Chromebooks for Staff

[Simon57]

Morning all 

 

Would really appreciate some advice on Chromebooks for staff - What are people purchasing- What kind of costs are they - What experiences are you finding? We need to replace a number of devices but i just can't find good devices with what i feel will have longevity. I don't feel overly confident buying devices with old processors and I also have the most ridiculous budget to do it from (I'm sure everyone experiences this too)

 

Welcome any feedback - And many thanks in advance!

[TheHyperTechie]

You will want Chromebook Plus models for staff. I haven't looked at pricing for a while from suppliers, but I think they range from anywhere between £4-500. We got these for some staff a while ago. Great laptops.

 

EDIT - If budgets are tight (understandably) we have used these for staff chromebooks as well. Despite the lower spec processor, they still perform very well, and we haven't had any complaints!

Edited October 1 by TheHyperTechie

[msi_school]

We use Chromebook plus devices and they are great, they do cost the same as a decent laptop so there is no initial cost saving but the the TCO is much lower.

 

We did run into issues with most Chromebook pluses being 16:10 and some of the staff hating this because it puts letterbox borders on the interactive screen especially if the initial slide is 16:9 where it does a double letterbox so you might want to test this out with the users before purchase.

[TIOAOA]

On a similar vein. What's everyone giving to the pupils these days. We used to go with the Lenovo 300e's but these are no longer available and the 500's which replace them are significantly more expensive.

[TheHyperTechie]

1 minute ago, TIOAOA said:

On a similar vein. What's everyone giving to the pupils these days. We used to go with the Lenovo 300e's but these are no longer available and the 500's which replace them are significantly more expensive.

Our most recent 1:1 batch (~120 devices) were the Dell 3100s. They are holding up well, and have auto updates until 2029. Went with Dell mainly due to the easy repairs, I can go online and buy pretty much any part for them and repair in house.

[aydee]

45 minutes ago, TIOAOA said:

On a similar vein. What's everyone giving to the pupils these days. We used to go with the Lenovo 300e's but these are no longer available and the 500's which replace them are significantly more expensive.

HP Fortis G1M's. decent chromebooks. they are about £200, but have HDMI out, both via HDMI and usbc which is a bonus for us as some rooms have usbc docks.

[Sephiroth]

For staff, I'd stick to T1 suppliers. We have Dell 5400s for all our teachers, which are now coming up to 7 years old. I would recommend going with at least 14" devices for staff if it's their primary device. Never been an issue with Dell for warranty or replacement, and we've had very few deaths - the majority of which were user damage. All we have had to do is replace some of the batteries, which is fairly straight forward to do.

 

For students, we have a mix. Mostly Dell 3100s and 5190s, but we also have a lot of DFE supplied devices from 'That Era'. The HP 11 G8s we have are pretty good. The worst ones we have are Asus. All our student Chromebooks are 11", which I would say is a bit small for most things.

 

Edit: The only thing to watch out for with Dell is when they have Chrome and Windows devices in the same model, and you need to contact support, you have to be quite firm that it's a Chromebook and you can't look at the BIOS, because there isn't one...