Slashdot Mirror
Google Announces 2,000 Schools Now Use Chromebooks, Up 100% In 3 Months
An anonymous reader writes "Google is fearlessly trudging on with its Chromebook push in the education market. The company announced on Friday that there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education around the world. Just three months ago, there were 1,000 schools, showing an impressive adoption rate so far."
There are tens of thousands of third world schools. This is impressive in the sense they now have a chance to eschew into the 21st century with and without central plumbing.
in 20 years the entire universe will be full of Chromebooks! Impressive adoption rate, indeed!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Because every initial adoption rate with technology is of course a linear rate that never falls of...
Hey man, thanks for explaining the joke to those without a sarcasm detector. I really appreciate it.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
They had been offering them to schools for 75% off at the end of last year, and there seems to be no minimum number of Chromebooks for them to count a school amongst their number, so any school that bought one as a bonus for the gym teacher could potentially be among the 2,000.
Best of luck to Google, but I can't help but think if Apple or Dell or HP had offered a 75% discount they would have found a lot more than 1,000 buyers in three months.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
But i don't think a there should be any electronic devices at schools, in a few years we will be paying an expensive price for this, when this kids grow up and have their brains all f*cked up with several disorders due to all this network style education, the brain needs to make effort, to be bored, all this new education techniques with this devices seems like a badly flash EPROM on your brain.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Because every initial adoption rate with technology is of course a linear rate that never falls of...
but its not unrealistic for it to have linear growth till saturation. Remember we are only talking a million devices every three months. In reality if Chromebooks are a success which considering the lack of viable alternatives [cost and maintenance] is likely I would expect better than linear growth.
They don't run very much software so teachers don't have to worry about them loading games and crap on them.
As an educator I feel the Chrome OS has a lot of potential, but in it's current state it's the equivalent of an early palm pilot. Yes, my students could use Google Docs or look around on YouTube using a Chromebook. The issue comes in when Google Drive is underdeveloped (duplicating files with the same name etc) which confuses students and leads to me repeating myself over and over while students relearn software they've gotten used to, most web based suites are still slightly unwieldy compared to their MS Office counterparts (say I want them to create a podcast or moving film), and for what web-based apps there are it's a huge pain getting everyone registered and saving where they can remember to access it later. Much easier just to use office and a network drive.
Basically, I'm annoyed by teachers and educational "visionaries" who just think throwing tablets at students will solve all issues, when they merely can help but not in all circumstances (relative to the cost I can find better solutions at the moment). Sure, having a projector in the class helps me expand on lessons, but I see it used incorrectly more than not (teachers lecturing from powerpoint office style), and old-school teaching methods still make up a good portion of effective teaching. Chromebooks just feel like tablets with keyboards, I'd take an old windows XP laptop cart from the dusty corner of the library over Chromebooks at the moment. It will change within 5 years I'm sure, but at the moment Chromebooks just seem like a waste of limited school funds.
Hey man, thanks for explaining the joke to those without a sarcasm detector. I really appreciate it.
Just to be clear, he's being sarcastic right there.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Anyone have a clue as to how much schools are paying for Chromebooks?
Apple tried to capture the early-education market but didn't manage to lock it up. (They wanted too much profit on the hardware?) Microsoft did much better at dominating the higher-education market with (almost) free software for students and profs, which carried them into dominance in the business world. If Google will (almost) give away the Chromebooks, I suspect they can capture the teenage/young adult market, making their money on content sales and ads. Even slow-to-catch-on Microsoft recognizes that this, not hardware or software, is the place money will now be made. Note how Metro, err, Win 8, turns your desktop into a tablet/media consumption device, The market for computers that actually do things, as opposed to watching media or Facebooking, is no longer of much interest to corporate.
yeah, google and big government, a match made in heaven!
Are you sure? I thought you were being sarcastic.
It's so hard these days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I remember I felt dumber and left behind when I used a PowerPC at high school, I can only imagine what these kids will feel when they realise they cannot even use a Windows PC because they have to discard 5-10 years worth of muscle memory and learnt techniques on a chrome book.....
thats if they even get to use them, no doubt there would be social network related mischief if they aren't sufficiently locked down.
The world as we see it today is splintered into all of these very powerful corporate entities tugging against us in many different ways, two major desktop OS'es, many up and coming Linux based ones, three tablet OS'es, touchscreen devices on our fridges, in our cars...
by the time a kid reaches 10 years old he has probably already set 50,000 VCR clocks.
is this a good thing or not? I think that if I were a kid growing up in today's world I would be very confused, and when you are trying to learn confusion is a very bad thing...
They had been offering them to schools for 75% off at the end of last year, and there seems to be no minimum number of Chromebooks for them to count a school amongst their number, so any school that bought one as a bonus for the gym teacher could potentially be among the 2,000.
Best of luck to Google, but I can't help but think if Apple or Dell or HP had offered a 75% discount they would have found a lot more than 1,000 buyers in three months.
It is not only mentioned its linked to a whole article about it "See also – Google and DonorsChoose.org offer schools Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks for $99 each". I a little confused why you think a high maintenance computers with high maintenance OS would win out in a school environment, and these computers are not just cheap they are $99. The only surprise is the offer was on the atom models, where I think the ARM ones would have been a better fit. Interestingly HP are offering a new Chromebook it says it in the article.
I remember I felt dumber and left behind
There is probably a really good reason for that. You have to remember that Android is going to overtake windows as the primary OS this year...by the time these children leave school, it could be a very different world, and right now, having seen Microsoft beg for youtube and googe maps its a new world order.
As an educator I feel
I doubt judging by your comments you have been near a school. The reality is a computer has no unique characteristics in a school environment, and the fact that Microsoft Office to you is essential really says it all. I'm sorry I wouldn't touch an old XP laptop over a chromebook in a school environment [especially for the reasons you state] for reasons of battery life and maintenance alone, The fact that these devices are ideal for children from a cost/size perspective shows either your extreme ignorance or subterfuge.
So do the kids get a "snow day" if the internet is down?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sorry, but I know schools and I know computers for long enough time. Every time I hear "iPads bought for kids" or "Android tablets bought for classes", I sarcastically laugh a bit. Can't help it. Really? I love Android, but sorry, this is very far fetched.
Usually discovering underneath it's just a PR sale with heavy discount, or some politicians trying to buy votes before elections.
It's nothing to do with using computers properly in educational programs.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I own a Samsung Chromebook, arm based one. So far it's been almost perfect for school (taking price into considering, there are better options but for a lot more money). For taking notes I have Google Docs, severely limited compared to even abiword which I used in combination with dropbox for taking notes on a old p4 laptop I used in the past (offline especially, which accounts for all my classes this semester as there off site). But it still fulfills the requirement of taking notes and being able to backup the data online (I have to download google docs as a different file type such as docx as for some reaosn there is no offline google docs for the actual document file, though you can create a new file. Wierd and I hope Google fixes that oversight soon)
But for note taking you don't need much and I find Google Docs adequate, found that it really forces you to focus on spelling and grammer in comparison to MS Word as there is no spelling/grammer check that I know of. The best you have is chrome telling you something is mispelled like a few things in my post already. So it forces the student to correct themselves. Or at the very least save it as another file type when their done and load it up onto MS Word to use spelling/grammer check. So strangely enough for school I give Google another point here as it forces them to not rely on technology as much to correct papers as at most it will highlight mispelled words (which I ignored some in my post).
So for my college needs it fulfills it. Which was take notes, write papers, internet access to go on blackboard and research. All of which it does quite well. To be blunt this is what a netbook is suppose to be, cheap low power device that gets the basics done.
Beyond that the keyboard on this laptop is superior to every laptop I have used minus a macbook pro I had the pleasure of using before for a short while (having used some pretty bad keyboards on laptops this is a big plus). The OS has a "Self Heal", everything auto updates. And it's made with raw simplicity and security in mind, 128bit AES encryption for user data for example which I consider a big plus considering it's a mobile device and in my opinion encryption is a must.
So what's the difference between HP's $99 TouchPad Tablet Selling out in Retailer Fire Sale and Google's $99 Chromebook offer for teachers sells out in one day? A. Commenters didn't accuse HP of "a lazy publicity stunt." :-)
Anything which can grow an unlimited amount until it runs out of resources (whether those resources are food, number of potential customers, or almost anything else) follows an S-shaped curve where it grows slowly, then more rapidly, then more slowly as the supply (in this case the supply of people who might have a need for the product) becomes saturated.
As a result, claiming that a product is rapidly growing by some large-sounding percentage is basically always BS. Any product can easily have a 100% rapid growth rate at some point on the adoption curve. This does not mean that it's going to grow at 100% forever, it's going to grow until it saturates the market, and this tells us little about the size of that market. If the market was any number somewhat greater than 2000 even if it was small compared to the actual number of schools in the world, we'd still get a 100% growth rate.
But I bet a headline "Chromebook has not yet saturated its market" wouldn't get as many ad impressions.
This is also true for ideas. The fact that some religion is growing at a rapid rate may just means it appeals to 0.5% of the population, but it only has converted a segment of that 0.5% and is still on the steep part of its curve.
This is initial enthusiasm, much like net books or Surface RT. When people find that it can't be used for productive work or that it is slow and unwieldy, they'll lose interest. There is usuallu a huge gap between the initial growth and ubiquity..
... without a Wifi connection with a Chromebook? Is this a trojan to get schools to pay for some pretty fat data pipes?
As someone who used to work in a school district as IT Support, I feel bad for all those tech guys that now how to figure out to maintain all this new stuff. Educators love shiny new objects and never consider such things as imaging, software deployments, user logon, existing network shares (and permissions), etc etc etc. I'm glad I don't have to worry about it anymore. "Why isn't Safari installed on these?" "Why does Little Johnny's computer screen have a Ubuntu logo on it now?" "Why is it taking you so long to put these in my classroom...they were delivered to your office two whole days ago!!!" "What do you mean it won't run Autocad?"
Hell. Pure, unadulterated hell.
Because every initial adoption rate with technology is of course a linear rate that never falls of...
Your point is well taken, of course doubling every three months is a geometric progression and not a linear one, but that is besides the point.
Because every initial adoption rate with technology is of course a linear rate that never falls of...
but its not unrealistic for it to have linear growth till saturation. Remember we are only talking a million devices every three months. In reality if Chromebooks are a success which considering the lack of viable alternatives [cost and maintenance] is likely I would expect better than linear growth.
Doubling every x time periods is a geometric progression, not a linear progression. There are also alternatives for Chromebooks, they are basically just netbooks repackage and then there are also tablets which can fill the same niche. What Chromebooks have going for it versus the alternatives is the backing of Google (compared to other netbooks) and price (compared to iPads and most tablets).
https://xkcd.com/1102/
Integrating new technologies into schools is vital for children's successful futures, especially in low-income or rural school districts. Children in schools with outdated technology are faced with a serious disadvantage later in life. The digital divide affects a large population of our country and sets other-wise intelligent children back and limits their future success. With technology like Chromebook, there is little service and update fee which allow this technology to be sustainable in the classroom for many years.
Although many could argue that our transition into an online world has it's consequences, there is no doubt that it is happening and children need to be educated on this new type of world and how to succeed in it.
Is google giving these plus all the support costs away for free?
Both my wife and my sister are elementary school teaches, and they struggle to get basic school supplies. Parent's are asked at the beginning of the year to have each child provide reams of paper, pencils and even cleaning supplies for the classroom.
They even have to buy their own dry erase markers...
To think we put men on the moon and brought them safely back using people that grew up studying books... but in this age of instant gratification... youtube will win out...
Can these make Google Chrome the Linux distro that isn't just a plaything for a million undirected tinkerers, but a real desktop OS to replace Windows? I hope so. It is a shame BeOs is dead. I liked it.
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
I thought Chromebooks were just very web oriented. The whole of the internet need not be up to use them. You can connect wirelessly to a local application server. For example, you can start LibreOffice in a web browser (such as a Chromebook) like this. The version of LibreOffice can be on a server in the principal's office, and kids can connect wirelessly to the classroom router, connected to the server. I haven't tried this, but I could see a school completely disconnected from the internet able to use chromebooks in the classroom.
Bought a Chromebook for a family member for a gift - without realizing that the only printing option was "cloud printing." I hate it. I have to replace my barely-used color laser printer or setup a PC in the house to effectively be the print "server." Even so, I really think it bites to send print jobs through the "cloud" when the printer is five feet away.
ARM Or Intel?
Have you actually seen the specs??? It is actually worst than the cheapest piece of crap Netbook from ACER.
It's fine if somebody who is adult, is informed about the consequence of his actions, and is free to choose among other options, picks up a Chromebook. I use many services from Google myself. But minors being forced to use them, doesn't seem right to me.
And besides, Chromebooks are walled gardens, so schools will need to buy real computers anyway if they don't want to train their students into content consumption only.
Now I'm confused, I only have one sarcastic mod point to use; and don't know who to use it on?
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
High adoption rate or 1000 new schools finally filled their orders?
Once Google dropped the price, added more offline capabilities and improved the hardware, the Chromebook was bound to take off. Education was the correct market to target, as the Chromebook is easy to manage and use, and starts up super-fast. Many schools, however, still need access to Windows applications. Or, they may want to access education-related web apps that require Java support. One possible approach to these issues is to combine Chromebooks with third party solutions such as Ericom AccessNow, an HTML5 RDP solution that enables Chromebook users to connect to any RDP host, including Terminal Server and VDI virtual desktops, and run Windows applications or desktops in a browser tab. You can even open up an Internet Explorer session inside a Chrome browser tab, and then connect to the applications that require Java and run them on the Chromebook. For more information about AccessNow for Chromebooks in Education, visit: http://www.ericom.com/Education-ChromebookRDPClient.asp?URL_ID=708 Please note that I work for Ericom
I am no longer a student.However, what significance does it have? If you are using Chormebooks, will save resources?I think this it will be! However, this practice is not also destroy the ability of the students hands-on writing!
A software company chief research officer reassures the AC, that "if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer [nowadays] and print a page, that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer.", "Mikko Hypponen: Three types of online attack".