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Google is Equipping More Rural School Buses With Wi-Fi and Chromebooks (theverge.com)
Google on Monday said it was formally expanding its Rolling Study Halls program, or school buses equipped with WiFi, computers and on-bus educators to help rural students with work beyond school hours. From a report: Google today announced an expansion of its Rolling Study Halls initiative to over 16 additional school districts, giving "thousands" of students access to Wi-Fi and Chromebooks on their buses. Google has piloted the program in North Carolina and South Carolina over the last couple years, focusing its efforts on rural communities where some students have lengthy bus rides between home and the classroom each day.
Providing students with dependable Wi-Fi before and after school is a boon for those who might lack broadband internet at home, giving them two opportunities daily to complete assignments or study for exams while on the bus. Google contributes mobile Wi-Fi routers, data plans, and Chromebook devices.
Providing students with dependable Wi-Fi before and after school is a boon for those who might lack broadband internet at home, giving them two opportunities daily to complete assignments or study for exams while on the bus. Google contributes mobile Wi-Fi routers, data plans, and Chromebook devices.
Is this really meant to get students used to the idea they will have to work outside of work hours when they grow up and get a career? :P
Google knows this'll be used for frivolous things like socializing, instagram, and porn, right?
Presumably the buses connect to some sort of access point or hotspot. Who pays for that?
Gotta get 'em hooked on those phones early!
All the better to strip-mine their privacy!
My 12-year old son would LOVE this idea...it would make it much easier to play games on his school-provided Chromebook if he had internet access for the long bus ride home. I can assure you that Chromebook gets used for much more gaming and YouTube watching than for actual schoolwork. No, they can't install apps, but there are lots of games available via the browser...
>> two opportunities daily to complete assignments or study for exams while on the bus
My kids went through a mix of public and private schools. Homework is barely even a thing anymore.
Let's be honest about what this will be: an extra 60-120 minutes of gaming per day on the bus, inside the closed Android/Chromebook ecosystem. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.)
I find it ironic that they are putting PCs and WiFi on school buses when they still don't even have seat belts.
Homework is barely even a thing anymore.
educating your kids is YOUR responsibility, if they don't have homework it's YOUR fault
"They're not humans. They're human resouces."
This has got to be abusive at some point. (Which was passed a long time ago.)
Source: Their track record. And the track record of what is defined as a corporation.
Ever tried to work on a laptop in a moving car or bus, especially one with as crappy a suspension as a school bus? Motion sickness city.
If Google was so damn generous, they'd donate laptops with 4G modems and access, so students can do homework at home, not in a rolling distraction-box.
I went to a rural school. The bus ride was over an hour long. I would purposefully get less sleep than necessary so I could sleep on the bus as the bus left around 6 am. This was common for all except those at the end of the route.
Bingo. By now these things must have caught up with Flash games we ran a decade ago on full ATX towers, or went further.
Some of this stuff is not really "web" apps : for instance, Google Earth doesn't run on Firefox 59 (!), we tried that on a friend's PC and he downloaded Chrome (haven't tried Brave/Vivaldi)
He otherwise ran the desktop version.. and honestly thought he couldn't look at photos (uploaded pictures of scenes) because he misconfigured the software, but I had to tell him Google terminated the online service that displayed pictures in Google Earth desktop.
If you are in a rural area or the edges of a major city, then if YOU cannot get internet how in the hell is the bus going to get internet?
4G outside major cities is a joke. You would almost never get >.5MBits if you are moving, and if there is wind or a storm you won't even get that.
We need to stop giving lip service to the fallacy that there is good internet available to We The People.
The telcos and wireless companies lie about their numbers, and they use scummy tactics with corporate-locked data so it always tells them what they want to hear.
In a major city you will rarely, if ever, get the speed you were sold, and uptime is not in the 90 percentile.
About 60% of the land area in the U.S. has no consistent internet connection, and probably rarely ever gets 4MBits consistently for more than a few minutes.
But sure, Lets Save the fucking Children and wire the buses with internet we STILL don't actually have.
educating your kids is YOUR responsibility, if they don't have homework it's YOUR fault
But government-run education has made so much progress!
Back in the bad old days of the late-1800s when local communities ran the US education system 8th-graders were required to pass exams that many if not most currently-graduating post-docs from ivy-league universities couldn't pass.
Now we have illiterate college students.
The very last thing any politician wants is educated and informed citizens that use critical-thinking skills and logic who are therefor capable of calling them out on their BS and know when they're being lied to.
Now all we need is all rural school buses equipped with seat belts. At least they will be able to use the Wi-Fi and Chromebook's to say a final good-bye to their loved ones or report that they survived the crash.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Elon Musk is going to donate HyperLoop systems so that the ride to and from school only takes 5 minutes. For a bazillion dollar company, google is sure stingy doling out a bit of good will.
Am I the only one who thinks itâ(TM)s more likely to be used for non-school related activity (Facebook, music, YouTube) than school work? Seriously, who does their assignments on the bus? Would be better to equip libraries and schools.
115 fatalities in 2017 alone, in school bus accidents. Whiles since 2012 the have been 138 fatalities due to school shootings. So despite what the news might say, there are more kids dying in school bus accidents than in school shootings. One just makes for much better ratings and is a current hot button issue for many liberal individuals and politicians, while the other is just business as usual.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?