Moving to Chromebooks

[jamoritch]

Hello,

 

A school that I support are looking at different options moving forward with their ICT. The head wants to implement a VLE, probably Moodle. To go with this he wants to get more laptops and is looking into Chromebooks. We are currently on a domain environment with one DC and an appserver controlling the DHCP etc. Does anybody have any recommendations/warnings/advice on what swapping to Chromebooks would be like and if it is a viable option for the school?

 

Cheers

[FN-GM]

We have a large Chromebook estate over 5 schools. Works really well. Instead of Moodle I would look at Google Classroom. We switched from Moodle to this many years ago.

 

Are you keeping Windows machines as well?

[TMBS]

We moved to Chromebooks 5 years ago and have never looked back, they are brilliant! They just work. We have a few issues with students swapping keys and changing the language but apart from that they are easy to manage.

 

Teachers love them in the classroom, they boot up in 8 seconds. The Google Admin Console is easy to configure, so setup, management is great! And above Chromebooks are much cheaper than laptops and the Google Admin Console, Email, Google Classroom are all free.

 

We had a class set to trial from a company call C Learning, which was really useful too.

[FN-GM]

We have a few issues with students swapping keys and changing the language but apart from that they are easy to manage.

 

There are newish policies to stop this.

[jamoritch]

Thanks for the replies guys - so after the swap to Chromebooks, does the google admin console completely replace your DC? We would be looking to keep ours as we have the admin machines and the machines that run the IWB's that would still be running Windows. We are also using Office365 currently so if we were to go down the Chromebooks route, I would imagine it makes sense to swap to gmail too.

[TMBS]

No we still have our DC as you'd still need that to manage IPs, etc. All our staff/students have a Gmail account (they need one to log on to the Chromebook) but that gives them all an email and the Google equivalent to Office 365, Slide, Sheets and Docs. Plus they get unlimited cloud storage with a Education account.

[jamoritch]

So, in terms of managing the Chromebooks - is that done through GPO's like a Windows machine or do you use a separate console? User's etc still managed through AD or a separate console?

 

Cheers

[TMBS]

Everything is done through the Google Admin Console. You just need your DC to manage IPs and WIFI. Who do you use for broadband/filtering? We had a few issues with that initially but most companies are now up and running with Chromebooks.

[jamoritch]

We go through a smoothwall server hosted by the LA. I'm sure we'll be fine getting that sorted.

[jmak]

+1 for Chromebooks

+1 for C Learning - really helpful and best prices I found by miles

 

We use AD to automatically provision our Google accounts, so still useful to have a DC.

[TMBS]

We go through a smoothwall server hosted by the LA. I'm sure we'll be fine getting that sorted.

Yes it will work fine with Smoothwall, they have it all preconfigured and ready to go. You'll just have to import their certificate into the Google console but Smoothwall support will help with that.

[TMBS]

We use AD to automatically provision our Google accounts, so still useful to have a DC.

 

How did you do that? Would make life much easier!

[jmak]

Using Azure AD connect, as we're using O365 as well. You can set up Active Directory Synchronisation/federation from Google admin.

[PotNoodleTech]

If you are looking to deploy chromebooks, do not use moodle, use google and google classroom as it integrates 100% with the chromebooks all on one system managed through one google admin interface.