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Phil Shapiro says 20,000 Teachers Should Unite to Spread Chromebooks (Video)
Phil Shapiro often loans his Chromebook to patrons of the public library where he works. He says people he loans it to are happily suprised at how fast it is. He wrote an article earlier this month titled Teachers unite to influence computer manufacturing that was a call to action; he says that if 20,000 teachers demand a simple, low-cost Chromebook appliance -- something like a Chrome-powered Mac mini with a small SSD instead of a hard drive, and of course without the high Mac mini price -- some computer manufacturer will bite on the idea. Monitors? There are plenty of used ones available. Ditto speakers and keyboards, not that they cost much new. The bottom line is that Phil believes Chromebooks, both in their current form factor and in a simpler one, could be "the" computer for schools and students. Maybe so, not that Android tablets are expensive or hard to use. And wait! Isn't there already a Chromebox? And even a Chromebase all-in-one Chrome-based desktop? In any case, Chrome-based computers look pretty good for schools and libraries, especially if and when prices for the simplest members of the family get down to where Phil thinks they should be. (Alternate video link)
Chrometeachers need laptops, sure but it's not the essential tool of Chromeeducation.
For some Chromereason, I feel like TFA is taking benefits of ***USING ANY LAPTOP*** and recasting them as Chromebenefits of using one company's product
Thank you Dave Raggett
Chrome laptops are consumption devices. They are not creative devices.
Schools need computers that you can hook Arduinos up to or Raspberry Pis or install Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Ruby, Visual Studio Express, etc. on. Computers you can install Gimp or Photoshop on.
They do not need fancy TVs.
The iPad failed in LA, not because it was expensive, but because it was a very dumb idea.
We need to get people involved in schools that at least have some clue about technology and what would be most useful to kids.
And frankly, until we get that sorted out, you'd be better off buying the students $200-400 worth of notebook paper and pencils.
Work Safe Porn
A properly locked-down Chromebook doesn't let you do stuff like that. You have to enable developer mode. Presumably the point of using chromebooks is that they're easier to maintain, and that won't be the case if they aren't locked down.
Why do people think that relying on a corporation's cloud for all of their computer use is a good idea?
I'm fine with the idea of demanding low-cost computers, but why must it be Google's spyware'd up version of Linux? Why not some other solution?
And then you've got a developer used to being tied into that web app for anything they want to do. "Certainly not impossible" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. A cheap computer that's suitable for learning programming isn't a very high bar, and there are a lot of options.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I'm a tech for a library system in California that piloted a Chromebook rollout at several of our large branches. Staff was fed up with the things shortly after testing began. These things just aren't made to take the wear and tear the average library patron gives them. It got so bad we had over half of our initial 40 machines in for repair at once. When we got them back (from Samsung, in this case) and asked branches to take them back, they actively refused; it was more work than they wanted to put in.
And this was supervised with mostly adult users. I cannot imagine what kind of chaos would occur with students that are not supervised.
I was having this discussion about my boss's Chromebox. Which I was laughing at for being a thin client. "it'll revolutionize the world"" he said. "We've had citrix for years." I said. All this dies is give you a thin client where the server is any internet accessible site.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
For Chromium OS, a guy called Hexxeh had some builds, but he seemed disappointed by the performance, so the port is on an indefinite hiatus. For the Chromium browser, I saw posts that indicated that it could be built for and run on the Pi. I haven't tried it, and I didn't try to find binaries. For Chrome itself (browser and OS), Google doesn't seem to have produced appropriate binaries.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Giving previously discarded windows machines to students? There's no way a school's sysadmin would be able to support anything that's not homogeneous.
These things are a good option because the hardware is decent and dirt cheap. The school district can also install any OS they want to on them, not just ChromeOS. If you can find where to get an x86 processor (that's Haswell no-less), 2GB ram, and 32GB SSD on a laptop for cheaper than $200, I would agree with you. I haven't been able to find anything that beats the Acer C720 at its price point.
Phil is possibly a moron on top of it.
A chromebook is just a computer, and not really any cheaper than an equivalent Windows machine (slightly, but not much).
A decent chrome book that 'isn't slow' will costs you $250 AT LEAST ... and right next to it on the shelf is the Windows $250 laptop that ... works exactly the same if you run everything in a browser like Chrome.
Oh, and the windows machine doesn't start off with you giving everything you have to Google.
Again I state, Phil has no idea what he's talking about.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Bill Gates Marginalises Teachers and Harvests Schools’ Data for Profit at Expense of Privacy
http://techrights.org/2013/06/21/bill-gates-marginalising-teachers/
Bill Gates Brings NSA-esque Surveillance to Children
http://techrights.org/2013/12/03/indoctrinate-control-and-spy/