6 ms·

from the post: > Schools in the US are now buying more Chromebooks than all other devices combined -- and in Q1 of this year, Chromebooks topped Macs in overal

by spot 10y ago

from the post: > Schools in the US are now buying more Chromebooks than all other devices combined -- and in Q1 of this year, Chromebooks topped Macs in overall shipments to become the #2 most popular PC operating system in the US*. that's pretty amazing actually. congrats to google & the chromebook team!

danso 10y ago
Pretty heartening too...for awhile, I was worried that computerized education would be limited to tablets.
- AckSyn 10y ago
  Tablets aren't really a problem when it comes to education. It's only a shift in how we do computing vs what we do it in. They've built tablets. We (developers) need to build the software that does more than consume our time, but allow us to create the content for others. Sadly, it's not there yet, but in time it will be. I don't doubt the computing capacity is there for a company to create a 3D modeling program for a tablet that's either touch driven, or a combo that includes a mouse and/or keyboard. There are already suites out there for image manipulation, music and video creation etc. If I could purchase a tablet and then a full (3D) CAD or other modeling software for it, I'd drop the money in a heartbeat.
  - om42 10y ago
    I don't really do much CAD but have lots of friends who do. Wouldn't you end up needing a keyboard and a mouse to be productive CADing on the tablet? Which would defeat the form factor of the tablet. There does seem to be a market for CADing on tablets as seen in Onshape. But I have never seen any of my friends use it (Mechanical engineering students and industry tends to favor SOLIDWORKS and sometimes CREO)
    - AckSyn 10y ago
      If the design of the CAD software were designed around the usage of a touch screen, and I don't think one would have to be constrained to require its use. I'm not saying they'd have to use the on-screen keyboard but build the interface to work well with a touch screen using what's already established in most programs (pinch, twist, tap and drag an item off a pallet or adjust its size etc).
      - jimjimjim 10y ago
        I've spent a bit of time working on an imaging application (not CAD but building plans) and whenever desktops vs tablets comes up everybody eventually realizes just how huge their fingers are and the meeting moves on to another topic.
        euyyn 10y ago
        I thought the iPad had pens like the Surface?
- stephenr 10y ago
  Right, its much better if computerised education is limited to browser based applications.
  - simula67 10y ago
    You realize the article is about Android apps coming to Chrome OS, right ?
    - stephenr 10y ago
      You realise that every single school/education department that chose to use Chromebooks did so knowing that they would not run anything but web apps, right? Additionally, this announcement of a future release lists very specific models of Chromebooks that will support Android apps. Honestly, Android (and Google's management of the situation) has a fucking terrible track record when it comes to support and updates for devices. Lastly - if you think that apps designed to run on a smartphone and later frankenstein'd onto a low cost laptop form-factor with a browser-as-the-os tagline, I think you should prepare to be surprised.
Mahn 10y ago
Anecdotal, but when our app got featured on the Chrome Web Store, we saw "clusters" of people coming from single IPs and running Chrome OS, which we would later find out to be US high-schools; for us that was pretty interesting, the realization that a lot of students in the US actively run Chrome OS, we certainly didn't plan for it.
userbinator 10y ago
I hate to be the contrarian one in a thread full of Google fans, but I'd consider this trend of schools flocking to locked-down and largely cloud-dependent computing devices to be pretty freaking scary. Start them young, get them accustomed to and comfortable with the idea of some huge company having great knowledge of and control over their online lives... it's a great business plan, but one that I would certainly object to my kids participating in.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  To be fair most of these schools probably already have iPads anyway. My mom's school gave out iPads and MacBooks to teachers and classrooms like crazy.
- Adaptive 10y ago
  I understand this concern. I've helped deploy chromebooks and linux based laptops and pcs at my daughters school. I am pro open source and would love to see lots of digging into understanding the systems. However I am also in favor of chromebooks. Here's why: The alternative to chromebooks isn't a glorious world of non-locked down non-cloud dependent machines. It's a world of poorly managed, crappy windows boxes. A world where students pass around USB keys. A world that is at least as locked down as a chromebook but much less secure and in many ways less flexible. Chromebooks, as locked down and hermetically sealed as they are as an ecosystem, are great for one simple reason: they free up time and resources. I'd rather see a fleet of chromebooks that are dead simple to manage and deploy and then take all that extra time and money and spend it on equipment a linux or osx or whatever based lab full of machines students can hack on and learn to code on and hook up to actuators or whatever they want to do. 90% of computer management in a school is dealing with day to day "can't print / how to load a document / etc". I've seen this completely evaporate at my daughter's school after rolling out chromebooks. It's amazing. So bring on chromebooks as locked down, easy to manage dedicated "get homework done" devices and free up time and money (because man are they cheap) to teach programming and hardware and everything else in a real computer lab.
  - stephenr 10y ago
jalami 10y ago
Congrats on the adoption, although I still don't think it's moving our public institutions in the right direction. It's really just moving a lot more kids into a walled garden. I know Google has been in hot water for collecting student data recently and has since taken steps to fix it. That's their primary business model though. "Anonymizing" promises always follow and then it's a trust game again. I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs. Sure this is great for Google, but I think our public institutions suffer from such a third-party centrality. I remember at UW-Madison, it was annoying having to pay for a semester long subscription to whatever the professor decided was a good cms for the class, but at least the costs were explicit and there wasn't a monopoly player in the field that everyone had to use. IMHO, Google is more interested in getting people into the garden than it is in selling hardware or fostering education.
- groovypuppy 10y ago
  "I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs." This is not the future. This is now. At the school district where I volunteer as a computer instructor, all the first graders already have a Google account that will follow them throughout their grades. In fact their user names include the year they are expected to graduate. They are teaching first graders how to use Google docs. Editing a Google doc is their first big lesson. I see them as walled in, but from their perspective the Google ecosystem is all there is to the internet.
  - aedron 10y ago
    Same thing here, only they are using Microsoft's cloud stuff for MS Office. These cloud suites are just too convenient not to use, and as long as there is no open and free alternative, it seems schools are stuck choosing between one of the oligopolists.
- danieldk 10y ago
zepto 10y ago
Since iPads oursell macs by a significant margin this is just a typical distorted comparison by IDC.
groundCode 10y ago
Interesting. Does that mean they have relaxed their t&c on how old you have to be to get a google account? I seem to remember a few years back google deleted an email account that some parents had set up for their child to email their grandparents.

by spot 10y ago

danso 10y ago

Pretty heartening too...for awhile, I was worried that computerized education would be limited to tablets.

AckSyn 10y ago
Tablets aren't really a problem when it comes to education. It's only a shift in how we do computing vs what we do it in. They've built tablets. We (developers) need to build the software that does more than consume our time, but allow us to create the content for others. Sadly, it's not there yet, but in time it will be. I don't doubt the computing capacity is there for a company to create a 3D modeling program for a tablet that's either touch driven, or a combo that includes a mouse and/or keyboard. There are already suites out there for image manipulation, music and video creation etc. If I could purchase a tablet and then a full (3D) CAD or other modeling software for it, I'd drop the money in a heartbeat.
- om42 10y ago
  I don't really do much CAD but have lots of friends who do. Wouldn't you end up needing a keyboard and a mouse to be productive CADing on the tablet? Which would defeat the form factor of the tablet. There does seem to be a market for CADing on tablets as seen in Onshape. But I have never seen any of my friends use it (Mechanical engineering students and industry tends to favor SOLIDWORKS and sometimes CREO)
  - AckSyn 10y ago
    If the design of the CAD software were designed around the usage of a touch screen, and I don't think one would have to be constrained to require its use. I'm not saying they'd have to use the on-screen keyboard but build the interface to work well with a touch screen using what's already established in most programs (pinch, twist, tap and drag an item off a pallet or adjust its size etc).
    - jimjimjim 10y ago
      I've spent a bit of time working on an imaging application (not CAD but building plans) and whenever desktops vs tablets comes up everybody eventually realizes just how huge their fingers are and the meeting moves on to another topic.
      - euyyn 10y ago
        I thought the iPad had pens like the Surface?
stephenr 10y ago
Right, its much better if computerised education is limited to browser based applications.
- simula67 10y ago
  You realize the article is about Android apps coming to Chrome OS, right ?
  - stephenr 10y ago
    You realise that every single school/education department that chose to use Chromebooks did so knowing that they would not run anything but web apps, right? Additionally, this announcement of a future release lists very specific models of Chromebooks that will support Android apps. Honestly, Android (and Google's management of the situation) has a fucking terrible track record when it comes to support and updates for devices. Lastly - if you think that apps designed to run on a smartphone and later frankenstein'd onto a low cost laptop form-factor with a browser-as-the-os tagline, I think you should prepare to be surprised.

Mahn 10y ago

Anecdotal, but when our app got featured on the Chrome Web Store, we saw "clusters" of people coming from single IPs and running Chrome OS, which we would later find out to be US high-schools; for us that was pretty interesting, the realization that a lot of students in the US actively run Chrome OS, we certainly didn't plan for it.

userbinator 10y ago

I hate to be the contrarian one in a thread full of Google fans, but I'd consider this trend of schools flocking to locked-down and largely cloud-dependent computing devices to be pretty freaking scary. Start them young, get them accustomed to and comfortable with the idea of some huge company having great knowledge of and control over their online lives... it's a great business plan, but one that I would certainly object to my kids participating in.

sotojuan 10y ago
To be fair most of these schools probably already have iPads anyway. My mom's school gave out iPads and MacBooks to teachers and classrooms like crazy.
Adaptive 10y ago
I understand this concern. I've helped deploy chromebooks and linux based laptops and pcs at my daughters school. I am pro open source and would love to see lots of digging into understanding the systems. However I am also in favor of chromebooks. Here's why: The alternative to chromebooks isn't a glorious world of non-locked down non-cloud dependent machines. It's a world of poorly managed, crappy windows boxes. A world where students pass around USB keys. A world that is at least as locked down as a chromebook but much less secure and in many ways less flexible. Chromebooks, as locked down and hermetically sealed as they are as an ecosystem, are great for one simple reason: they free up time and resources. I'd rather see a fleet of chromebooks that are dead simple to manage and deploy and then take all that extra time and money and spend it on equipment a linux or osx or whatever based lab full of machines students can hack on and learn to code on and hook up to actuators or whatever they want to do. 90% of computer management in a school is dealing with day to day "can't print / how to load a document / etc". I've seen this completely evaporate at my daughter's school after rolling out chromebooks. It's amazing. So bring on chromebooks as locked down, easy to manage dedicated "get homework done" devices and free up time and money (because man are they cheap) to teach programming and hardware and everything else in a real computer lab.
- stephenr 10y ago

jalami 10y ago

Congrats on the adoption, although I still don't think it's moving our public institutions in the right direction. It's really just moving a lot more kids into a walled garden. I know Google has been in hot water for collecting student data recently and has since taken steps to fix it. That's their primary business model though. "Anonymizing" promises always follow and then it's a trust game again. I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs. Sure this is great for Google, but I think our public institutions suffer from such a third-party centrality. I remember at UW-Madison, it was annoying having to pay for a semester long subscription to whatever the professor decided was a good cms for the class, but at least the costs were explicit and there wasn't a monopoly player in the field that everyone had to use. IMHO, Google is more interested in getting people into the garden than it is in selling hardware or fostering education.

groovypuppy 10y ago
"I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs." This is not the future. This is now. At the school district where I volunteer as a computer instructor, all the first graders already have a Google account that will follow them throughout their grades. In fact their user names include the year they are expected to graduate. They are teaching first graders how to use Google docs. Editing a Google doc is their first big lesson. I see them as walled in, but from their perspective the Google ecosystem is all there is to the internet.
- aedron 10y ago
  Same thing here, only they are using Microsoft's cloud stuff for MS Office. These cloud suites are just too convenient not to use, and as long as there is no open and free alternative, it seems schools are stuck choosing between one of the oligopolists.
danieldk 10y ago

zepto 10y ago

Since iPads oursell macs by a significant margin this is just a typical distorted comparison by IDC.

groundCode 10y ago

Interesting. Does that mean they have relaxed their t&c on how old you have to be to get a google account? I seem to remember a few years back google deleted an email account that some parents had set up for their child to email their grandparents.