Every digital marvel seems to take things higher and higher. When it comes to Chromebooks and traditional laptops, you can find them in use in the classrooms across the globe. Teachers use them both for data analysis, accessing real-time data on student performance, for training and more. Data analysis can help the teacher to zero in on students who need more tutoring, or on content that needs to be re-taught. When it comes to the pros and cons of each, there are some benefits found with the Chromebook that is not available with traditional laptops. Read on for more.
Interactive features are said to be stronger with Chromebooks. According to Turning Technologies, both creating and collaborating are more feasible on the Chromebook. Many tools for such actions are part of the Google suite of services, such as Google Classroom. Certainly it can be accessed from a laptop, but not with the same flowing ease.
Whatis, a website that describes the features of technology indicated that the Chromebook is a Google product, that is essentially a thin laptop with Chrome OS as its operating system. It mentions that the device is considered a browser-in-a-box because it is the sole software app that Chrome OS can run locally. Laptops (other than Chromebooks) do not have this configuration. As the website indicates, another nickname for Chromebooks is “cloudbooks,” due to the fact that Google’s virtual servers are where videos, images, documents and the owner’s other applications are stored. With a regular laptop, the owner/user has to store things on the cloud by creating or accessing a cloud-based account – in other words it is not automatic.
Not having data stored on the Chromebook means that if the owner/user loses their device, the information remains secured because they are associated with the user’s Google account. Not so with regular laptops.
Quip.com and similar online tools that have some capabilities of Google Classroom are accessible on either device, but they are not classroom specific and have broader applications for the corporate world than for the classroom. This means the educator has to tweak the tools to make them work optimally on their device.
There’s also a brighter screen on Chromebooks, as well as instant resume from sleep mode, fast boot time (because it goes directly to the browser) and one high speed USB port. The classroom teacher and student is always time conscious. Because of this, the quick work of the Chromebook can mean more productivity in the classroom. Those minutes add up. This may be especially true for the higher grades where students have to switch classes.
On Wiki Ezvid, they write about the top 10 laptops for classrooms. Chromebooks show up as number 10 and number 9, the highest two ranks. One is the Acer Chromebook 15 and the other is the Toshiba Chromebook 2.
According to their government website, the state of main reached an agreement with Apple computers to provide laptops to all students in middle and high school in 2000. They refer to this arrangement as the Main Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI). With such an agreement, they wanted integrated learning results and teacher education and preparation to be 2 of the 5 goals. According to the website, it began with a surplus being provided to schools one time, and then expanded from there when the governor realized that education was needed to take some giant steps in order to better prepare students by providing them with laptops. The site also reports four successful years, and renewal of the contract up to 2013, when the initiative ended. Hewlett Packard won the contract after that. These were all regular laptops (Apple and Hewlett Packard), not Chromebooks, so this is proof positive that some are finding the regular laptop to be an outlier performer for schoolroom applications, even though they are not Chromebooks.