Comment on K12 Admins powerwashing their Chromebooks for a new school year. (Summer 2023, Colorized)
mean_bean279@lemmy.world 11 months agoAs a former K-12 sysadmin who maintained 10,000 chromebooks on my own I think that either of you doesn’t fully grasp how crucial these devices are. Web access is 99% of school device usage and for the few random CTE/STEM products or PASCO devices for science I’ll get a dedicated laptop locker with 10 laptops in it for checkout that run Windows with a base golden image and (preferably entune, but let’s be real) apps in SCCM Software Center so I can quickly wipe them when inevitably a student with more free time than myself either breaks it, deletes system32, or loads it full of porn or Counter Strike.
It’s for students. It’s cheap, it’s effective, it has minimal vulnerabilities that cannot be quickly resolved in 1 minute with a power wash. It has an easy admin interface for techs so I can have them manage smaller details, and it allows me to quickly get them repaired, or cheaply replace them.
zxo@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Chromebooks are nearly perfect student devices, especially newer ones.
They charge quickly, have long battery lives, and most things students would need are easily accessible on Chrome. As well, it’s a little bit harder for students to exploit and put their own apps on in my experience, because it requires more knowledge than what most students have to counter things like social media blocks (Games are kinda an exception though).
While they probably aren’t the best for other forms of usage, they are very good school devices. I wouldn’t even consider using Macs or Windows laptops at schools instead.
mean_bean279@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Back in 2013 when the first Chromebooks were rolling out to education they basically subsidized the hell out of them. Google Admin and the licenses came free for the first like 1k or so devices if I recall. It allowed small districts to get them even cheaper and lessened the costs for us larger districts as well. It made it impossible to deny over a comparable windows device that would have easily cost 3x as much and more importantly it required 1/100th the work to setup and maintain. Plus GADS included a whole suite of apps that still had a cost on the windows side since O365 was still in its infancy and MS wasn’t sure how to charge for it.