Overall, interesting thread. Definitely appreciate those who work in education and have knowledge + experience in administering Chromebooks chiming in.
Say whatever you will of Chromebooks. There's a reason they have a 50% market share in the education sector. Evidently, it's been a proven solution. We're now a year past, but there are so many misconceptions with them, it's mind boggling. I can back up many of the assertions since I bought an HP Chromebook 14 over a month ago and have been using it since then.
-It's mostly a consumption device.
-It's got some productivity features in there, like limited programming in Python, and image editor
-Google Office works offline. Of course, you need internet to sync your changes back to Google Drive
-For $190 shipped, it's an excellent way to browse the internet. The large screen makes reading on the pleasant side, and the full keyboard works well for typing. It actually works better in the sense that the HP one removes the numpad, the 2x3 home/end/insert/etc. buttons, so there are more shortcuts to deal with, but the spacing works out well
-My unit only has 16 GB of storage. For those comparing Chromebooks to iPads for educational use (3-12), note that the basic iPad also has only 16 GB of storage. You can get the next tier at 32 or 64 GB, but then you'd need to add $100 retail x the # of units you'd like to buy. Even if you get volume discounts, you're still paying a lot since you're buying in all those bulk #s.
The typical student in grades 3 through 12 will be writing essays, articles, making some slides, and perhaps doing spreadsheets. My Word docs span 100KB to 10MB each. PPT and Excel are roughly the same. They should NOT need more than 1 GB of storage, let alone 16 GB. Plus, changes get synced back to the Google Drive. If students need to work with large multimedia files, then a larger Chromebook, or a different laptop altogether would likely be needed. However, the majority of students should be fine with the "no frills" Chromebook (90%?)
-they're much cheaper to replace
-they have less resell value, so they're not likely to get pawned off like with iPads
-some kids of course would prefer iPads... some of them are more so goofing off, and that's where Minecraft, Hearthstone, and many of the games are. Plus, they're not paying for it with their own money, so they have no stake in the matter.
-I've heard of iPads being much harder to administrate. I appreciate some of the examples of admin for Chromebooks vs. iPads. I've talked with a couple of teachers in the CA school districts. Their views and experiences are similar to what I've seen here. They're able to see everything that kids do, including sneaking in views of a Justin Beiber video.
-Chromebooks can be shared. You can get away with less of them, and you can hand off one that's not being used to a student who lost/broke/forgot theirs
-Chromebooks have nice battery life. Linux wasn't really built for laptops in mind, so it's worse in that respect
-Ubuntu and Windows laptops need to be administered. Yes, so do Chrome books, and just like how the Chromebooks themselves still cost money even though they're more affordable. However requiring much less IT resources is time and money saved for the school.
-CBs have keyboards. Ipads can get keyboards too, but they may need to be charged, connect via Bluetooth, add another $100 to the cost of each ipad, and that's another thing to lose.
