened (in order) was able to bar -code scan the outside of the box to get the serial number of each Chromebook off quickly.  This took only 5-10 minutes - initially I had the parent helper tediously typing in the serial number but this ended up being the quickest and accurate.
3. Our TTS guy then opened them up and connected them to our school wifi logged into the internet - we have all our school owned devices set to this separate WLAN so that the kids didn't need to authenticate each time they and enrolled each device.  Not sure how long this took him but it was just on one of his scheduled fortnightly visits.
4. The Chromebooks were boxed up ready for the kids to unwrap!
5. I spent about 2 hours just going through the settings on the GAFE admin domain turning things on and off (as per list on VLN at your discretion). I also had a play around with a couple of the apps that I wanted the kids to be able to have deployed to the devices "typing club" was essential as we have such a long domain name to log in " @pakurangaheights.school.nz" so hoped that the kids might use this app in a self directed learning way.

Setting up the GAFE logins/hapara:

Kiwi Schools did this process for us, however I was inpatient and pushed them along!  I had spoken to Fiona Grant (Manaiakalani cluster) about what needed to be put onto the .csv file and got it prepared and sent off to Kiwi Schools who then uploaded it to Hapara - essentially you prepare 2 .csv files one with the teachers and room numbers and one with the kids information.  Once it's uploaded in the correct format Hapara then add access to the teachers, who can then print out the class info with the kids log in and intial password.