Chromebooks put twinkle in students’ eyes

On a recent Friday morning, Ofelia Seminario’s first-grade class at Saint Gabriel School was excited. Really excited.

The reason wasn’t recess or a class party. The students were doing work — on their Chromebooks.

“I’m working on math,” explained Sophia Solinsky. A simple addition problem flashed on the screen. “And what you gotta do, is you gotta press the right answer, you got to press the right amount.”

“Radical!” an animated penguin said to Sophia as she typed in the correct answer. “How many is one plus three?”

The Chromebooks — inexpensive, basic laptops sold by Google — were a gift from the school’s alumni network. As of last week, every student in grades one through eight at Saint Gabriel’s had a Chromebook to use during class time.

In the first grade, that mostly means self-guided educational games like the math program Sophia was using.

“They caught on very quickly and they’re able to navigate it very easily,” Ms. Seminario said of her first graders. “This will help them because as they grow older, they’ll be able to do research and be able to know where to go on the Internet to find the information that they need.”

First-year principal Anthony Naccari said teachers have embraced the Chromebooks and worked to incorporate them into their daily curriculum.

“[A] goal we have this year is differentiated instruction, where instruction is planned around the learning needs and styles of every student,” said Mr. Naccari. “The programs online really assist the teacher in providing the differentiated instruction for each child in his or her class, so I’m really excited about that.”

In the fourth-grade classroom, teacher Dolores Ahern oversaw her students as they completed a lesson on their Chromebooks. She explained that the program allows children to work at their own speed, so she never has to delay the class by going back to explain something or figure out what to do with a student who is more advanced in a particular subject.

“Each of them, they are reading at their own reading level,” Ms. Ahern said. “So they really are at a pace that they feel comfortable with.”