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Robert Pogson reports:
Recent news about the popularity of Chromebooks with schools may seem puzzling.
Schools in Hillsborough, New Jersey decided to make an experiment out of its own program. Beginning in 2012, 200 students were given iPads and 200 students were given Chromebooks. After receiving feedback from both students and teachers, the schools sold off their iPads and bought 4,600 Chromebooks.
After all, a keyboard is a great input device and writing is one of the three "Rs" but why not just [buy] a notebook PC? The answer is that the high cost of maintaining the legacy PC is too great. Keeping content on the server makes the job easier and with Chromebooks, schools don't even need to own the server.
...then there's the malware, the slowing down, the re-re-rebooting with that other OS.
That makes the ChromeBook a winner in education and probably a lot of organizations large and small, even consumers. Of course, they could get those benefits with GNU/Linux but it would take more technical knowledge. Again Chromebooks win.
See iPad vs. Chromebook For Students
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @06:07AM
I amend my statement:
The oldest/earliest of his students probably -had- used Windoze.
When Pogson got to his first teaching assignment, he had a bunch of Lose95 boxes that were infected to the gunwales and were laying idle.
With the M$ OS those were running, he couldn't keep the boxes he had up very long and the amount of time he wasted on de-crapping boxes drove him to Linux.
...then there were the licensing restrictions (specifically, networking).
.
Schools should teach CONCEPTS.
Once the kids have those, they should be able to extrapolate.
Teaching where to click in a particular app is just silly.
("Industry standard apps" have been mentioned in this thread.
Think of the kids who were taught that it was useful to memorize menu locations in M$Office just before "The Ribbon" was introduced.)
If a language|app|protocol isn't cross-platform, I question the utility of that something.
Again: Teach CONCEPTS.
...and if you didn't read my post about Pogson in a previous thread:
He was in the Great White North working with First Nation kids.
They didn't have a pot to piss in.
The freight charge to fly something in added significantly to the purchase price.
Pogson discovered that having Linux Just Work(tm) on his old gear allowed his kids do computing with modern, supported software without wasting a dime on that software.
That was another good lesson for the kids to learn.
-- gewg_