Remote Learning: the Lycée Français de Gavà Bon Soleil experience with Acer Chromebooks

The Lycée Français de Gavà Bon Soleil is an international school founded in 1969 in Gavà, a town near Barcelona. This multilingal school already started a digital transformation process in the recent years, but the Covid-10 outbreak in the latest months has compelled the Bon Soleil Centre to definitely accelerate it. Here’s how Acer – along with FDOS Software, supplier of equipment and computer solutions – has equipped 200 devices to students and teachers to teach, learn and collaborate within a new educational frame. The use of these resources provided by Acer has been absolutely crucial for the proper performance of work dynamics between teachers and students during the quarantine.

Fitting classroom and remote learning needs

Located in the Province of Barcelona in Spain, Lycée Français de Gavà Bon Soleil is an educational centre with more than 1,300 pupils, ranging from pre-school education to Baccalaureate. Their pedagogical aim is to train educated people and citizens, endowed with critical sense and moral qualities, who are especially capable of contributing to the material and moral improvement of humanity.
It’s a multilingual school, with international projection, with students from 17 different nationalities living together in their classrooms. Strongly committed to the ethical and moral development of its students, the centre is also firmly committed to classroom innovations. On this matter, they are in the process of digitizing their classrooms with the gradual acquisition of computer products and services, as well as the adoption of new educational methodologies that have already been implemented in recent years.
But the ongoing pandemic changed the situation, bringing out more needs. The devices for students and teachers had to fit not only with all-day school needs, but also with remote learning from home. The Bon Soleil centre was looking for robust and easy to use (and to manage from IT departmend) devices, facilitating cooperation and collaboration. For these reasons, they chose Acer Chromebook C730, C731, C732 and C733 models for students. These equipments fully meet their needs:

• Battery life: Acer Chromebook devices provide up to 12 hours of use, fully covering the need for battery life throughout school hours.
• Resistance: Students of different stages and ages will use the equipment. They need devices supporting the daily treatment of the students. Acer Chromebook devices exceed their expectations thanks to their military grade and impact resistance.
• Integration with the G-Suite platform: They needed devices adaptable to a wide range of tasks. This adaptability is offered by Acer Chromebook devices by including all the functions of G Suite for Education, to stay connected (Gmail, Meets), create (Docs) and store (Drive) working papers, among many other needs.
• Simplified Management: Due to the duration and extent of the state of alarm, the security checkups and students’ devices administration by IT department, as well as the monitoring of their activity by the teachers is another really important point. Therefore, Acer Chromebook devices provide flexible access to manage device settings and monitor them, through the Google management console.

 

Remote learning with Acer Chromebooks: the experience of Bon Soleil students and teachers

The institution itself says that they are very happy with Acer, both for the quality of the products offered and the after-sales service. In total, 4 different Chromebook models were used: Acer Chromebook C730, C731, C732 and C733, for the exclusive use of students; and higher performance devices for the management team and those responsible for implementing ICT in the school.
Communication between students and teachers during the quarantine was especially simple. Students could access the virtual classrooms of each subject and check the syllabus with Classroom, send emails to the teachers, ask questions in the class group through Meets or even specify hours of personalized tutoring through Calendar, with their own Chromebook devices.
After a gradual start over several years, and after attending a pandemic context with teachers and students locked in their homes, the final result of the project to integrate digital resources in the classrooms of Gavà Bon Soleil could not be more positive.
Some of the great discoveries they have been able to experience during the quarantine have been the following ones:

• Access to information: The students have more independence in the learning process, and they can access the working tools in Google Classroom on their own. This section also allows students at the Baccalaureate level to have more autonomy that will bring them closer to the dynamics of university education.
• Improvement in communication: Tools like Classroom or Meets allow real-time contact between classmates and teachers when it comes to working and sharing documents and information which, in turn, stimulates teamwork.
• Digital evaluation: Students have access to much more dynamic and immediate evaluations, while the teacher receives much more information from the tests.