Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#2It must be so different going to school these days. I feel excited for our future kids!
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#3I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#4I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.
Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop.
Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills.
A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#5I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.
Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills. A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.
Indeed, a bootable browser has little use outside of... web browsing. Even an old machine with an old OS is more usable, especially when there's no network connectivity. That happens a lot more than you think with a laptop.
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#6I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.
Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills. A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.
It depends. A regular laptop can do more things, but most of the time students just need a laptop to research and write articles and the Chromebook does that very well, without exposing the internals of a traditional desktop system.
If I'm a college student, I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades, malware and other things. I just want something that works out of the box and Chromebook does that perfectly. If I really want to tinker, it's not that hard to install a linux distro in a Chromebook and not everyone desires to tinker with their computers.
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#7This deal was probably made pre-Snowden revelations. I doubt any of the world's governments are so eager to deploy US-controlled machines in their institutions and schools, especially if they are "cloud-only".
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#8I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.
Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills. A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.
It's a little hard to tell from the article what the goal is. If the goal is just to use the computers as a means to some other (non-tech) educational end, e.g. as browsers for accessing online information, then Chromebooks seem like a reasonable method of doing so. If the goal is computer education, then I agree they're suboptimal; even something like a Raspberry Pi might be better for that kind of education.
One lingering unease I have about the first use-case, though, is that it forecloses some unplanned exploration. I largely got into tech by fiddling around with lightweight programming on machines that weren't explicitly bought to teach programming. Perhaps web-based dev environments will fill that gap, though; someone with a Chromebook can still experiment with anything from Codeacademy to jsFiddle to sketchpad.cc.
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#9I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.
Think of the hundred of millions of kids who've been hooked onto Microsoft's products. Why shouldn't kids have a choice?
Re: Google offering free Chromebooks to Indian schools
#10I commend Google for it, but my inner voice is somewhat skeptical that this is a great way to get kids hooked on Google's services. Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. So I think its a win-win for both parties.
Then again, having a Chromebook is way better than some crappy linux machine/cheap windows laptop. Why? It's a much more limited device with much less potential for learning essential skills. A Chromebook can only be used to surf the web. It's the polar opposite of what an educational institute needs.
Apart from the good points that other folks are making, this isn't necessarily targeted at engineering students.
A decent screen, a decent keyboard, comes with a word processor, is low maintenance, doesn't get viruses (theoretically at least) and it can access the web. That sounds pretty good to me.