Chromebooks are they like marmite ?

[ictgoodpractice]

Love to hear from any secondary state or independent or prep schools who only use Chromebooks.

 

What are the plus and minus please.

 

Only ever used M365 and teams etc PCs/laptops for kids and staff and tried surface gos

[synaesthesia]

Don't only use them, but as long as you understand what they are and don't think of them as a laptop, then you're golden. Just think of it as a browser on a box - and usually that's all you need these days.

[Ratcliffepg]

We are an independent school and all students from year 4 to year 11 have a Chromebook, I cannot think of many minus... simple and easy to use for students, all managed from Google admin, we use Google Classroom instead of teams.

[PotNoodleTech]

A main short summary is.

 

Fully integrated with google ecosystem so if the school already uses classroom your users will fly with it with virtually zero training.

Easier to use for Pupils

Easier to use for Teachers

Easier to manage for IT Admins

Cheaper

As already said no real training implications as the layout of everything is so much easier to understand than MS products you can give a chromebook to a 5 year old and theyll just crack on. (try getting a 5 year old to join a teams meet or navigate onedrive stuff, etc).

 

No real negative points that I can think of unless you desperatly love MS and desperatly hate Google.

[gszech]

They just work.

[jthompson]

Yep, designed for education and it shows. It's almost as if the people behind it looked at schools and thought "Hmm. All the users move about the place every hour to do different things. The computers need to have almost instant startup and sign-in, be shared devices first and foremost and have unobtrusive, bullet-proof, hands-free updates".

Windows has a distinctly different disposition to that (assumption of a single, all-day-each-day user who can work around massive, work-blocking updates).

[dhicks]

What are the plus and minus please.

 

Some additional pluses:

 

- You seem to be able to get a device with all the features that you'd want for a school device (good enough processor, RAM and local storage, good battery life, full-flip design, stylus support, front-and--rear cameras, general robustness / ease of repair) at a better price than the equivalent Windows device. There's probably not a huge difference per device, but it does add up if you're buying hundreds at a time.

- Management license fee is a £30-ish one-off fee, which you can factor in as part of the purchase price, which makes for a more easily-managed budget. Overall licensing costs for Google Workspace and Office 365 are probably getting close to each other, although our Google licensing costs are still less per year than Microsoft.

- ChromeOS / Google Workspace has good built-in support for management of kiosk devices - great for displays, or any single-use device you want.

- Filtering, with a client-side filtering application added to Google Workspace accounts, is nice and easy. If a pupil uses a Chromebook at home (and they are cheap enough to buy, or even cheaper if you re-use an old laptop with ChromeOS Flex) and logs on with their school account they get all the plugins and add-ons the school might have licensed, including any filtering. This makes for a nice, easy way to give parents a school-filtered device for home. Of course, as soon as they log off their school account and log on with a standard Google account they can get past any filtering, so some supervision would still be needed.

 

One problem which I can think of: no-one seems to do ChromeOS devices with nice built-in cameras. Our Reception classrooms still use iPads for taking photos as they found the Chromebook cameras weren't really that good.

[Jamman960]

Similar to Ratcliffepg - we're an independent school with all pupils from Y3 to Y11 using 1:1 chromebooks

 

Its generally gone very well with more and more work being moved into Google classroom.

 

Teachers are still on windows at the moment but seriously considering switching when the next major refresh comes around in a couple of years.

[Chris_Cook]

They are great at what they do, and fairly easy to manage in bulk. Cost is great. Much better for schools than windows laptops.

 

The main issue we have (Other than kids breaking everything) is some old software like 2dDesign, Adobe CS, etc.

 

There is this for auditing your windows software: https://chromeosreadinesstool.com/

 

The other thing is a lot of the 14 inch CBs we use for staff aren't as robust as I would like.

 

We have over 3000 in our trust (1-2-1 for years 7-11, plus trolleys in each of our primary schools), and we've managed to get rid of all our general purpose IT rooms, with just ones left for Computer Science, DT, Music and Media.

 

We get probably about 1 or 2 breakages a day, but I think any device would break given the same mis-treatment.

 

Other than repairs, providing spares for students who forgot and the usual online behavior management, they don't really cause us much extra work from a technical perspective.

[dhicks]

Teachers are still on windows at the moment but seriously considering switching when the next major refresh comes around in a couple of years.

 

Staff seem to be increasing unaware that there's a difference between different operating systems (which is a good thing - staff shouldn't need to be concerned with the technical aspects of how computing services are delivered). We switched out one of the (very) old iMacs from our Art room when the hardware started to fail, swapping it for a (not much newer) Chromebase. The Art department complained they wanted the Mac back as they were more familiar with how it worked - despite it having been running ChromeOS Flex since we installed it up there! The only difference between the two machines was the colour and shape of the device, plus the big Apple logo on the back of the Mac.

[PotNoodleTech]

Staff seem to be increasing unaware that there's a difference between different operating systems (which is a good thing - staff shouldn't need to be concerned with the technical aspects of how computing services are delivered). We switched out one of the (very) old iMacs from our Art room when the hardware started to fail, swapping it for a (not much newer) Chromebase. The Art department complained they wanted the Mac back as they were more familiar with how it worked - despite it having been running ChromeOS Flex since we installed it up there! The only difference between the two machines was the colour and shape of the device, plus the big Apple logo on the back of the Mac.

 

haha that's brilliant.

[paulkerton]

My favourite thing is when teachers insist they have to use Windows, and then proceed to open a browser and work in it all day.

[dhicks]

My favourite thing is when teachers insist they have to use Windows, and then proceed to open a browser and work in it all day.

 

Exactly - and I think it highlights that the users (teachers, in this case, probably other staff and pupils as well) aren't hearing quite the same question we think we're asking them. I'm not quite sure what the average teacher pictures in their head when someone says "Windows machine", but it seems quite likely they're thinking "nice new machine, with familiar login screen and background" more than "nice affordable, easy-to-manage device", which is maybe what we tend to think we're asking what they want.

[dhicks]

One problem which I can think of: no-one seems to do ChromeOS devices with nice built-in cameras.

 

Or dedicated ChromeOS desktop all-ine-one devices. We can, of course, buy a Windows (or Mac) all-in-one and reformat it with ChromeOS Flex, but there don't seem to be any cheaper Chomebases around at the moment. There are some snazzy devices for dedicated display screens and so on, but nothing that I can find by way of desktop machines. We can, of course, buy a cheap (£200) NUC-alike PC and mount that under or behind a monitor (£100), but that makes for several power plugs and cables, plus possibly a webcam, and we prefer nice neat all-in-ones for classroom setups as there's less to be tinkered with.

[mthomas08]

My favourite thing is when teachers insist they have to use Windows, and then proceed to open a browser and work in it all day.

 

Wait.. your teachers insist they use Windows? What kind of teacher breed are they? Ours insist software XYZ and even if we sneakly remove it.. within 1 day "where's XYZ!!!!". And yes.. software dating back to 2000.

Ugh..