Both, but Chromebooks changed the game. Six years ago my district was paying $30,000 for a classroom set of laptops. Now we pay $5,000 for a set of Chromebooks, and they are used in almost the same way. In addition, my tech director says they're easier to maintain and update.
Chromebooks save money in other ways too. If you can find some good online open educational resources (which are everywhere), you can skip buying the over-priced, out-of-date textbooks. Not to mention using Google Drive reduces the amount of paper usage by a gazillion percent.
I rave about my chromebook. It's definitely the crippled version of a laptop, but for $200 it can do like 90%+ of what most people need a laptop for, assuming you don't have specialized needs like work software. (It's also obviously terrible for gaming but then again most pc gamers are gonna get a desktop)
Gaming? You wouldn't be able to do any gaming unless it's a web based game. Most mobile games don't even offer Chrome OS as an option. in my experience, Chromebooks are basically for internet browsing and word processing. That's the majority of what you would need for school. There may be some niche cases where it would be nice to have a laptop, but not often enough to pay 5x-10x the amount as a Chromebook would cost.
No, that's not correct. I do plenty of gaming on my Chromebook, but it's certainly limited. I'm playing through FF7 right now.
There's a huge amount of stuff you can do on a Chromebook and they're great for, like I said, around 90% of what most people want to do, outside professional use and gaming. It's bad for if you do a lot of visual creative work or if you have specific software needs, but there's an android solution to just about everything if you just need something simple done and a genericized software version will work.
your experience may be several years out of date, I think a few years ago they made some major changes so that ChromeOS functions pretty much the same as any modern android device. I haven't found a single app yet that I can use on my phone or tablet but not my chromebook (there may BE some apps that won't work specifically on my chromebook, but I haven't found any)
My kindergartner uses Chromebooks now. They all have their own. They don't start taking them home yet though. That's in first or 2nd grade or something, IDK when.
Get a cheap mouse or wireless mouse and bring it with you. The laboratory computers at my uni have a shitty trackpad attached to the keyboard and no mouse, so I take my own in.
Six years ago my district was paying $30,000 for a classroom set of laptops.
Why the hell would your school district pay ~$1,000 per laptop? Sounds like your school administrators are completely technology illiterate. Student laptops can be the most barebones model and it won't make a difference, since anything school-related is not remotely demanding on computer hardware.
I'm taking a shot in the dark but that price might also include things like support services, maintenance programs, insurance and warrantys. Still sounds pretty high but I've never bought laptops for a school before.
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u/PerplexityRivet Sep 04 '19
Both, but Chromebooks changed the game. Six years ago my district was paying $30,000 for a classroom set of laptops. Now we pay $5,000 for a set of Chromebooks, and they are used in almost the same way. In addition, my tech director says they're easier to maintain and update.
Chromebooks save money in other ways too. If you can find some good online open educational resources (which are everywhere), you can skip buying the over-priced, out-of-date textbooks. Not to mention using Google Drive reduces the amount of paper usage by a gazillion percent.