Laptops or Chromebook?

[boomish]

We are a small school running old Lenovo Thinkpad's, they have got to the point where they are so slow it's almost unusable, (2 min boot times) we are talking to our IT supplier who are suggesting replacing them with Chromebooks we could do a trial but we still have to buy a license for £19 per laptop. I've looked at possible SSD upgrades and battery refurb options & we should move to Windows 10 next year but it would be good to see what options there are for new machines. Currently our thinking is running a mixed system of 30 or so of each, new Laptops & Chromebook and our existing iPad's, the new low cost MS/ Lenovo 300E (sub £300) looks good but no idea on the Chromebooks.

 

Any suggestions from people that have done this already? I'm concerned at all the downsides & limitations to Chromebooks, if these new Win10 low cost Lenovo's are going to be good for the same price why bother risking it. I presume the Chrome license is a one off Device management fee.

 

Appreciate any advice..

[FN-GM]

The Chrome licence is a one off. I have got them at £16 each recently. Do you have G Suite already?

 

we haven't purchased Laptops in 4 years, but instead purchased Chromebooks instead.

[boomish]

Thanks for the quick reply, we have G-suite yep we've been running Classroom & calendar apps for about 2 years, we use G drive on all the iPad's etc.

 

We would have to replace older software that won't run on Chromebooks but I think thats probably overdue especially all the old flash software. CPU heavy apps are a concern however but we have been doing things like video editing on the iPads and thats much simpler. Can you tell me where you got the licenses from? & what problems you've had changing over? I know there are lot of advantages & disadvantages I'm just wondering if the Chromebooks are the same money as the new Windows 10 machines whats the point. Are they really so much faster because it's all in a browser? what happens if there is a network problem ours is dreadfully slow at times.

[ShellfishClive]

We use Chromebooks in a fair amount of the schools that we support and they all love them. They are easy to setup and once the staff get their head around everything being in the cloud then they will like them as well.

[fiza]

Have a look at Cloud Ready by Neverware https://www.neverware.com/edu#eduintro

 

Basically converts old hardware into Chrome devices.

 

Might be life left in your Thinkpads yet depending on how much Cloudready costs you.

[PrimaryNetMan]

Another vote for Chromebooks. Some good Edu devices coming through. The new Lenovo's look interesting.

 

As mentioned CloudReady is another option - https://www.neverware.com/edu#edutitle. Minimum 30 devices for the purchase of the licences, looking at around £10.00 per device, per year. Been Trialling it on some 9yo Dell Optiplex 760s and it's ideal. - if you contact them they will provide some trial licences for you.

[boomish]

Many thanks for the tip off, that would be good to see, my fear is there are so many apps that will be lost and the teachers aren't tech savvy at all, just getting them to save to Google drive was tough, also I have heard of Chromebooks becoming obsolete after a few years. Mind you anything is better than our current laptops 2 mins + to boot is ridiculous. My PC at home is 30 secs and my Mac is under ten!

[fiza]

Many thanks for the tip off, that would be good to see, my fear is there are so many apps that will be lost and the teachers aren't tech savvy at all, just getting them to save to Google drive was tough, also I have heard of Chromebooks becoming obsolete after a few years. Mind you anything is better than our current laptops 2 mins + to boot is ridiculous. My PC at home is 30 secs and my Mac is under ten!

 

When you look at buying a Chromebook I would check its Auto Update Expiration date on this website https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

 

Make sure you get at least 4 year out of it. These dates do get extended sometimes.

[maark]

If you are using G suite and classroom I would definitely go for chromebooks - so easy to manage and use. Work is saved automatically in the background as students do it which is a plus. No windows updates/profiles etc. and resetting takes a few minutes if they get corrupted.

[boomish]

Thanks again for the reply, we use Classroom but minimal use & only for 1 year group..thats taken 2 years. I feel the priority is Fast boot times, easy login, quick apps, battery life and a rugged machine, but even with that I doubt the teachers will like the change, they don't understand the cloud & learning new apps is an uphill struggle. If they perform quickly on our network then that will be a huge benefit, the laptops are continually installing updates 24/7..(win 7). I'll have to grab a machine & test it..

[maark]

At a previous school we gave a dept 30 chromebooks - we thought they weren't using them because they never contacted IT support.

After checking they had been using them all the time and never had any issues :-)

[fiza]

Thanks again for the reply, we use Classroom but minimal use & only for 1 year group..thats taken 2 years. I feel the priority is Fast boot times, easy login, quick apps, battery life and a rugged machine, but even with that I doubt the teachers will like the change, they don't understand the cloud & learning new apps is an uphill struggle. If they perform quickly on our network then that will be a huge benefit, the laptops are continually installing updates 24/7..(win 7). I'll have to grab a machine & test it..

 

You can get a set of Chromebooks on a trial from C-Learning

 

C-Learning

[Sylv3r]

We use Chromebooks and will be buying some more and we use Office365 with them, equally as well as a Windows device.

 

There's also Windows S devices now too, but you will need Microsoft InTune to manage them similar to the google management licences.

[DavR]

After an extended period of fiddling with G Suite (it's not difficult, but I wanted to get it 'just so'), I released Chromebooks to our Year 5 classes on Monday, and they love them! I was concerned that giving every child an individual logon could be an issue (our Windows machine just have a single student logon) by apparently it hasn't been. We haven't got any apps yet, purely using them as Internet devices, I don't know if we'll go much beyond that.

 

We bought Dell Chromebook 3189s for £250 a piece, plus £19 each for management licenses. Cheaper models are available, but we liked this one.

[FN-GM]

" I was concerned that giving every child an individual logon could be an issue (our Windows machine just have a single student logon)."

 

According to Ofsted your year 5 students should be using their own account. If they are not this is is in indicator of an inadequate school. See page 9 of the attached.

Inspecting e-safety.docx

[DavR]

" I was concerned that giving every child an individual logon could be an issue (our Windows machine just have a single student logon)."

 

According to Ofsted your year 5 students should be using their own account. If they are not this is is in indicator of an inadequate school. See page 9 of the attached.

 

Eeep.

 

Thanks for that....

[FN-GM]

It isn't commonly advertised, its shocking really!