SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by cykros on Tuesday August 26 2014, @05:52PM
While I'd love to see open standards more, I'm not sure that it's worth gambling with the education of schoolchildren to bring them about, when not having a background in industry standard software as universal as MS Office can sometimes be enough to lose an edge in an interview.
I'm definitely not against educating children on open standards, but it may be best to at least offer both side by side (and let them compare and make their own decisions about the matter, seeing the issues that arise from proprietary software firsthand, as well as the difficulties with keeping community driven software feature-complete), effectively giving MORE of an edge to students this way, rather than withholding the industry standard proprietary software as a sort of ideological crusade (even if I do agree with the ideology).
Though it all does sound a little bit silly, especially when MS does things like entirely overhaul the UI, so that despite growing up using MS Office, I was only one year out of college before opening up a new version of Office left me spending a good 15 minutes on finding so much as a menu to click on... When it comes to the basics, Libre/Open-Office are probably more than good enough, and easier to mandate kids use at home than MS Office, but if you're going to get into the use of macros or other MS Office specific tasks, it's probably best to at least expose them to the systems they're more likely to encounter professionally. As a bonus, teaching multiple suites alongside helps abstract the method of learning to use software, as opposed to just knowing how to use a particular program. A skill far more useful than any program-specific expertise. Only downside here is that at least in this day in age, it's probably a lot harder to find teachers for this method, due to their all being brought up the old way...