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New Zealand Chooses Google Chromebooks Over Microsoft Windows 10 For Education (betanews.com)
Google announced this week that it has signed an agreement with New Zealand's Ministry of Education to provide all state and state integrated schools in the country with Chrome Education licenses. The three-year agreement goes into effect on November 1 next month. From a report: "Starting on November 1, as part of an agreement with Google and the New Zealand Ministry of Education, all state and state-integrated schools across New Zealand will be able to start claiming Ministry-funded Chrome Education licenses to manage new and existing unmanaged Chromebooks. The Chrome Education license was developed to make device management in schools a breeze, so that teachers and students can focus on what's most important -- teaching and learning. Equipped with the Chrome Education license, schools can utilize essential education features to better support the many ways Chromebooks are used in the classroom," says Suan Ye, Head of Google for Education, Australia and New Zealand.
well they got the wool pulled over their eyes
I have to say, it's a perfect device for most people. It "just works", and they don't have to have a degree in comp-sci to manage the thing.
We all used to wonder what was going to bring down the Windows monopoly. It's Linux... in the form of Chromebooks.
Yeah yeah someone ALWAYS points out that they can't use one because of UberCadSuperSimulationPublisherLatheController 44.0, but those people are a minuscule minority. They'll keep using Windows for a while yet, but the average person will use a phone for mobile computing, and a Chromebook or work-alike for home use when they want a larger screen. Most people's needs are perfectly met by a device like these.
Chromebooks are what's starting to drive the "year of Linux on the desktop". Not Gnome, not Cinnamon, but ChromeOS. The market hasn't totally flipped yet. It will, and when it happens, Windows is going to fade. Already Chromebooks are approaching 70% of all school purchases in the USA (flew past 60% in early 2018), and people are turning to them for home use too. When that generation of kids gets to be adults, they'll keep using ChromeOS.
I did the training for CMC (Chrome Management Console) for a non school related project and I can see why schools are adopting it.
CMC is WAY easier for IT admins to use over active directory.
You can control exactly what version of chrome devices use, when they update, what wifi networks they can connect to, what apps are allowed, where devices are (on a map even!), high security built in and its cheap. Its as close to nirvana that overworked school IT pros can get.
AD will still win on corporate networks, but MS have lost the education space and the mobile/cell phone space. Unfortunately their office/Win10 grip will hold firm in the corporate space for the foreseeable future.
46137
People have been saying this for years but Microsoft has too much expertise in proprietary tools and user support to say they are going away merely over a single district's choice. I remember when Apple was considered the top educational computing brand. It never amounted to a serious challenge of Windows or Office or anything like that. Or, more aptly, what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
What's really great is that Linux applications (apps one might normally run in xwindows) are gradually being enabled in Chromebooks. The ability to easily run a full Linux as a container/VM is also being enabled. It's a big step forward for Linux in general.
You sing praise of Chromebook as if Google is a saint. Just because something has a Linux kernel doesn't mean it deserves to be celebrated. What good is that kernel if it is hidden under layers of nonstandard UI, or tied to cloud services designed to spy on you and monetize your personal data? It's not like the end user of a Chromebook is any better off than on Windows, just more gimped, while giving more of their data to one company.
It's a good choice for all students. It might not be the best choice for a minority who want to do more with their devices, but I suspect those will find a way, like we did when I was in school and all the computers ran MS windows. My kids use a chromebook for school. Their learning materials are online.
I'm in NZ, although we homeschool so this isn't something that directly affects us at the moment. The previous government here changed from centralized IT purchasing for schools to shcools being able to negociate individually. Microsoft and others naturally took advantage of this and so education IT spending has been too high - hopefully this is a reversal.
Do the educational licenses ensure that Google does to do data analytics on the employees/students habits, typing speeds, etc, or is just one more brick in profiling everyone so accurately that no one can hide from the all seeing eyes?
I use a Chromebook as my primary laptop. I rarely run ChromeOS though. Mostly I boot a full Linux system off a SD card. With that said, ChromeOS is nice for running Android apps or when I just need a tablet (it's a 2-in-1 chromebook).
Microsoft has too much expertise in proprietary tools and user support to say they are going away merely over a single district's choice.
It's not a single district's choice. It's already MOST districts. As in well more than half.
The difference today is that Apples were expensive, and Chromebooks come in affordable ranges for the average working Joe. Also Chromebooks are way easier to manage than Macs, and waaaaaaaay easier than Windows. That's the nail in Microsoft's coffin. (Mac has not enough desktop market share to have a coffin to drive a nail into).
That's the ticket! It's a simple to use and manage device for people who want that, and people who want more can have a full-on Linux command line.
So the NZ government DOES have some intelligent individuals among them..
The get bugger all else right when it comes to education.
Hmmm... Chrome... shiney!
A good move, given that there are a lot of poor families in NZ (and our standard of living continues to fall) so chances are that a Chrome device will be cheaper than a Windows one, ensuring that everyone has access to the necessary resources.
Either way they are being screwed.
As the NZ school year finishes up in late November/early December, why not save 2+ months of licensing by waiting for the new school yea run February?
We seem to be in an endless cycle of dumbing down:
I considered becoming an IT teacher in the UK, which requires you to spend a few weeks before you can do the teacher training course. What I found was that every IT class revolved around drawing pretty pictures. They were designing vector logos, producing posters, making flash animations, creating a "website" in PowerPoint with lots of pretty animations, and so forth. What they weren't doing is being taught how to use a computer. The most basic computer skill is understanding the file system, which I feel is fundamental to computer literacy, and can be taught very easily since it's rather simple. Sadly, they're not being taught about computing at all.
Part of the problem, and something that is covered on The Register a lot, is that they can't attract Computer Science graduates to teaching, so most IT teachers have no background or interest in computers. This is because nobody with an interest in computing would want to teach people how to draw pretty pictures all day. As a result, out of fourteen teachers I met, I'd only say one of them had any real computer skills, and most were greatly lacking in computer skills and knowledge. Since they're not interested in computers themselves, they're more than happy to teach students about drawing pretty pictures rather than teaching them computer skills.
A common them is that schools offer the BTEC IT rather than the A Level Computer Science (for people outside the UK, BTEC and A Level are done at age 16-18, and BTEC is supposed to be vocational, but it's basically just dumbed down). The A Level Computer Science is a great course that teaches actual computing principles, while the BTEC is just yet more drawing pictures, producing animations and designing logos. I asked the head of IT why the school opted for the BTEC over the A Level and he said, "Oh, the A Level is just so boring!" So we have an IT teacher who finds computers boring. With people like that teaching IT, it's little wonder Chromebooks are being adopted. Their idea of computing likely revolves around downloading some apps from the Google Play Store.
Needless to say, I decided not to become an IT teacher, so they no doubt employed somebody with a degree in English instead. Since they're employing people without computer skills, knowledge or enthusiasm, students are simply taught to be consumers rather than computer users. They're taught to buy Google Play apps, subscribe to Google services, hand their data over to Google. To consume and never question their corporate overloads! This is the path to enlightenment!
Sundar Pichai must be paying you well for all this astroturfing.
Sigh, it's the antimicrosoft bias in NZ schools.
They've all got free use of Microsoft software due to their license agreement - but do the schools use it?
No. They use Google stuff. Because that's all the teachers know. They think "microsoft bad", but coming from the actual enterprise I.T. space, I look at what teachers are doing and laugh. They do stuff they think it is impressive, and I look at it and think how much nicer it is in Office 365.
And they don't even have to pay for it.
What is this garbage?
Hell, even the Surface hardware feels uninspired these days
Why is some lame Microsoft-hating blog being linked to instead of the original source?
https://www.blog.google/outrea...
Nothing in the statement from Google says this is an exclusive switch to only Chromebooks. This is just the government saying that they'll pay for special education licenses to manage Chromebooks for schools that want it. Probably because schools have been buying Chromebooks because they're the cheapest option, and now the school systems are having issues managing them. Obviously the government wouldn't be blowing money on these management tools if they weren't having issues with the Chromebooks that needed to be addressed. What I want to know is if the schools already bought Chromebooks, and Google has tools the manage them en masse, why is Google *charging* schools to use this tool? Google already has made money off the Chromebooks - they've already been purchased. This expenditure doesn't directly help the students. It's not buying more hardware, or more educational software. It's just to try and keep the Chromebooks running right. You'd think Google, with their billions, would provide these tools for free to any educational organization that wants it.
But this has to be spun as an anti-Microsoft move by New Zealand.
Better known as 318230.
Yeah, I found it weird New Zealand would choose Google given their strong attachment to personal privacy.
As with any sale this size though, it's usually about the kickbacks.
As someone who works in NZ schools this is totally sensationalist. Windows 10 and intune management liscences have been paid for under the same kind of deal for years. It is good they are now doing the same thing for chrome os. There are a lot of chromebooks in use but there is also a lot of Windows and Mac too. The article and writeup are very bias as per usual.
Chrome is only starting to provide any real programming tools. So when teachers want to use tools, they will have to use whatever few are supported on Chrome, or use them in the cloud. If I want Java and Netbeans (or IntelliJ, or BlueJ, or...) good luck. Google created this sticky platform as the snare, and the formerly do-no-evil company is now a gigantic spider sucking the blood (and perhaps student brains) out of schools And of course, consider the Digital Gap, which as the New York Times says is note quite what was expected: Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected https://nyti.ms/2JkjOuf
Does Google have any servers in New Zealand? If not I'm surprised they find the latency acceptable.
If all it will be used for is text processing and web browsing. No point spending big dollars for Windows licenses.
google education licenses in schools, does not allow google to use any user personal information (or any information associated with a Google Account).
basically edu licenses for both Microsoft and Google are free its the hardware etc that costs, microsoft had pretty much lost this one and even DELL know it... I repeat DELL sell chromebooks thats how much chromebooks are working in edu.
personally the quicker we can kill Active Directory and have proper security the better
Ya gotta admit that Microsoft is really making an effort to catch up in the spying functionality.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
You sing praise of Chromebook as if Google is a saint.
Not the same. Microsoft was a monopoly, and their Windows is still a monoculture, with many applications that run on only that platform.
ChromeBooks are different. Almost everything is done in the browser, and can also be done on a Windows laptop or MacBook. There is no lock-in.
Give a kid a Windows PC and they learn how to use Windows.
Give a kid a ChromeBook and they learn how to use the Internet.
Hoovering up as much user info as it can.
Yeah, I found it weird New Zealand would choose Google given their strong attachment to personal privacy.
As a born and bred New Zealander, I have no idea where you get that idea from.
The average Kiwi knows absolutely nothing about computers, and the people who made this decision will be no different. They want it to "Just Work".
As with any sale this size though, it's usually about the kickbacks
There won't be any kickbacks. Check out the corruption perceptions index. We are either 1st or 2nd in the world for corruption.
This may be because of the many schools who demanded parents buy iPads. The pushback was pretty strong, and I know several people who told their kid's school to get stuffed when told they would have to buy one.
"I have to say, it's a perfect device for most people. It "just works", and they don't have to have a degree in comp-sci to manage the thing."
Yeah, just do all your computing, shopping, and interacting with the world using a device built by an advertising company that wants to monetize you. What could possibly be undesirable about that.
"Yeah yeah someone ALWAYS points out that they can't use one because of UberCadSuperSimulationPublisherLatheController 44.0, but those people are a minuscule minority"
No they aren't. They want to work on a powerpoint or spreadhsheet using exactly the same software they use at work. They run a small business and need some accounting software. They bought a logitech harmony universal remote and want to program it, they want to play some random steam game.
"When that generation of kids gets to be adults, they'll keep using ChromeOS."
For a while it was all ipads ipads ipads, every student gets an ipad, and schools couldn't buy enough ipads, and then the schools discovered they weren't really all that great for education after all. And now home users are finding between their smartphone and their laptop the tablet isn't that useful there either, and the next great thing is now becoming a niche -- still useful and definitely has a place but we didn't get rid of all our computers for them in the end.
Chromebooks are the new tablets which were the new netbooks... maybe they'll take hold... or maybe they'll be ultimately found to be too limiting too. The jury's still out. For me... as lousy as windows 10 is... chromeOs is not an improvement.
NZ sold their education user data to Microsoft long ago. Now itâ(TM)s Googleâ(TM)s turn to harvest.
Visual Studio is attaching to gdb and xdb command line debuggers in Linux from Windows in Visual Studio 2017. I would not be surprised if Windows become the preferred development platform for Linux clients also. Given Active Directory has managed to get a strangle hold on authentication servers it is making serious efforts to displace many unix tool vendors.
If Visual Studio painlessly steps through code running in a linux machine with the GUI running on a windows box it will get lots of sales there.
MS might lose the numbers game, but in some sense it already has. iPad and phones have become the most common computers, lap top sales are dwindling, desktops too. So in some sense latops and desktops are losing to phones and pads.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A browser is as standard as it gets.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Chromebooks are what's starting to drive the "year of Linux on the desktop". Not Gnome, not Cinnamon, but ChromeOS. The market hasn't totally flipped yet. It will, and when it happens, Windows is going to fade. Already Chromebooks are approaching 70% of all school purchases in the USA (flew past 60% in early 2018), and people are turning to them for home use too.
In the real world what happens is people buy this crap and then find out it won't run office or any of their windows software and return them.
Chromebooks need a Google account to work and as such should not even be on the table for education. Nobody wants their children being spied on by Google.
When that generation of kids gets to be adults, they'll keep using ChromeOS.
This is what everyone said about Macs 20 years ago. The indoctrinate kids early theory usually dies off when they go off to college and buy a real laptop they can actually use for productive work.
But it is not necessarily locked away...
https://www.xda-developers.com...
Even then, what's stopping a school from buying a shitload of chromebooks, and then ripping Google's OS out of them and going with whatever the fuck they want, using something like MrChromebox?
https://mrchromebox.tech/#devi...
(Notice, just about all of them support *FULL* UEFI bios replacement!!)
Not the same. Microsoft was a monopoly, and their Windows is still a monoculture, with many applications that run on only that platform.
Every general purpose operating system provides a native ABI unique to that operating system generally not compatible with other operating systems.
What you are saying is no different from asserting iptables won't run on Windows so Linux is a monoculture.
ChromeBooks are different.
Almost everything is done in the browser, and can also be done on a Windows laptop or MacBook. There is no lock-in.
Using a dumb terminal does nothing to prevent lock-in it simply punts the issue.
Give a kid a Windows PC and they learn how to use Windows.
Give a kid a ChromeBook and they learn how to use the Internet.
At least the Windows kid will have learned something they can use later in life.
Nobody looking to be hired for any job writes "I can use the Internet!!" on their resume.
Appreciate the education on lack of corruption in NZ, I was not aware.
That said, your remark seems to echo the NZ got the wool pulled over their eyes sentiment. What will happen once with greater enablement in their children, the people realize the privacy implications of their decision?
I have contracted for a lot of schools and the price is extremely attractive, but the maintenance and instability and how it does not work with 50% of the applications out there is the killer. One school deployed 10000 Chrome-books and the IT department work load went up 297%. There was no way to keep up with all the problems. The Chrome-books would have to be re-loaded over and over and over to fix issues. Google tried to help but they were faced with the same issues. These are great if you do nothing but browse the web. They are not designed for business or any real work. The school finally had to dumb the Chrome-books and go back to Windows based tablets. The cost to buy them is high but they work very well for extend periods of time, work will all the applications and don't have to be re-loaded. When the schools CFO did the numbers the Windows Tablets cost the school 147% less over all. Less in time to manage, less problems, and a lot less unhappy school staff and students.
Yeah they call it a bribe. All the major corporations have shit bucket tons of money in off shore tax havens and they pay bribes in the form of luxury over seas holidays ie the only corrupt government approved way of getting and spending bribes, that and of course campaign contributions. Not only are the selling the privacy of New Zealand children but addicting them to the privacy invasiveness of Google and selling out the psychological control of the minors to Google before they even become adults, data to manipulate the minds of New Zealand's future, a island of Google worshippers and then they will wonder why.
The flip side, the New Zealand government and Education Department publicly admitting they are not technologically inept to manage computer system and must pass it off to a US corporation, New Zealand tech companies must be spewing. At least they told to IMF to fuck off when American corporations wanted to buy up all New Zealand homes and make them all pay rent to America.
This is probably the backdoor takeover, once those students have been trained and manipulated on Google they will be begging American corporations to take over.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
When I see âoeMinistry-funded Chrome Education licenses to manage new and existing unmanaged Chromebooksâoe I have to wonder what they mean.
Does this management mean that admins, and low level techs, can turn on the cameras on managed Chromebooks? Of course, just to verify their use, not using them for voyeuristic purposes.
Most people use an Android device as their primary device.
I think, if the best story is a 3 year, NON exclusive license, for EDUCATION NICHE, in NEW ZEALAND.... you can stick a fork in ChromeOS, it's done.
Meanwhile, Google's successful OS is being cripple to push it downwards in the market so ChromeOS can try to stand on it. Why? Because Pichai the Google head ran the ChromeOS division before he took the CEO slot. So we get this ridiculous situation of a ChromeOS that runs Android badly as their primary tablet interface.
my kid's school stated they were going 100% chromebook and also wanted kids to BYOD if could since they had limited chromebooks at school. However my kid told me that there were still some kids bringing windows notebook or macbook. I was informed by a parent of kids going different school that the school forced parents to buy chromebook from their shop and the price was ridiculously high in my opinion since I could buy my kid a reasonable near-new chromebook (i5 ivy bridge / 4GB RAM / 32 GB SSD / touch screen) at less than half the price.
its cheap
Yeah. You're paying for it by giving Google all of your data. Nothing's free.
I don't respond to AC's.
I wonder what privacy protections the children will be given to protect themselves from exploitation by google?
The choice that a school administrator has is:
iPads + Office 365
Surfaces + Office 365
Chromebooks + G Suite
Apple has really cut itself out of these comparisons by not having offering iCloud mail and apps as part of a school package.
And the first result was this https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/education-in-australia-new-zealand-and-the-pacific-9781472503589/ .....What is he the head of again?
What have either of those said about this? The queen and her consort must've been informed, yes?
What will happen once with greater enablement in their children, the people realize the privacy implications of their decision?
Are you unaware that the latest Windows is also a privacy shit show? I'm sure even an Apple device is reporting *something* back to Cupertino. The only option to not be spied on these days is to install GNU/Linux or similar. That said, having privacy from some megacorp isn't a primary or even secondary need for "education devices"
The requirements are probably more like:
Cheap so it doesn't really matter if a kid fucks it up. Some idiot in this thread listed "cheap" as a drawback, yet it's a primary need for these devices. Cheap also leads to weaker hardware; guess which OS will suffer the most on weak hardware (Clue: it's not one of the *nix derivatives)
Needs to be locked down so a kid won't fuck the OS up and require IT support (even locking down the OS requires IT support if you're on Windows)
Automagically uploading to a server so a virus can't eat the homework, while still allowing offline work that will automagically upload later on when it has a network connection
Collaborative work: Google docs has been collaborative for years, so no mailing around different versions of a doc. The group just edits the doc locally and sees everyone else's update in real time. I'm sure MS Office would have copied this feature by now but honestly who gives a fuck about the product that did it second
And to the people claiming that these kids will be disadvantaged when they join the work force, you've got it backwards. The megacorps try and get people to use their products as kids so that they turn into adults who expect/use the same products in their work place. For example, the university I attended had free licenses of Office, Visual Studio Pro, Visio etc provided by MS to the IT students, as a means of locking us into their way of doing things (If you've already got Visual Studio then you're at least going to try writing your code in C# and your teachers know that they can expect you to produce and submit your work using the provided tools
Even then, what's stopping a school from buying a shitload of chromebooks, and then ripping Google's OS out of them and going with whatever the fuck they want, using something like MrChromebox?
Answer: the fact that noone in a school has the slightest clue about how to manage technology, hardware or basically even the photocopier.
My kid is at a NZ intermediate (middle) school where the 'ICT' guru is just a male teacher who seems to have just impressed everyone else by writing some wickid formula's in excel or something
School's have no capability or even desire to install custom OSs. In fact - many of them use third party surveillance (sorry I mean 'safety') tools and require you to sign all kinds of forms saying you agree to this otherwise your kid can just go and sit in the corner and fold napkins or something
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
As a born and bred New Zealander, I have no idea where you get that idea from.
The average Kiwi knows absolutely nothing about computers, and the people who made this decision will be no different. They want it to "Just Work".
What a crock of BS.
Please do not make Kiwis out to be dumb just to suit your argument.
There won't be any kickbacks. Check out the corruption perceptions index. We are either 1st or 2nd in the world for corruption.
Oh please, we had our communication minister embroiled just last month. That index is more about how nice you are to international human rights bodies, as it is any type of actual corruption. One of the most inaccurate and least scientific international ratings that exists. Pfft.
Just like all the others in the five eyes network, your information is certainly not treated as anything but a resource. That resource being used as part of corporate dealings is just an extension of an already corrupt machine.
Perhaps NZldrs are dumb after all, if we truly believe that its anything but the same as other first world countries. The problem is the lack of investigative journalism in NZ.
What good is that kernel if it is hidden under layers of nonstandard UI
Some would say "ideal". If you at any point need to see or interact with your kernel in any way or even get within reach of some of its layers of abstraction then you have really fouled up the entire OS design.
Also what is non-standard about Chromebook's UI? They seem quite consistent across devices to me.
As with any sale this size though, it's usually about the kickbacks.
Or more accurately, it's about cost benefit combined with the fact that Google has a very large education ecosystem. My wife works at an Apple school. Macbooks and iPads all round... All powered by Google's Classroom set of educational suites.
If they went to tender right now Chromebooks would almost certainly win.
Privacy implications compared to what?
Cloud is the only practical option, as the funding isn't there for anything else, and they are all as bad as each other. That cancels out in the comparison.
Maintenance wise Chromebooks win hands down. Logically it is the only choice they could make.
The kids who are capable will have another computer anyway.
The choice that a school administrator has is:
iPads + Office 365
Surfaces + Office 365
Chromebooks + G Suite
Apple has really cut itself out of these comparisons by not having offering iCloud mail and apps as part of a school package.
Microsoft Office 365 Cloud works perfectly fine on a Google Chromebook.
New Zealanders in general have absolutely no idea about technological privacy. Occasionally people get asked to shut down drones where I live but the dangers of surveillance or encryption don't seem to shine this far down. Our police and government use private investigators to sidestep the law (Thompson and Clarke is one) and where they get caught sidestepping it they change it since obviously the law was out of date. As an example of how blind we are our Womans Refugee website has 23 trackers attached to it and our governments email servers aren't encrypted. Sometimes I think our government security services are a bunch of very well paid idiots trying to figure out what GiCiSiBa means......well, that was my rant.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
First, it's a school laptop so the expectation of privacy is probably minimal to start with.
Secondly, Google doesn't monteize personal data without permission (e.g. asking to use your photos on Google maps, opt-in on personalized advertising), and has special educational accounts for children that are even more restricted. Remember that you normally can't even get a Google account to use a Chromebook unless you are of legal age to agree to it in your jurisdiction.
By the way, if you have evidence that Google is using personal data it does not have explicit opt-in permission to use then I'd love to see it. I will file the GDPR complaint personally, all you need to do is show me the proof I need.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Even microsoft can see the writing on the wall, and are moving their emphasis towards cloud because that's the only way they can remain relevant. No reason you can't use the microsoft cloud services from a chromebook.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Because it's open source, and there's no reason a third party couldn't provide a version of chromeos configured to use their services instead of google's.
Fundamentally, general purpose computers are designed for geeks, they require knowledge to operate and maintain which most people neither have nor want, and if you allow people without the requisite skills to operate complex machines then disaster usually occurs (malware epidemics being a good example).
So what's best for users is locked down devices managed by someone else, and chrome/android can provide this. Android has already been forked by third parties providing their own systems (amazon etc) and i'd expect chromeos to follow the same way. The vast majority of users are simply better off with a limited device managed by someone else.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Check out the corruption perceptions index
The key is in the name, it's all about perception... All countries are corrupt, some are just better at hiding it than others.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
he flip side, the New Zealand government and Education Department publicly admitting they are not technologically inept to manage computer system and must pass it off to a US corporation,
If they didn't hand the schoolkids over to the american corporation google, they would hand them over to the american corporations apple or microsoft... There aren't really any other alternatives.
And it's highly unlikely that an education department would have the skills (or budget to hire such skilled people) to manage computer systems properly.
Those new zealand tech companies are probably all just resellers for one of the above american corporations anyway, perhaps providing some limited local first-line support.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"They run a small business and need some accounting software. They bought a logitech harmony universal remote and want to program it, they want to play some random steam game."
There are plenty of options for small businesses to use web based accounting software that operates in the cloud. In fact these are quite attractive to a small business due to things like having your accountant/book keeper and yourself being able to see the same set of up to date accounts. Your point was?
We have those for a 1:1 student device initiative. We have used 5 different models over the past 3-4 years and they all have one thing in common, the hardware is cheap junk. We spend more time fixing the chromebooks than we ever did when we had labs with windows desktops. The training staff seems to think that the 360 degree hinge is the greatest thing since sliced bread. We keep telling them that this feature just adds complexity and makes the devices more prone to damage, but they don't listen to the people that have to fix them. The only thing they have going for them is that they are easier to manage than iPads.
You posted as AC and the other person used an actual account. Whom to believe? It is so hard to decide!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
IPtables isn't a user application. You are either too stupid to figure that out or being intentionally ingenuous.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If you think Visual studio will ever be the preferred development environment for Linux you should seek psychiatric help.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This agreement isn't about buying more chromebooks or shedding current windows/Mac computers, it's about a license to allow schools to better manage their chromebooks.
Windows users get the tools to do this for free with their windows desktop and server licenses (Active Directory/Group Policy), the Australian govt is simply buying a tool to provide a somewhat similar suite of tools for their chromebooks.
Ken
No. What's good is being able to accomplish your work across various OSes, and losing the reliance on Windows. This means you can use Linux, or Mac, or Chrome or whatever OS you want to get things done. The rise of Chromebooks isn't great for the sake of Chromebooks, but for the sake of being able to use something other than Windows, having portable apps, and more web interfaces rather than proprietary clients or something tied to IE or Edge.
I wonder how much data Google will be able to collect on the under-aged kids. Who, by the way, don't have the ability to opt out of using a 3rd party, data harvester for their education.
We learned with books, pencils, paper, chalkboard, and a good teacher. And with that, we sent a man to the moon.
Instead of wasting money on tech that will no longer be usable in 3 years, we should invest that money into teacher pay and school maintenance.
Give a kid a Windows PC and they learn how to use Windows.
nope, all these kids do is go to chrome and use whatever online program the teacher tells them to do. Only in some specific classes do they use "programs". Heck even some teachers dont even bother to teach them computers, only how to get to the shortcut on the desktop. Sadly I am starting to feel the schools are making humans stupid!
I think you're on target. Windows 10 is a marketing platform as much as it is an operating system.
I am a Tier 2 tech support person who works with Windows every day. Win 10 is the worst version of Windows ever, IMHO. As I said, it is a marketing platform and there is no privacy from Microsoft. We cringe every month when the Windows updates roll out. We wait to see what Microsoft broke this time. Every month Microsoft makes updates that break their own software and that of many other vendors. The first version of the October update had to be pulled because it was deleting people's files.
Lately, they've been really screwing up Outlook. Changing the way it works with Exchange and other services in a very non-transparent effort to push people to the subscription-based Office 365. Even that breaks on a regular basis when you finally submit to their monthly extortion racket.
If I could avoid using Windows I would.
Or they install Debian on it, like I did. I bought a Xhromebook because of the price and I have a maxhine at home.
No need to buy the latest and fastest.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You're both wrong. Give a kid a Windows PC and they learn how to use Windows to launch an application, and use that application.
Give a kid a Chromebook and they learn how to use ChromeOS to launch an application, and use that application.
Give a kid an iPad and they learn how to use iOS to launch an application, and use that application.
Either way the OS is such a minimal part of the lesson, it's the application itself that provides the meaningful skill. It makes very little difference to the learning whether that application is written in VB.Net and presented directly from the OS, or written in JavaScript and presented through a web browser.
See: Microsoft Word vs Word Online, Photoshop vs Pixlr, etc. Sure in some cases native applications are more powerful, but like it was mentioned above, the overwhelming majority (especially at lower grades) don't need that kind of power.
Also, regardless of the device, that "they learn how to use the internet" is one of the absolute most important things they do. Sure it might not go on a resume, but being able to find and verify information on the internet is one of the most important life skills out there.
> someone ALWAYS points out that they can't use one because of UberCadSuperSimulationPublisherLatheController 44.0,
Maybe, but they are probably running it on Windows XP because that is what they were supplied with when they bought the lathe and it is not supported on anything more recent.
For a while it was all ipads ipads ipads, every student gets an ipad, and schools couldn't buy enough ipads, and then the schools discovered they weren't really all that great for education after all. And now home users are finding between their smartphone and their laptop the tablet isn't that useful there either, and the next great thing is now becoming a niche -- still useful and definitely has a place but we didn't get rid of all our computers for them in the end.
Chromebooks are the new tablets which were the new netbooks... maybe they'll take hold... or maybe they'll be ultimately found to be too limiting too. The jury's still out.
The iPad craze was simply Apple's tremendously capable marketing machine in action. Once people got them in their hands they discovered they were useless.
There is one very big difference between iPads and Chromebooks: Chromebooks have physical keyboards. Tablets are passive consumption devices. They have no other purpose. Even tablet games are practically passive experiences because there's neither the screen real estate nor the input devices available to manage a complex UI. Not even Apple's marketing could paper over the reality that tablet-based educational software is little more than a glorified PowerPoint, no matter how glitzy it can be made to look.
Chromebooks have keyboards. And despite all the nonsense coming out of bad educational studies, the one thing that has survived is the truth that children learn by interacting with words. And that distinction is important. Just tapping the screen to Go Next is a useless interaction. What's required is composing their own words. In traditional classrooms, that meant verbally. In Chromebook classrooms, that means written. And for that, you need a physical keyboard.
Sure a Chromebook isn't a "real" computer. Or is it... Did you know you can program an Arduino from a Chromebook? You can. You can also edit images, audio, and video...and run any Linux application.
The jury is still out indeed, but Chromebooks really do have the manageability needed while still presenting the one required tool to enable composition, which is all-important. This doesn't smell like overhyped marketing to me. This smells like a need fulfilled, with hints of actual classroom success.
"In fact these are quite attractive to a small business due to things like having your accountant/book keeper "
Meh, most accountants and bookkeepers I've met advise against using cloud products; most of them are either more expensive or more limited or both. Not to mention being tied to your internet availability, and there service availability, and being subjected to random user interface changes and feature breakages... yeah its the holy grail of what people want for bookkeeping.
"due to things like having your accountant/book keeper and yourself being able to see the same set of up to date accounts."
Because there wasn't a pile of simple ways of dealing with that before? From teamviewer to remote desktop to dropbox; accountants have been solving that problem for a couple decades now.
"Your point was?"
The real question is: "What was yours?"
Ok. You aren't wrong.
"Sure a Chromebook isn't a "real" computer. Or is it... Did you know you can program an Arduino from a Chromebook? You can. You can also edit images, audio, and video...and run any Linux application."
Or for exactly the same price I get an actual laptop that does *all* of that and runs any windows program too. To me that's the problem chromebooks have; the budget stuff at the low end is garbage ... screen too small, keyboard cramped, low quality, fragile.
Now you can go upmarket from the bottom, and chromebooks offer that... but at pricepoint that no longer has any advantage over PCs. Sure a $1200 pixel book is a nice enough device... but for $1200 i'll get a dell or a microsoft surfacebook or maybe a mac... and I'd argue that's a much better value.
For comparison, after a lot of research, I bought my kids education series dell latitudes... they were reasonable, decent spec'd (ram + cpu + ssd), rugged little laptops. The screens aren't great. They're fine, but the viewing angles are restricted, and that's the only real compromise in the device. But I think it's a better value, and better constructed device that can survive a lot more abuse and do lot more than a chromebook at the same price point.
Meanwhile schools are loading up on the budget devices; which may ultimately just be too limited. And if they are forced to move up-market for a truly productive device, the case for a chromebook over another laptop is a lot weaker. I also haven't been impressed by chromebooks ruggedness - the e-series latitudes i mentioned aren't indestructible but i'm not living in fear as they go back and forth to school in the kids book bags and tossed around. I wouldn't knock one off the table on purpose... but i'd give it far better odds of surviving the landing.
Microsoft is fighting back with its best product. VisualStudio.
Yay, but 99% of students won't be programmers, so why would they care about (the apparently amazing, wonderful, life-altering, floor-cleaning, and world-peace-bringing) VisualStudio?
Already Microsoft is supporting ssh daemon and incoming ssh connections,
Seems like the first thing I would disable on student devices, but maybe you envision a school full of perfectly-behaved programmers?
Why isn't there a separate internet for children, so that 'child friendly' devices can be sold, thus freeing parents from the worry of their children viewing certain things online (I'm not talking about 'far right' opinions (i.e. what MOST people believe, as opposed to the FAR LEFT, which is what the media keeps telling you is 'normal'), I'm talking about pornography and videos of horrific violence.
www.youbrainonporn.com
Also notice the UI difference between modern Widows 10 and Office 365 now, and back when the current users where school children.
Even if by some chance Microsoft and Office are still relevant in the business world when these Australian kids grow up, it would almost definitely not look like anything now.
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