Yesterday afternoon was a time of great excitement in my classroom – the school have recently acquired a set of Chromebooks and this was the first time the children had been allowed to use them!

We decided that the plan for the lesson should begin with the children electing computer monitors for each table – these children will be responsible for getting the computers out and putting them away, as well as looking after the login details for all the children at their table.

Next, we spent around 30 minutes going through the login process and having each child practise logging in and out of the computers.  There were a fair few typos creeping into the passwords, but on the whole the class managed this well despite the randomised passwords in use.

Finally, they got to use the computers in earnest – they are currently learning all about Roald Dahl, so were sent off to do some research using Google and noting down interesting facts in their topic book.  All children loved this task, a few needed assistance finding useful websites, but the majority were able to find them themselves.

If I were to teach this again, I would use a restricted (child-friendly) search engine as I am not sure that the school’s web filters are sufficiently narrow to allow a group of 7 and 8 year olds to browse Google.