Editor’s Note: Earlier this week at ISTE, we announced new tools to support our future explorers and digital citizens, and we released seven new Impact Portraits profiling the impact of Google for Education and Chromebooks in districts across the US. Today we’ll dive deeper into the findings from these schools. For more information from ISTE, follow our updates on Twitter, and if you’re in San Antonio, visit us at booth #1718 to learn more and demo these new tools for yourself.

In 2016, we worked with Evergreen Education Group  answer a big and pressing question: Can we measure the impact of Chromebooks and G Suite for Education in schools? Evergreen’s discussions over 16 months with more than 100 school leaders from 6 countries was captured in a series of Impact Portraits—data-rich case studies with real school results. Their research uncovered four key factors that help schools and students flourish when adopting technology for the classroom: planning, professional learning, patience and support.

Today we take a closer look at the findings in seven new Impact Portraits from school districts across the U.S. These districts range in size and demographics from Florida’s Brevard County,  with a student population of 73,000 and 9,000 educators, to New York State’s Amherst Central, which has 4 K-12 schools, 2,944 students, and 263 educators.

The one thing these schools have in common: They're using Chromebooks and G Suite to drive measurable improvements in everything from reading skills to AP diploma graduation rates. Below are some key results from each school district.

• The Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township, Indiana, deployed Chromebooks and G Suite for Education in fall 2014. Since then, Wayne Township’s scores on IREAD-3, Indiana’s measure of third-grade reading skills, have risen by 10% to 86%. High school graduation rates also rose 21.1%, from 67% to an average of 88.1%.
  

• After giving every student a Chromebook, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) Middle School of Choice, part of the Burleson Independent School District, Texas, surpassed every middle school in the district on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness and the BrightBytes’ CASE Technology Framework, which measures the impact of technology on learning outcomes. Engagement is high as well: One English teacher reported a 72% decrease in missed homework assignments after Chromebooks were introduced to her classroom.

• In Brevard County Public Schools, Florida, Quest Elementary added 120 Chromebooks in 2014. Since then, the percentage of students scoring proficient or above in English/Language arts rose from 81% to 85% and students scoring proficient or above in math rose from 86% to 89%. Brevard’s West Shore Senior High School leveraged Chromebooks and G Suite for students seeking the new Advanced Placement (AP) Capstone Project diploma in 2016, which requires intensive research and collaboration. The first year the AP Capstone diploma was offered, 60 out of 160 graduating West Shore students received the prestigious diploma.
  

• In 2013, Hoover City Schools, Alabama, in the Birmingham suburbs, gave students Chromebooks for classroom and home use. Students now have access to Chromebooks and G Suite wherever they go. For absent students, Hoover City created a virtual high school with online video lessons; the schools also introduced an Engaged Learning Facilitators (ELF) program, offering extra technology training to interested teachers who then coach and support other educators in the district.
  
  
• The Oak Hills Local School District, Ohio saved more than  $100,000 a year in software license and server fees by adopting G Suite in 2009. Based on these benefits, the district gave Chromebooks to every student in its three middle schools over the next three years. By the 2016–17 school year, every student in grades 1–12 had their own Chromebook. Chromebooks cost 26% less than similar devices and also help prepare students for Ohio’s state testing, which is conducted online.
  

• The Amherst Central School District, New York adopted G Suite in 2010, and, after positive reception to Google’s educational technology, in 2012, the district began using Chromebooks. Today, students use Google Slides to create digital portfolios and take virtual field trips with Google Expeditions. Google technology has proved so transformative in the district that the device-to-student ratio in Amherst schools is now approaching 1:1.
  
  
• In 2015, Lee’s Summit R-7 School District, Missouri gave a Chromebook to 17,500 students from grade K-12 through the G Suite Connect2Learn program. Students can use their Chromebooks at school and at home (or wherever a WiFi hotspot is available), increasing their learning opportunities throughout the week. A year later, the district’s BrightBytes CASE scores had risen across all four measures of the test: Classroom (up 3.4%), Access (up 3.2%), Skills (up 1.5%), and Environment (up 1.5%).
  

To read more stories like these, visit our Impact Portraits page at g.co/EduImpact and stay tuned here for our next post on Impact Portraits from Europe. For ideas on how to bring technology into your school district, visit Google for Education’s Transformation Center. And follow @GoogleForEdu on Twitter to see all that's launching at ISTE.

Editor's note: Over the last year, we’ve introduced new ways for students to develop important future skills with Chromebook tools, including active listening and creativity. Yesterday at ISTE we announced our latest bundles in this series, curated in collaboration with educators. In this post, we dive into the Media Literacy apps on Chromebooks bundle, designed to help students evaluate and think critically about the information they see online. Follow our updates on Twitter, and if you’re at ISTE in San Antonio, visit us at booth #1718 to learn more and demo these tools for yourself.

Bringing current events into the classroom is a great way to engage students in what’s happening around the world. With countless online news sources to choose from, it’s more important than ever for students to develop media literacy skills that help them understand the difference between reliable information sources and “fake news.” And media literacy skills aren’t just helpful in the classroom—they’re essential  future skills that help students thrive beyond the classroom and into their adult careers.

Earlier this month we announced Be Internet Awesome, a program to help kids learn how to become smart, confident explorers of the online world. One module teaches how to be Internet Alert, including how to avoid “falling for fake.” Now, to help school districts provide more media literacy opportunities to students, we’re offering a bundle of Media Literacy apps on Chromebooks, designed to help students evaluate and think critically about the information they see online. These apps are available at a special discounted price and may be purchased alongside Chromebooks or independently from U.S. Chromebooks resellers.

Here’s a deeper look at the apps in the Media Literacy bundle.

Scrible is a research platform enabling students to curate, annotate and collaborate on authentic online sources such as news articles and blog posts. They can highlight important passages, comment on key points and reply to one another in real time—fostering collaborative discourse, critical commentary, and mindfulness about the quality of their sources. They can later bring their researched content into the writing process using automatic citation capture, bibliographies and Google Docs and Drive integrations.

“Scrible helps students think about information critically through organizing their thoughts on the page,” says Matt Menschner, social studies teacher at Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (KCAPA) in Philadelphia, PA. “It's helped foster creative and critical thinking and positive discussion around the efficacy of the information that we’re going through on a daily basis.”

Menschner says that during the recent school year, Scrible “acted like an icebreaker and fostered a lot more creative discussion and face-to-face conversations” between his students. He doesn’t expect the benefits to fade after graduation, either—students from previous years “come back to visit and they tell me they still use Scrible now in their college classes.”

Frontier, an app from eSpark Learning, teaches critical thinking about media through reading and writing lessons for students in grades three through eight. Frontier offers a library of online lessons centered on thought-provoking topics that engage all types of readers—from eager to reluctant. “It's a differentiated research, reading and writing product that allows students to have choice,” says Cindy Kopp, a fifth-grade English language arts and social studies teacher at Mineola Middle School in Mineola, NY. “It enables them to think beyond the text.”

Kopp says Frontier projects are “inherently something students are excited about. They become so interested in some of the projects that on their own they look to read more about them.” One student, for example, became fascinated with crime-scene forensics, and his research paper was shared with a law enforcement officer in Michigan. The officer then shared a video with the class that helped further their understanding of the forensic process.

“The kids went wild over it, because now they're realizing that their writing has importance,” Kopp says. “There's relevance, and they're opening a dialogue with others outside of the classroom.”

Encouraging student choice in research and writing can help students connect more deeply with the core curriculum at hand. Frontier is “building out projects that align to our curriculum, which helps us supplement the social studies portion of the curriculum,” says Kopp. All the while, students learn how to “seek and access information from a variety of sources, related to questions they’re curious about.”

To learn more about these and other educational tools, please visit g.co/educhromebookapps, check out the websites, or contact your school’s Chromebook reseller. And follow @GoogleForEdu on Twitter to see all that's launching at ISTE.

Editor's note: Over the last year, we’ve introduced new ways for students to develop important future skills with Chromebook tools, including active listening and creativity. Yesterday at ISTE we announced our latest bundles in this series, curated in collaboration with educators. In this post, we dive into the STEM tools on Chromebooks bundle, designed to help students become makers and inventors. Follow our updates on Twitter, and if you’re at ISTE in San Antonio, visit us at booth #1718 to learn more and demo these tools for yourself.

Students everywhere are exploring important concepts in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with a level of sophistication that’s rising every year. They’re also developing skills like problem solving and collaboration that they’ll need in higher education and, eventually, in their careers, while being exposed to real-world opportunities to be makers.

“If we want a nation where our future leaders, neighbors and workers have the ability to understand and solve some of the complex challenges of today and tomorrow, building students’ skills, content knowledge and fluency in STEM fields is essential,” the Office of Innovation & Improvement, U.S. Department of Education noted in a statement in January, 2017.

To help school districts provide more STEM opportunities to students, we’re now offering a bundle of STEM tools on Chromebooks, designed to to help students become inventors and makers. These tools are available at a special discounted price and may be purchased alongside Chromebooks or independently from U.S. Chromebooks resellers.

Let’s take a deeper look at the tools in the STEM bundle.

The Dremel 3D40 3D Printer was developed by Bosch, a company that has made reliable tools for builders and hobbyists for over 80 years. About the size of a microwave oven, a 3D printer “prints” solid objects, layer by layer. The 3D40 3D Printer supports design tools such as Tinkercad and BlocksCAD, that help students create three-dimensional versions of just about anything they can dream up.

Michael Miller is a K-5 technology teacher and high-school computer science teacher for Otsego Public Schools in Otsego, MI. “Students are being exposed to technology that’s now used in a lot of fields. Medical, dental, the food industry—they’re all using 3D printers,” he says. “It will definitely make students more future ready.”

Miller uses a 3D40 3D Printer with Chromebooks in his elementary and high school classes. Depending on the class, students use the tools to create anything from a light saber to a miniature model of a Wright brothers’ airplane. From components for robots to mouthpieces for flutes, his students bring a range of personal interests to the design and printing process.

Although students often work on individual projects, Miller encourages them to solve problems together as a team. “If they need help, I expect them to look to their neighbor first before coming come to me.” Miller also sees how 3D printing can be a way to engage female students, who are often underrepresented in STEM fields today, as well as students who are less likely to speak up in class. “I had a high school student—a very reserved student—and it helped him feel more ownership in the class. It gave him a greater sense of belonging when he could make something.”

The littleBits Code Kit combines block-based visual coding, powered by Google’s Blockly, with programmable physical “bits” that are electronic color-coded building blocks that snap together with magnets. Using the Code Kit, which is designed to be accessible to a wide range of grades, students have fun building and coding games, all while learning the foundations of computer science. The kit also comes with lessons, video tutorials, getting started guides and other resources for educators and students.

Rob Troke, a computer science teacher at James Denman Middle School in San Francisco recently took a sixth-grade class to I/O Youth at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. There, his students used the littleBits Code Kit to program light and sound patterns on a physical Bit. They quickly learned about programming logic such as loops and variables.

“I was happy to see how engaged the kids were,” he says. “It maintained their interest the entire hour, whereas with other apps and tools, I’ve seen the novelty wear off after 15 minutes.”

For some students, having a physical object linked to a coding activity helps bring additional context to computer science. It also brings electrical and mechanical engineering, often overlooked subjects in K-12, into the classroom. “Having things to play with, to figure out what they are, what they do, is extremely helpful… it’s like robotics, but without the robot,” Troke says.

Dremel’s 3D40 3D printer and littleBits Code Kit, along with free programs created by Google—like CS First and Applied Digital Skills—help bring STEM concepts to life in creative and tangible ways. To learn more about these and other educational tools, please visit g.co/educhromebookapps, check out the websites, or contact your school’s Chromebook reseller. And follow @GoogleForEdu on Twitter to see all that's launching at ISTE.