Chromebooks in schools?

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ryanvade

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The local Middle School has announced something interesting and I an curious what the community thinks about this. Starting next year, the school is requiring students to own chromebooks. In particular they are the Acer 720p touch edition chromebooks. If the students don't own one of these chomebooks they will have to share one with other students.

I like the idea of increasing technology in schools, as long as it doesn't cause technology dependence, but can a school really require a particular brand of product? This is definitely better then requiring a mac book or some other over priced laptop and it runs Linux :p. Well, Google's version anyway. My problem with this is how the school requires the students to buy one from THEM. IE the school is putting custom "monitoring" software on the crhomebooks. Not to mention they are going with the more expensive model.

Is this a worthy trade off? Require cheap(er) chromebooks but you have to buy them through the school with special software to "monitor" what is looked at on the chromebook? Or should partents and students be able to buy their own from wherever they want, even the cheaper non-touch model?

Thoughts? Anyone else see the spying capability?

P.S. We own a Acer 720 non-touch chromebook at our house and it is really nice. Small, with an annoying touchpad, but nice.
 


It seems asinine if the school is requiring the student/parent to pay full price for the chromebook. I can see maybe half priced chromebooks where the school pays half of the balance in exchange for it being monitored/controlled by the school. If I had to buy a full priced chromebook for my kid I sure as hell wouldn't want the school controlling what could/couldn't be on it.

Its a growing trend though where less and less true "ownership" is given to the owner of the device. I'd also argue Apple shouldn't be in control of what I can/can't install on my iPod/iPhone/iPad since I purchased the hardware I should have full control of what I put on the device.

It scares me that this seems to be a growing trend though
 
It seems asinine if the school is requiring the student/parent to pay full price for the chromebook. I can see maybe half priced chromebooks where the school pays half of the balance in exchange for it being monitored/controlled by the school. If I had to buy a full priced chromebook for my kid I sure as hell wouldn't want the school controlling what could/couldn't be on it.

Its a growing trend though where less and less true "ownership" is given to the owner of the device. I'd also argue Apple shouldn't be in control of what I can/can't install on my iPod/iPhone/iPad since I purchased the hardware I should have full control of what I put on the device.

It scares me that this seems to be a growing trend though
My thoughts exactly.
 

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