No testing, no production, no app installs, no backups, no training (at least for students), no managing licenses, no maintaining a custom collection of apps, etc.
Would macbooks or windows boxes be plausibly cheaper in any way?
Seems like most highschools give freshman a new chromebook, and then offer to sell it to the student for $25-$75 when they graduate. Said laptops often live on supporting the student or the student's family. My kid just graduated and is quite fond of her chromebook. It's pretty low power (some arm variant), 4gb ram, pretty durable case, and I expect it to live on for a few more years.
Sure chromebooks can get gross, but that's really only a issue if you plan to give them to multiple people. The laptop we got came with a get to know your laptop card that showed you how to recover from pouring a soda on your keyboard, generally open, shake, and don't close the lid for a few hours.
Teachers can still use books and chalkboards, up to them. But using google apps is a useful skill and using them to turn in homework seems to work really well. The use of chromebooks during class was limited for my kid, but depended on heavily for homework, research, etc.
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?
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.
I have a Chromebook that was released in 2019 and will get updates until 2027, so there's definitely not a rule that they can only get updates for 5 years.
How much money and resources do you think goog is spending on an ongoing basis to ensure they sell fewer Chromebooks to schools (and in general) in the future?
It's much easier (and more profitable / less expensive) from a program management perspective to instead deprecate the bulk of these cheap machines after five years to ensure "consistent user experience".
I hope I'm wrong! My experience with capitalism tells me I'm probably not. Less e-waste isn't profitable in the short to medium term. :(
The hardware manufacturer is a different story. They love nothing better than to collect a laptop price tag on a laptop replacement schedule while only having to deliver a chromebook performance and absolutely zero os/software related customer support or windows license.
Google just makes the chromeOs?
- Digital experiences can offer different learning formats which might work better for a subset of kids.
Cons:
- Having computers in the classroom is a huge distraction, and not a valuable use of time for teachers to have to manage on top of everything else; kids constantly abuse the privilege and goof off instead of paying attention to the lesson. Teachers can either fail at their job and ignore it, or must constantly monitor and police all the screens while they are teaching. As if it's not already hard enough to manage the class?
- Chromebooks are expensive for school districts, they pay large ongoing sums of money to Google for the G-Suite SaaS contracts, too. They're not getting a great deal, districts often don't even have the expertise to evaluate if it's cost effective or not.
- Chromebooks get filthy and gross, with kid sludge and boogers and whatever else. Who should be tasked with cleaning them?
- Chromebooks result in excessive, unnecessary e-waste. Google offers updates for only a few years before deprecating them. They only run a web browser, but somehow they must be EOLd after only 5 years? Ok..
How about bringing back the books and chalkboards? Ill-informed parents would probably freak out and have a meltdown, thinking their kid is getting a second rate education without the stupid Chromebook during school time.
We are stuck in the minima of a very local function. So dumb.
This isn't the biggest problem though, it's the US public education system that created and enables all this, constantly making changes to curriculae and requirements in a non data-driven way.