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I went to a school where we used chrome books. We paid a 500 euro deposit I believe upfront and signed a contract that obliged us to use the machine appropriate
by er4din 4y ago
I went to a school where we used chrome books. We paid a 500 euro deposit I believe upfront and signed a contract that obliged us to use the machine appropriately and that any damage resulting from failing to do so is our fault yada yada. By the end of the curriculum the computer moves into being our own property and the school wipes it from the network so to speak and it’s factory reset.
The reality is that at this point it’s a piece of old junk that no one wants since it’s been in constant use for like 4 years, and yes I went to a privileged school which hopped onto the idea as soon as it was publicly available.
I talked to our it department and they confirm the fact that chrombooks make the back end work of the it department so so so much easier, as does the rest of the google interface. They no longer deal with individual account backups, data storage and network access, being able to focus on what is accessible from the school network and solving hardware problems with the machines themselves, as well as some additional maintenances on PC systems that were present I. Every classroom dedicated to each teacher which we’re not chrome books but ran windows 7 instead, up until a year or 2 ago I believe.
Chrome books have an arguably larger upfront cost bit a reduced maintenance cost which may make them more economical depending on the scale you work on and you budget. As I said I went to a privileged school with around 1k kids as of last year I believe so it may have been a good choice there, the school is not in Denmark btw.
I personally am more interested in knowing what are the alternative options to the chrome books that denmarkian schools can switch to now that chrome books are out of the picture, because let’s face it, we’re not going to back to pen and paper days because of this. I found some HP made notepads that run windows 10 and are visually resembling chrome books in addition to being in the same price range of 400 euro. Does anyone have any better guesses as to what the switch could be made to?
- sliken 4y agoThat all makes sense and lines up with my experience. Schools have a hard time keeping IT staff, as soon as you manage a school district for a year or two you can double or triple your salary elsewhere. So the near adminless part of chomebooks is quite valuable, doubly so when every IT lead seems to want to go in a different direction. I do question the utility of laptops vs desktops. Assuming students aren't on the laptop during every class. If you assume say 1-2 hour a day of laptop time and access to a web browser at home you could save much of the waste of throwing away a laptop every 4 years. LCD panels can easily last 10 years, and batteries are often the first thing to die on laptops. I've built diskless linux desktops for educational settings, with a bit of tweaking was pretty much seamless for users. Literally had a browser, matlab, mathematic, maple, and print icons on the desktop and didn't do any training for incoming students. We'd buy 100 at a time or so and they would last 6-8 years, and each one met the needs of 4-10 students. Cost (and environmental impact) is quite a bit less for a mac mini/Intel NUC and similar SFFS than a laptop.