I volunteer in an after-school supplemental program for kiddos in public housing. Three years ago we scared up a grant to buy four iPads to help the kids do their homework.
Then a local teacher intervened and said, no, no, no, get Chromebooks. We did. We got six for the same money. They're compatible with the local school IT systems. They reset themselves when somebody logs off, so we don't have to worry about what the kids install on them.
THEY HAVE KEYBOARDS! Kids can use them to for written-word assignments without futzing around with the onscreen keyboards.
They aren't quite as game-focused as the iPads. That means we get less squabbling over who gets to use them and for what. (I've taken to leaving my iPad at home because it's an attractive nuisance.)
They're cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if one gets damaged.
The chromebooks are a big win for us and the kids we serve.
Can be used on recycled laptops. Provides Chromeos. Free for personal (no support). I have no connection with neverware other than being impressed with their work when I tried it on a 9 year old Thinkpad.
> I volunteer in an after-school supplemental program for kiddos in public housing. Three years ago we scared up a grant to buy four iPads to help the kids do their homework.
> Then a local teacher intervened and said, no, no, no, get Chromebooks. We did. We got six for the same money. They're compatible with the local school IT systems. They reset themselves when somebody logs off, so we don't have to worry about what the kids install on them.
> THEY HAVE KEYBOARDS! Kids can use them to for written-word assignments without futzing around with the onscreen keyboards.
> They aren't quite as game-focused as the iPads. That means we get less squabbling over who gets to use them and for what. (I've taken to leaving my iPad at home because it's an attractive nuisance.)
> They're cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if one gets damaged.
> The chromebooks are a big win for us and the kids we serve.
How did you only get six Chromebooks for the price of four iPads?
I work in EdTech. I never thought the ipad ever made sense in the classroom and I'm not surprised that a netbook is beating back the tablet.
Input onto a tablet is clumsy at best. It is essentially a passive device. Yes, you can add an aftermarket keyboard and and an after market stand, but now you have a three part hacked together netbook instead of one that's designed with a keyboard and hinge from the get-go.
Further, tablets are a magnet for damage. A laptop screen can take localized damage and still mostly work. A tabket screen shatters. Plus the laptop screen is set back within the monitor component and the overall center of gravity means that a netbook is more likely to land on the keyboard side.
Finally, the software story is best for windows (web and native plus great management features), decent for chromebook, and worst for ipads.
Even outside of education, I don't think the iPad is useful for anything other than consumption.
I've seen some creative types using drawing applications on it, which is cool I guess, but for the most part I don't see it replacing a laptop/desktop just yet.
A lot of educational software is games as opposed to office software etc where the keyboard is the main / best input device. The iPad has done a lot in schools, especially the K-5 market, for example, see edtech like Osmo. You might not think it makes sense but students especially younger ones are benefiting from it every day.
(My mom is a teacher and I've helped her research and adopt a lot of this into her classroom including several iterations of iPads and augmented reality based learning games.)
Netbooks are also much more serviceable than tablets. At $20 a pop screens can basically be thought of as a wear item if you've got a large enough fleet deployed.
Let's be honest, most of the best studying time is still spent using pen & paper and exercise sheets. Even in 2017. Let's not fool ourselves, apps don't make you understand things quicker. The exception are very few select educational videos and some Wikipedia pages. Or programming on the PC, since that is much harder to learn without actual tools to run code.
My kids are both in high school right now. My observation is that they are largely platform agnostic. Of course the browser runs on any platform. That's their "terminal" for everything. They use Google Docs on whatever computer they're sitting at, and have figured out its collaborative features.
Just a few years ago it was very important for them to have a computer with the latest version of Office installed on it -- one for every kid in case they both got assignments at the same time -- but the teachers are now largely comfortable with Google Docs or Whatever. That 3-user Office 2010 license is probably my last commercial software purchase ever.
So it seems that the choice of platform is something that the grown ups worry about, but it doesn't affect the kids at all. Their school seems to have gone with Chromebooks.
About 8 or 10 years ago, my older daughters insisted that OpenOffice wasn't a "real" word processor, since it didn't look like MS Office on XP, and we were then running Ubuntu at home (since switched to OSX, but whatever...). Then one year, the school got "Vistafied", and the whole UI they were used to got scrambled. At that point, their eyes were opened, and they stopped complaining about the system at home being "different", as well as having to pay attention to using a compatible format, since MS graciously made them painfully aware of all that, anyway.
They are now pretty used to doing stuff on the net/cloud, with whatever disposable device/UI is around that year.
For standard school papers and reports there's no reason the standard text editor on whatever platform (e.g. Wordpad, or its Mac equivalent) should not be acceptable.
About 6 years ago I showed my oldest son (in 8th grade at the time) basic LaTeX to write papers and he would turn in the PDF files.
Sure it's all moved to Google docs now and that's fine, but the requirement for office suites never made sense.
Agreed! My wife is a 7-8 grade teacher in a private school and the people that have the most trouble with technology is, surprise, the adults. The kids pretty much get along with anything you give them access to. This means that Google Docs works fine, it even works on their home computer or the one at the library. And my wife does everything she can in Google Docs so that they even turn in their homework online. It's a win-win.
Apple seem to be in the same state of denial now that Microsoft were when Windows 8 came out. They believe touch-screen tablets are the future, and the way computing should be done, and ignore the desktop and laptop paradigm works much better for getting work done for a lot of people.
Microsoft realised their mistake and came out with Windows 10, which works well across both tablets and desktops/laptops. Apple seem to have doubled-down. The future looks prettier for the former.
How has Microsoft realised their Windows 8 mistake? Win10 and WinPhone10 are more of the same (Win8), just even more buggy. Guess how many control panel dialog styles has Win10, oh right more than 5, dating all the way back to Win95. In what universe asked consumers to be spied by Microsoft, the "telemetry features" that cannot be turned off (just Basic or Full) and forced automatic updates that basically reinstall the full Windows and reset many settings - must be a dystopian 1984 universe where consumers are mindless slaves. No Microsoft has NOT learned from their mistake. They make more and more as the go the wrong direction. Will they (be forced to) make to do a 180 degree U-turn?
Apple stellar sales and profits with the first generation of iPads caused that state of denial from one side. Gaming profit going away from PCs (to consoles and tables) was the other side. Even apple neglected their laptops in favor of the profitable divisions.
Everyone wanted to have one 'App' store to profit as much as Google and Apple. Even Amazon has one nowadays. Steam filled a void.
What Microsoft realized is that they could add good hardware and a store to the Windows experience and get some of that profit.
> Microsoft realised their mistake and came out with Windows 10, which works well across both tablets and desktops/laptops. Apple seem to have doubled-down. The future looks prettier for the former.
Do you use Windows 10 on tablets? Because compared to iOS I find it very touch unfriendly and fidgety. I use it because I develop for the 3 eco systems, but Windows I for one cannot really use it without for anything useful without a mouse. I do not have that issue with iOS or Android.
I'm not a kid in school, but a highly paid software engineer and I have gone with a Chromebook. It does what I do, surf the internet and for 10+ hours on a single charge. When I want to do some programming, I just ssh into my several-year-old Linux desktop and use tmux + vim.
If ChromeOS opened up its Linux internals without using the crouton hack, it would destroy every other platform out there.
I am actually sad how schools are going to locked down, consumption based hardware. How many people here got their start in computers by messing with school computers to make them do new things? Now, the computer is just a "magic" locked black box to do homework on.
I have 2 iPads that I inherited. They are used 99% for watching videos. Expensive portable streaming TVs. My daughter practices typing and coding on her Chromebook. Paid $180 >2 years ago and it works perfectly.
Apple had an amazing product for schools and was dominating one-to-one laptop programs with their highly-repairable white plastic macbooks. And then they discontinued them to push iPads and the far-pricier macbook pros. Apple willingly jettisoned the school market to focus on consumers
Well, that was what we saw from outside. I'm partial to the notion that they actually believed they were going to have a broader appeal with iPads.
However, as a parent and as a long-time Apple user, I think they are completely incompetent at multi-user scenarios in general - Classroom 2.0 is "cute" but impractical in the few times I tried to help teachers to use it, iPad multi-user is nowhere to be seen in practice, and the price points are completely outrageous (my kids' school uses iPads).
To add insult to injury, parental control is also MIA (tangent, I know, but relevant in the overall picture).
Chromebooks walk all over that - they're cheaper, have pretty decent unified management (not really business-grade, but straightforward and effective enough for K12, for instance), and they have real keyboards.
Things start flaking out a bit upmarket (when you're in college, a Chromebook and Google services might not be the best computer/environment to use depending on your major, for a lot of reasons), but in general, and from what I picked up during a deep dive into the education segment a couple of months ago, I'm not surprised they're popular.
What I _am_ surprised (and then again, not much, really) is that Google and their hardware partners don't seem to tackle European markets in earnest. I had to buy a Chromebook in the US for my own use, and if I were to replace it today I would probably have to have something shipped from the US again - they are nowhere to be found in retail in my neck of the woods, and European online retailers only seem to stock a few outdated models.
So I guess the scenario the article describes is going to remain US-only for a long while.
> Apple willingly jettisoned the school market to focus on consumers
Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. The lack of bulk iPad management tools until recently (and I don't even know how good they are now) makes them almost unusable in a lot of school situations.
This is an unpopular opinion here, but I'll voice it anyway. There are serious privacy implications of using Chromebooks, particularly in schools where young students may not understand the degree and extent of online tracking going on in ChromeOS.
Since you cannot use a Chromebook fully without signing in, everything you do in the operating system is tracked and recorded by Google and tied to your identity. Why is this even considered remotely acceptable?
The amount of data that Google captures about students must simply be staggering.
It's simply not enough to say that the data is "anonymised" (a meaningless term when you have so much data about a user's online habits), or only viewed in aggregated form. This still means the data can be interrogated and mined for information in ways we can't begin to imagine.
It remains baffling why the tech industry is so silent on this important subject.
I had two chromebooks and I loved them. I could get done everything I need on daily basis except for printing. Printing is a bitch on chromebooks. I tried all Google cloud print, wifi print and all other things but printing was inconvenient so when my business picked up and I had to print shipping labels and packing slips I went ahead and purchased a Surface Book. Now the business grew and we have a separate warehouse with a windows pc there for printing purposes im stuck with this 1400 dollar Surface book, its great hardware but I hate Microsoft Software, honestly, I just dont think Microsoft is good with software. Other than their office suite everything else MS makes is subprime at best. I had to use the media player than comes preinstalled on windows 10 yesterday and once again I told mysel, MS software sucks. I cant wait for Google to work out the bugs in Android apps running on Chromebooks. Hoping to switch back to chromebook soon.
Chromebooks plus google classroom are all I see in my kids elementary school. Reminds me of the early days of Apple. Kind of funny that you can get a $200 chromebook and it has a touch screen. My $2,500 macbook pro only has a touchbar.
What I've heard from a school library: they have iPads and Chromebooks, and the kids all want the Chromebooks because keyboard. Now consider that the iPads cost twice as much.
I observed a similar pattern in my kids, who gave the impression that using laptops make someone look smarter or more capable (less limited) than someone who uses tablets or iPads. In other words, someone "graduates" from using tablets to using laptops.
I had thought that the convenient form factor of lighter, less frills tablets would make them continually more appealing to kids or less technical adults regardless of where the device is used. But that does not seem to be the preferred case in a school setting, especially as a student gets older. I think it reflects a desire to be taken more seriously, and the appearance of the tools being used matters a lot, even if the same type or quality of work could be done using a Chromebook or iPad.
So, some of this is about mode, input. But, a big factor in Chromebook adoption in schools has to do with the ease of enterprise deployment and management. Apple is far behind the curve here, and the amount of work to manage a school/class deployment (esp in the early days) was huge.
I work in a school where we have a bunch of iPads that get passed around from classroom to classroom. They are terrible. I wish they'd purchased Chromebooks instead but iPads are more impressive on a list of school features.
I am yet to see any Chromebook on sale besides a few discounters trying to get rid of them. Some of which already returned by customers, being sold with heavy discounts.
The really scary part, to me, is the way a Google account is now effectively mandatory for a large section of US children. Sure, it's a "school account", but that doesn't stop them from being data mined or advertised to. I do not think such practises should be normalised at an early age, or sanctioned in an official capacity.
"I think the iPad is still the best device, especially if you want to do real work ... While the Google apps are very powerful, you’re limited in what you can do in a web browser."
Every platform has limitations. Windows and Mac seem to have the least. But does "real work" just mean whatever device you like best?
My kids' school system starts students on Google Docs in 3rd grade (running on OS X/macOS), and almost all of the other classes that require special applications use browser-based apps. We got my daughter a $300 Acer Chromebook when she reached 8th grade and one of the best things about it is I almost never have to provide technical support.
The exception is setting up printing -- Google Cloud Print, printer companies, and wifi router manufacturers leave a lot to be desired when it comes to setting up wireless printing.
Back in the 80's we had computer labs full of Apple II's, which were used for educational (for the most part) games like Number Munchers, Carmen San Diego, and Oregon Trail. Then maybe some Print Shop, teaching typing, and using the computers to write reports for other classes.
They did the job perfectly well - why aren't today's computers being used for the same things? You don't even need books. Class, take out your device and open Wikipedia to the article on volcanoes...
[+] [-] OliverJones|8 years ago|reply
Then a local teacher intervened and said, no, no, no, get Chromebooks. We did. We got six for the same money. They're compatible with the local school IT systems. They reset themselves when somebody logs off, so we don't have to worry about what the kids install on them.
THEY HAVE KEYBOARDS! Kids can use them to for written-word assignments without futzing around with the onscreen keyboards.
They aren't quite as game-focused as the iPads. That means we get less squabbling over who gets to use them and for what. (I've taken to leaving my iPad at home because it's an attractive nuisance.)
They're cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if one gets damaged.
The chromebooks are a big win for us and the kids we serve.
[+] [-] keithpeter|8 years ago|reply
Can be used on recycled laptops. Provides Chromeos. Free for personal (no support). I have no connection with neverware other than being impressed with their work when I tried it on a 9 year old Thinkpad.
[+] [-] Isamu|8 years ago|reply
The youngest kids still should get tablets though (if anything.)
Just pointing out that it's still a matter of what's appropriate for a particular classroom, never one size fits all.
[+] [-] Fiahil|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dexterdog|8 years ago|reply
> Then a local teacher intervened and said, no, no, no, get Chromebooks. We did. We got six for the same money. They're compatible with the local school IT systems. They reset themselves when somebody logs off, so we don't have to worry about what the kids install on them.
> THEY HAVE KEYBOARDS! Kids can use them to for written-word assignments without futzing around with the onscreen keyboards.
> They aren't quite as game-focused as the iPads. That means we get less squabbling over who gets to use them and for what. (I've taken to leaving my iPad at home because it's an attractive nuisance.)
> They're cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if one gets damaged.
> The chromebooks are a big win for us and the kids we serve.
How did you only get six Chromebooks for the price of four iPads?
[+] [-] bradleyjg|8 years ago|reply
Input onto a tablet is clumsy at best. It is essentially a passive device. Yes, you can add an aftermarket keyboard and and an after market stand, but now you have a three part hacked together netbook instead of one that's designed with a keyboard and hinge from the get-go.
Further, tablets are a magnet for damage. A laptop screen can take localized damage and still mostly work. A tabket screen shatters. Plus the laptop screen is set back within the monitor component and the overall center of gravity means that a netbook is more likely to land on the keyboard side.
Finally, the software story is best for windows (web and native plus great management features), decent for chromebook, and worst for ipads.
[+] [-] djhworld|8 years ago|reply
I've seen some creative types using drawing applications on it, which is cool I guess, but for the most part I don't see it replacing a laptop/desktop just yet.
[+] [-] bluedino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedmiston|8 years ago|reply
https://www.playosmo.com/en/
(My mom is a teacher and I've helped her research and adopt a lot of this into her classroom including several iterations of iPads and augmented reality based learning games.)
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kenji|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotjosh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|8 years ago|reply
Just a few years ago it was very important for them to have a computer with the latest version of Office installed on it -- one for every kid in case they both got assignments at the same time -- but the teachers are now largely comfortable with Google Docs or Whatever. That 3-user Office 2010 license is probably my last commercial software purchase ever.
So it seems that the choice of platform is something that the grown ups worry about, but it doesn't affect the kids at all. Their school seems to have gone with Chromebooks.
[+] [-] Roboprog|8 years ago|reply
About 8 or 10 years ago, my older daughters insisted that OpenOffice wasn't a "real" word processor, since it didn't look like MS Office on XP, and we were then running Ubuntu at home (since switched to OSX, but whatever...). Then one year, the school got "Vistafied", and the whole UI they were used to got scrambled. At that point, their eyes were opened, and they stopped complaining about the system at home being "different", as well as having to pay attention to using a compatible format, since MS graciously made them painfully aware of all that, anyway.
They are now pretty used to doing stuff on the net/cloud, with whatever disposable device/UI is around that year.
[+] [-] ams6110|8 years ago|reply
About 6 years ago I showed my oldest son (in 8th grade at the time) basic LaTeX to write papers and he would turn in the PDF files.
Sure it's all moved to Google docs now and that's fine, but the requirement for office suites never made sense.
[+] [-] robotjosh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ourmandave|8 years ago|reply
But next year is college so the choices are Windows or Mac?
[+] [-] Corrado|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|8 years ago|reply
Microsoft realised their mistake and came out with Windows 10, which works well across both tablets and desktops/laptops. Apple seem to have doubled-down. The future looks prettier for the former.
[+] [-] SomeStupidPoint|8 years ago|reply
And if I'm using those, why wouldn't I want a laptop?
[+] [-] frik|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shorel|8 years ago|reply
Everyone wanted to have one 'App' store to profit as much as Google and Apple. Even Amazon has one nowadays. Steam filled a void.
What Microsoft realized is that they could add good hardware and a store to the Windows experience and get some of that profit.
[+] [-] tluyben2|8 years ago|reply
Do you use Windows 10 on tablets? Because compared to iOS I find it very touch unfriendly and fidgety. I use it because I develop for the 3 eco systems, but Windows I for one cannot really use it without for anything useful without a mouse. I do not have that issue with iOS or Android.
[+] [-] was_boring|8 years ago|reply
If ChromeOS opened up its Linux internals without using the crouton hack, it would destroy every other platform out there.
[+] [-] AnOscelot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedmiston|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microtonal|8 years ago|reply
(I am a Mac user, but Windows + WSL would probably be my first choice after a Mac. Especially if Microsoft would stop spying on their users.)
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pryelluw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarvuschris|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|8 years ago|reply
However, as a parent and as a long-time Apple user, I think they are completely incompetent at multi-user scenarios in general - Classroom 2.0 is "cute" but impractical in the few times I tried to help teachers to use it, iPad multi-user is nowhere to be seen in practice, and the price points are completely outrageous (my kids' school uses iPads).
To add insult to injury, parental control is also MIA (tangent, I know, but relevant in the overall picture).
Chromebooks walk all over that - they're cheaper, have pretty decent unified management (not really business-grade, but straightforward and effective enough for K12, for instance), and they have real keyboards.
Things start flaking out a bit upmarket (when you're in college, a Chromebook and Google services might not be the best computer/environment to use depending on your major, for a lot of reasons), but in general, and from what I picked up during a deep dive into the education segment a couple of months ago, I'm not surprised they're popular.
What I _am_ surprised (and then again, not much, really) is that Google and their hardware partners don't seem to tackle European markets in earnest. I had to buy a Chromebook in the US for my own use, and if I were to replace it today I would probably have to have something shipped from the US again - they are nowhere to be found in retail in my neck of the woods, and European online retailers only seem to stock a few outdated models.
So I guess the scenario the article describes is going to remain US-only for a long while.
[+] [-] mcphage|8 years ago|reply
Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. The lack of bulk iPad management tools until recently (and I don't even know how good they are now) makes them almost unusable in a lot of school situations.
[+] [-] open-source-ux|8 years ago|reply
Since you cannot use a Chromebook fully without signing in, everything you do in the operating system is tracked and recorded by Google and tied to your identity. Why is this even considered remotely acceptable?
The amount of data that Google captures about students must simply be staggering.
It's simply not enough to say that the data is "anonymised" (a meaningless term when you have so much data about a user's online habits), or only viewed in aggregated form. This still means the data can be interrogated and mined for information in ways we can't begin to imagine.
It remains baffling why the tech industry is so silent on this important subject.
[+] [-] elvirs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgot-my-pw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eweise|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siosonel|8 years ago|reply
I had thought that the convenient form factor of lighter, less frills tablets would make them continually more appealing to kids or less technical adults regardless of where the device is used. But that does not seem to be the preferred case in a school setting, especially as a student gets older. I think it reflects a desire to be taken more seriously, and the appearance of the tools being used matters a lot, even if the same type or quality of work could be done using a Chromebook or iPad.
[+] [-] cypherpunks01|8 years ago|reply
We provision all new employees at our small manufacturing company with Chromebooks.
[+] [-] edtechstrats|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therobotking|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|8 years ago|reply
Here in Europe Windows still reigns supreme.
I am yet to see any Chromebook on sale besides a few discounters trying to get rid of them. Some of which already returned by customers, being sold with heavy discounts.
[+] [-] dTal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infosample|8 years ago|reply
Every platform has limitations. Windows and Mac seem to have the least. But does "real work" just mean whatever device you like best?
[+] [-] cptskippy|8 years ago|reply
I would say it's whatever device allows you to perform your job functions in the way that best suits your lifestyle.
[+] [-] ilamont|8 years ago|reply
The exception is setting up printing -- Google Cloud Print, printer companies, and wifi router manufacturers leave a lot to be desired when it comes to setting up wireless printing.
[+] [-] tacomonstrous|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|8 years ago|reply
They did the job perfectly well - why aren't today's computers being used for the same things? You don't even need books. Class, take out your device and open Wikipedia to the article on volcanoes...