Nebraska's Northwest Public School District, with 1,500 K-12 students, has begun implementing daily use of over 800 Chromebooks.
Scott Axt, the assistant principal in his 20th year of the education sector, and Brian Gibson, the Director of Technology with over 15 years of experience, had previously dealt with dissatisfaction from teachers and parents about the monitoring and filtering system they had in place. The pair decided to switch to GoGuardian over the summer months.
Since the switch, Northwest Public Schools has “established a very strong sense of trust from the parents and faculty to provide a safe learning environment,” said Assistant Principal Axt. “There is such a great flexibility to turn on and off things that are needed educationally, and the teachers are very happy as well because they know they have a strong management technique in the classroom to keep students engaged.”
Axt reported that GoGuardian has helped him in unexpected ways. For example, he noted improvement in both student grades and failure rates, citing a "a 20-25% decrease in failing grades." Axt said he attributes the decrease in failing grades directly to the GoGuardian software and the techniques it provides for keeping students engaged.
Axt also spoke more in depth about the analytics that GoGuardian provides: “We use the analytics on the homepage to manage not only positive trending items, but negative as well, and because of it we are seeing improvement in so many areas.”
Missing Chromebooks provided another type of challenge for the new system. Axt and Gibson followed the anti-theft steps prescribed within GoGuardian and were able to recover two missing Chromebooks.
“The Anti-theft is such a great feature, we really love it," said Axt."We have had a few Chromebooks come up missing. The photo feature is a nice tool, and we were able to recover two of the missing Chromebooks.”
