Last term, we asked students, parents and staff for feedback on the roll out of Chromebooks for students at NHEHS, and we wanted to share some of the main findings with you.

The key headline is that 88% of students and 90% of parents are confident in their/their daughter’s use of her Chromebook, which is very encouraging so early on in our implementation process. Our teachers are using the Chromebooks in a range of different ways to support learning, as are students. Our teachers are actively seeking additional training sessions on how to maximise use of technology to fully support the girls, and this is being arranged by the school. Most parents believe that it was the right decision to introduce Chromebooks and that it is aiding their daughter’s education. Parents told us that their daughters are using their Chromebooks between 1 and 10 hours per week.

Girls and parents told us that they would like their textbooks online and we are actively looking at ways to support this, as well as looking at the overall weights of bags with the addition of the Chromebooks. Girls also told us about their desire to print at home from their Chromebook – a fix for this has been implemented and a guide will be communicated shortly. We also learned about blocked video content from YouTube and several blocked websites that the girls would like to access. We are actively looking at the web filters to enable more safe content whilst keeping a robust firewall in place. We are also making sure that girls are able to work with their Chromebooks in appropriate places in school (namely the classroom and the library) whilst maintaining device-free zones around school to ensure girls have plenty of time away from screens.

Parents were concerned about homework being set on different platforms – we will monitor this and report back. Other actions resulting from this survey include the introduction of a touch-typing club to be set up this term and the exploration of different programmes for teachers to be able to better monitor screen usage in the classroom.

We remain ever grateful to parents for their continued support in the further development of technology provision in school and also thanks to our girls for their enthusiasm, commitment and ideas on how we can harness new technologies to help in their learning.