Ridgewood Chromebook Program Will Expand To Middle Schools Next Year

The district’s popular Chromebook initiative will expand to the middle schools for the 2015-16 school year.

Each of the district’s 1,400 middle school students will receive a Chromebook in the second year of the program. The program kicked off this year with every high school student receiving a Chromebook.

Chromebooks are like a laptop in that they are portable, but they contain very small hard drives and are meant for online use only.

“It has been a very successful program,” said Superintendent Daniel Fishbein.

The Ridgewood Education Foundation gave the district a $100,000 grant last year and a $50,000 grant this year to purchase the Chromebooks.

Teachers and students share and submit assignments using Google Docs, an online storage service Google offers. The district has been using Google Docs for “sometime,” Fishbein said, but students started using it this year.

“It is part of how students learn,” Fishbein said. “They learn, they research, they share information.”

More than 200 staff members were trained in how to use Google Docs at learning summit last summer and an additional 300 were trained this year.

(Pictured: A student using a Chromebook/Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)