Comment by 7734128
18 hours ago
It would be so much better for the student's IT proficiencies if the were some ordinary Linux computers instead. Preferably with limited central managment.
The Chromebooks are probably cheaper than the hardware itself could be, but that's a good demonstration of the issue.
It wouldn’t. The central management of Chromebook is what makes the whole system usable. All you’d be doing is sentencing school IT folks to endless, endless support requests.
Funny. At my son's school in Germany, students may bring any device they want without central administration (just Wifi and web platforms). It works quite well without inundating IT staff with support requests. (To achieve at least some similarity of systems, you get a partial refund if you buy either iPads or convertible notebooks running Windows. My son's notebook technically runs Windows but he mostly uses plain Debian Linux with Xournal++.)
That sounds wonderful for tech literate families. Probably less so for ones that aren’t, how many are loaded down with crappy spyware, I wonder?
Who would run the cloud side, or at least the networked backup service?
Sorry, I love Linux, but could you imagine managing a fleet of the cheapest hardware possible and also teaching a bunch of 6th graders how to use Linux? School IT workers are already heroes. I don't like Google, but they're a necessary evil to keep those guys from tearing their hair out every day unless we dedicate significantly more resources to computing in schools.
We managed fine with crappy old Windows XP Thinkpads in elementary school. Modern Linux is far easier, and I'm saying the slight challenge would be educational.