As a CR-48 owner, I think this is both good for education and bad.
The good parts of this is that ThinkPad's are well built machines and this particular model has been ruggedized. This form factor seems perfect to me for the educational environment: light, portable and rugged.
The negative is ChromeOS itself for an educational environment. It's a fine machine for doing Internet research and light writing, but more traditional OSes allow for more experimentation and learning. You won't be messing around with video editing on these in any significant way. Web design wouldn't be easy either. Web design was one of my favorite high school classes.
For library and research computers, this seems like a great option. Rugged, secure, portable. For a learning tool, wouldn't something more open, more able to run more applications be better?
From an IT perspective I get it. These machines require so little maintenance and are much more hardended than your typical PC.
In many ways, I feel the original ThinkPad that this is based off of would be a better educational tool. This of course comes down to whether or not school want students experimenting these days. I hope they do.
Students have never been allowed to "tinker" with school-owned computers. I have been involved in educational programs that relied on school-owned laptops at the college level. In my experience having a locked-down machine is really the only way to make this sort of thing work well.
Unless you're teaching CS or networking or something along those lines there is just no benefit to allowing students fiddle with the computers that isn't completely overwhelmed by the negative effects of students accidentally hosing the machines.
I guess in a perfect world we would let everyone tinker with everything. You never know where the next brilliant idea will come from and all that. But in the world we live in, there are costs and there are benefits. When the costs of something dwarf the benefits of that thing you don't do it.
Yeah, and that's fine. What I'm saying is that when the computer is a primary mode of delivering course material or is otherwise absolutely necessary for the curriculum, malfunctions, whether caused by user error or otherwise, are unacceptable. Most schools just don't have the resources to support "real" computers in the hands of the students.
Yes they do. Most of them are contracted out to companies which have state restoration software on, so if someone screws it up, they can re-image it instantly.
I have a son in 6th grade, and this year marked the start of him getting a limited google account via the school that he uses to do homework. I don't know the extent to which the teachers can see what the students do, but they do presentations, writing and web research all in the confines of their google account. My son uses the Chromebook we have at home to access his account and do homework.
> The negative is ChromeOS itself for an educational environment. It's a fine machine for doing Internet research and light writing, but more traditional OSes allow for more experimentation and learning. You won't be messing around with video editing on these in any significant way.
A video editing course would be better served by a computer lab. 99% of students aren't going to need to install Final Cut on their school computer and it would be a huge waste to make sure that was possible.
I haven't been in school for a while, but they rather discouraged any tinkering with the computers while I was there. Merely launching the command prompt was enough to be written up by a teacher. Trying to 'experiment' in any way would have gotten your computer privileges revoked.
The good parts of this is that ThinkPad's are well built machines and this particular model has been ruggedized. This form factor seems perfect to me for the educational environment: light, portable and rugged.
The negative is ChromeOS itself for an educational environment. It's a fine machine for doing Internet research and light writing, but more traditional OSes allow for more experimentation and learning. You won't be messing around with video editing on these in any significant way. Web design wouldn't be easy either. Web design was one of my favorite high school classes.
For library and research computers, this seems like a great option. Rugged, secure, portable. For a learning tool, wouldn't something more open, more able to run more applications be better?
From an IT perspective I get it. These machines require so little maintenance and are much more hardended than your typical PC.
In many ways, I feel the original ThinkPad that this is based off of would be a better educational tool. This of course comes down to whether or not school want students experimenting these days. I hope they do.