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.

From Ideas to iBooks - Great Advice

One of the most popular posts earlier this month was about the free iBook Hot Apps 4 HOTS published by Lisa Johnson and Yolanda Barker. I was just looking at Lisa's blog and discovered that she has outlined the steps taken to get Hot Apps 4 HOTS from an idea to an iBook. The blog post includes Johnson and Barker's Blog Talk Radio episode in which they discuss the process.

Applications for Education
If you're thinking about publishing your own iBooks or having your students publish iBooks, Hot Apps 4 HOTS: From Inception to ISBN could be very instructive for you.

Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

My assistant tells me to write faster.

Good morning from Maine. Despite the outcome of the SuperBowl, everyone at the Free Technology for Teachers World Headquarters had a good week and I hope that the same is true for all of you. As I do every week, I've written a short list of the week's most popular posts. If your RSS reader or email inbox got too full this week, this list provides a good way for you to quickly discover some of the week's ed tech highlights.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Three Browser Extensions Every Teacher Should Try
2. Stocks, Dividends, and Inflation Explained in Under Two Minutes
3. 30 Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers
4. 15 Resources for Safer Internet Day
5. 7 Tools Students Can Use to Manage Group Projects
6. ThinkB4U - Web Safety Tutorials from Google
7. Gooru - Great Collections of Math and Science Resources

Would you like to contribute to the Fifth Anniversary Classroom 2.0 Book? If so, we're still accepting contributions. Contributing to the Classroom 2.0 Fifth Anniversary Book could be an excellent way to have your ideas read by a large audience.

Please visit the official advertisers and marketing partners that help keep this blog going.
LearnBoost provides a free online gradebook service for teachers.
MasteryConnect provides a network for teachers to share and discover Common Core assessments.
The Worth Ave Group offers insurance plans for school technology.
Fifty Sneakers offers a great service for creating multimedia online quizzes.
ABCya.com is a provider of free educational games for K-5.
Lesley University offers quality online graduate programs for teachers.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers. In February I will be holding a free public webinar through UMBC.
Ed Tech Teacher offers professional development services for schools. I will be speaking at their winter conference on March 3.

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Some of my upcoming presentations that are open to the public are:

A public webinar on February 20th  for the University of Maryland at Baltimore County.

The EdTech Teacher 2012 Winter Conference on March 3. 

NCTIES March 7-9, you won't want to miss the Best of the Web Smackdown I'm doing with Steven Anderson. 

My other blog, Android 4 Schools is gaining subscribers every week. If you're an Android user, please check out Android 4 Schools and let me know what you think.