Schools Have Had It With Google 

The real reason: Google decided to increase prices quite a lot and started charging for things that had been free.

Ironic that we use Google to find out that schools are ditching Google.

As the tech person in the school I work at, I can tell you that the Chromebooks really don’t last long if kids aren’t careful with them. I have had to put repair tickets in on average of 3-5 per day. Broken screens and headphone jacks that get broken.

Managing Google services as an admin is horrible. Everything is User based and the Admin has very little control to do things, unlike Microsoft, where an admin can control everything.

Our university dropped Google drive soon after we decided to switch to it because they up and jacked up the price on us and freaked out when their "unlimited storage" actually got tested by our users and they pulled a "wait.. we didn't ACTUALLY mean 'unlimited'" move and then set limits.

10:48 I used to be a middle school and high school teacher, including during the pandemic. These kids are NOT good with technology. When I was growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, we had exposure to rapidly evolving computers and phones that forced us to problem solve and troubleshoot on our own because UX designs weren't as streamlined as they are now. Everything is now too simple that these kids have no clue what to do when procedures or solutions aren't stupidly obvious.

Meanwhile our school was like "Get your own computer scrub.". Funny thing is despite being one of the best privet schools in West Bengal, our school was pretty clueless about how to go about with the online classes situation. Many of us senior students found ourselves volentering to help the teachers with their classes. Basically every teacher selected one of us 12th grade students to set up and manage and admin all of their class. We were given the freedom to choose the platform (We managed to convince them to settle on discord somehow. And I would say Discord is way undersated in the education market.) So basically we people just sat there listening to our teachers tell 6th graders stories while serving as the teacher's personal Alexa....

"Students don't go to the computer lab to learn typing" I find this quote very funny, since in my experience most students can't actually type properly. They couldn't 20 years ago when I was in high school and the situation has not improved in a positive way since then.

During my last few years at University, we changed from g suite to office 365. I'm qualified to say it was a massive upgrade.

When I was in school we had MS and then switched to Google, all the students hated it so much and basically revolted they made the switch back.

I would say that schools ditching google was a good thing if it didn't mean turning back to Microsoft. The reason MS has such a dominant position in the corporate sector isn't because the software is amazing, it's because they worked hard to fill schools with their software and ensure that an entire generation grew up learning how to use their software. Well, that in combination with their Embrace Extend Extinguish philosophy...

Having used both, I have to say while Microsoft is a lot more powerful, Google is a lot more simple and intuitive. So it’s probably better for students, especially younger students like those in elementary/middle school. However, it’s complicated by the fact that a majority of employers use Microsoft, so maybe students should just have to deal with it so they are prepared for the workplace? I used Google all throughout school, and so having to use Microsoft now that I’m working is driving me insane. A lot of the features I use are harder to use because it is crammed with so many other features I don’t use and/or they simply don’t work as well. Maybe after a year or two of usage I’ll be able to close the gap, but man it’s killing me.

My senior year I took a “computer surveys” class because I watching a lot of LTT at the time. Literally every single day we where tasked with fixing Chromebook’s. They break so easily

This video hit at a good time for me. I was feeling Google's prestige in many areas is starting to decay.

In my state(Gujarat) in India, from like 9th grade we are taught to install and learn how to use linux on computer(majorly Ubuntu), along with open source softwares like apache office, libre office etc. I think this is a great idea.

I’d like to put my two cents and say my school switched from Microsoft to google suite for both high school and college and it was actually a lot better experience for most of us. It might just depend on the types of schools and students.

The main problem with people adapting to G Suite is probably the lack of desktop apps. And whats worse is when you try to use the web apps the extensions you were familiar with from Office end up triggering browser related shortcuts.

Another issue with the chrome books was that they only lasted about 2 years before they essentially would crumble to dust. They had practically no resell value and there were too many models to reliably get replacement parts. Leading to cannibalising broken chromebooks until the end of the year amd then a huge cost to repurchase hundreds of newer model chromebooks to start the cycle again

Be careful what you wish for. My company transitioned to Microsoft for their services (aka "360"), and things break more often, run much slower, and essential business data gets deleted on a time schedule. I think all of this stuff, whether instigated by Google or Microsoft, will come back to haunt those who abandoned their private solutions.

You missed the bit where Google jacked up pricing, and MS bundles everything into 365 now, so it actually became cheaper to go with 365 than G Suite, because you'd get so many more features. I personally don't like 365, it is bloated with complex features that work poorly, while Google's simplicity leads to a better overall experience. But my uni made the switch from primarily G suite to full on 365 because of the price hike.

My school has been using windows for years but instead of getting every student a windows laptop they would get cheap Chromebooks and all you had to do was connect to a VMware VDI to get full windows access.

Office 365 the only option? You can still buy a stand-alone one-time purchase license for office. It's $150 for the home & student version and $440 for the professional version. It won't get new features, but it will still get security updates for quite a while.

Randomly losing access to a product because you lose an Internet connection to "verify" a product, or need to update it with authentication randomly, is bad. This is what you get with the Microsoft ecosystem. Then the random bugs that seem to be creeping in more and more into Office. For Google to make a worse product, lol. Personally I have access to both and still prefer to use LibreOffice. Funnily enough the Excel variant has more functional formulas, and I often have used this at work to fix Excel sheets when looking to reorganise data sets. If you are familiar with a bit of programming a lot of free AI tools (Python especially) are so useful for converting PDFs to text or word/spreadsheets, and just so much that was previously tedious.

Thinking of the last remark about what students will go on to use outside of school, I thought a lot about that when I was trying to become a high school teacher (abandoned because I realized the career is terrible, as much as I enjoy teaching). In the courses I took we talked a lot about integration of technology into the classroom, both to enhance learning and to teach "21st Century Skills," but I was frustrated by how much of what I saw felt like a closed ecosystem of educational technology that had no relevance outside the classroom, wouldn't ever be useful to students again. I would have preferred to teach students using free-open-source everything as much as possible, almost everything can be accomplished with that, but there were a lot of limitations with Chromebooks, they could really only do things the "approved" ways - which often felt far more limiting than other readily-available open-source free software that the students could use whenever they want in or out of the classroom. For example, Google Sheets is far less capable of data manipulation and graphing than Excel or Libreoffice Calc, meaning current high school students have gone back to doing things by hand that I did in spreadsheets 10 years ago - a step backwards! Likewise, the whole Microsoft Office license thing - screw that, just have everyone use LibreOffice!

I am someone who got to use a whole group of computer based experiences in my education. In elementary school, pretty much every computer was a ThinkPad or ThinkCentre. In kindergarten (which was 2007-2008 for me), there was one computer lab full of old ThinkPads all with slow internet connections, which we used primarily for playing certain educational games from what I remember, and in like 1st grade we had to check the weather online each day. We also had a few old ThinkCentre desktops in the classroom used for less all at once activities. Then around the middle of 3rd grade, they switched us to a 1:1 device to student ratio, so there was a full cart of newer ThinkPads in each classroom (which the WiFi was often painfully slow to use on) and the computer lab was renovated to newer ThinkCentres, all while keeping the few extra older desktops in each classroom. This is the solution we had for 3rd through 5th grade. We never did any coding projects or anything, but we did certain online learning activities along with writing final papers in Word. We also had demonstrations of Excel and made a few PowerPoint presentations (which I had a lot of fun with actually even outside the classroom). Then, after 5th grade, I went to a private Christian school right as my county was switching primarily to iPads students take home with them, which in 2013 was not super popular yet from what I remember, but they still use this method today. What I got instead was a complete mess of technology going forward. In 6th grade, we only had a typing class where we used a remote desktop Windows 7 server. Then that server broke by 7th grade and instead of risking using out of support Windows XP computers, they actually put Linux on their older computers, specifically the Edubuntu distro (the education version of Ubuntu with bundled basic education software). This was pretty much my first introduction to Linux and I probably learned more about Linux in that class than the typing and, I kid you not, LibreOffice lessons we had. During 8th grade, they bought a cart of Chromebooks, but only 1 cart, as the school didn't have enough money for everyone to have one. Around this time they also got the remote desktop server running again, this time with Windows Server 2008 R2, which had horrible screen tearing on the remote desktop client monitors. We mostly used the Chromebooks though outside of our 9th grade computer science class (basically just learning Microsoft Office and some basic Scratch), except when somebody nobody knows for sure messed up the wiring of the server causing it to not work correctly for over a month, while my class was punished with a massive assignment despite not having proof who did it. Apart from that, most of our computer based assignments from this point on were through Google Classroom. However, most of our assignments were still done the old fashioned way, which it was throughout a lot of my schooling career.

It also didn't help that a Chromebook was practically useless without an internet connection with the availability of online only apps.

I think the big problem with Canvas is that most teachers don't know how to use it, and most school districts are too cheap to train them. We use Canvas for everything at my college, but still write it all in MS Office. It's readily apparent which teachers are tech savvy, which ones care about figuring out Canvas, and which ones begrudgingly use Canvas because they have to. I got to play around with Canvas instructor mode a little bit. It seems like pretty powerful software when used properly. The problem is at least 80% of the teachers barely know how to use Canvas (yeah, I'm guessing here).

I used PowerPoint and Word so much ever since Kindergarten, and I knew how to use it and was a savvy power user! Then they forcibly switched to G Suite and I felt so limited, I felt like it was stifling my creativity. I hated it. I was happiest when there was an opportunity in school to use PowerPoint anyways, like when I made a PowerPoint cartoon for English in 6th grade or when I made PowerPoint games for Game Dev in 10th grade. And then they started switching to Chromebooks, and they just felt so stifling. My school district would use GoGuardian and go completely overkill with the website blacklist, and they were able to block RU-vid entirely, full stop. I couldn't search for any RU-vid video tutorials for anything. I hated it so much. I was so happy when I got to take home Windows laptops during the pandemic, and my IT class was assigned Windows laptops to carry around instead of Chromebooks during my senior year. I HATE Google. And the students or even teachers couldn't do anything about it, since it came from the highest levels of the district and they refused to change back. And don't get me started on Google Classroom or Canvas. I hate them so fucking much. Fucking hate my school district for forcing it down everyone's throat.

I worked in G Suite support from pre-pandemic into the first year of it. What you're saying is pretty much all true, a lot of schools realized Google Classroom couldnt meet their needs and just used other software and downgraded their subscription to Workspace for Education fundementals as it was free in order to continue using Gmail and Google Meet. I remember Google Meet itself sucked ass for schools for a few months into the pandemic.

"Everyone is using MS or Apple" I beg to differ. All companies I work with have either a pure MS environment or use Linux for back-end with MS Clients. At best Apple is an over-priced after thought for marketing or consultants, but not the general 9 to 5 office grunt...

I never understood why schools used chromebooks. When my step kid was in 6th grade using a chrome book, he had to use a regular computer and he had no idea how to use it. No clue. It was terrible because companies dont use chromebooks, they use computers.

As someone who has worked with both for years, it's kind of like leaving Moloch for Baal. They're both evil, but the latter doesn't require quite so many human lives.

In my first three years of high school, we had Windows laptops, and we had cracked versions of Halo and Minecraft that worked on the school LAN, so we could have dozens of players all within the school playing together. It was a great time, and many did play responsibly so it didn't get in the way of classes. In senior year, everything was replaced with Chromebooks...I hated those things. Minecraft and Halo sessions were over.

i've noticed my high school started using canvas and outlook. when i became a sophomore (which was during the pandemic), my school switched from google classroom to canvas because "a lot of colleges/universities use canvas and there's more features" and in my senior year, we switched from gmail to outlook. they never provided a reason why

Younger kids don't necessarily need all the functionality of MS Offfice immediately. But becoming familiar with it is great for when you do need it later. Perhaps it's not worth the cost, perhaps it is. I didn't use Google Docs until a few years into college, Docs was fine, but Sheets and Slides are extremely lacking compared to PowerPoint and especially Excel.

Oddly enough, my school system is currently transitioning TO google.

I do IT for a few schools. I don't understand why you would want a Chromebook if all the programs you're going to be using are Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Powerpoint. Sometimes they also add iPads... It's really fun to deal with a student that has a GSuite account, an MS account and AppleID :(

Our school switched because we wanted OneNote (handwriting assignment submissions). Let’s face it office is a disaster in terms of collaboration but OneNote is the only option for handwriting based assignment submission

My school district changed over to Canvas and everyone I have talked to has said they would rather Google Classroom (even teachers). The schools mixed together Gradebook but in the 2018-2019 school year, they changed to Studentvue & Parentvue for the grading issue. The only flaw teachers and students found is that G classroom would say you are missing an assignment if you unsubmited it to redo something.

As a UK student, in secondary school we used Microsoft 365 (Word, PowerPoint, etc) for literally everything. The only time we used google docs was because of the collaboration features, because simply it’s easy to use. Teachers tried to use Google classroom across all our subjects but in the end they just switched back to what we were using before - as google classroom made the process more complicated and nobody knew how to properly use it. We had iPads in our school; every student had one to make learning easier and to use less paper for resources, and they never, ever, used chromebooks. There were some apple Mac computers for music and creative subjects, but windows computers for everything else. We really didn’t use google for much.

Google doesn't give the freedom to their employees to develop a reliable product

I liked google classroom as a student a lot and I'm upset that got rid of it. Schoology, one of the third party apps mentioned, has a terrible interface, shoddy google suite connectivity at best, a terrible mobile app for keeping up with assignments, and flimsy anti-cheat measures for tests and quizzes that locked me out when I wasn't trying to cheat and couldn't figure out how to lock me out when I was. I don't know a single student that liked the switch.

I'd go completely open source, but then what would I know. Years ago I got reprimanded in College for suggesting to my peers on a class forum that we all use Libre Office and provided a download link. No amount of explanation was sufficient to get the learned staff to understand the concept of "free" software and I was told that it was against school policy to post links that promote software piracy. My "act" was never escalated so I stopped trying to explain and just deleted the message.

School should be going to LINUX

I've been quite happy with G Suite but I never use Classroom with my students. I just use calendar, since that is what students are going to have to learn when they start working for some company. I invite students to lesson with calendar and attach my assignments and presentations to calendar events. My school never touched Chromebooks because it already had Macs in their labs.

As a student in the class of 21, I've seen everything you are talking about. I remember learning Word, Exel, and some other Microsoft stuff. I remember in Highschool when we got our own dedicated Chromebook and having google classroom. I was there during the peak of the pandemic with the google video call stuff. I even saw the switch from Classroom to Canvas in my final year

i just graduated, and my school is so heavily ingrained in e-learning, our schools network was int even optimized for all those connected devices running nearly 24/7 and it nearly caused me and my peers to fail our finals! when we all logged on to take our test online, the network couldn't handle the strain of all those devices communicating at once and it bottle necked the whole school. no one could connect to the site to take the test as our router was prolly under so much strain and the service was already cheap and bad to begin with, there are random dead zones in some classrooms. so you can imagine the panic as 325 students got locked out mid test or couldn't even take it to begin with! had to spend an hour or more getting the bottleneck fixed, no idea how our ONE IT GUY did it but he single handedly saved all the senoirs!

My team just completed the migration of thousands of mailboxes and drive data for a whole state and it's agencies from GSuite to O365. Even got a write up in the state paper. Users miss some things but the pros outweigh the cons.

i have been in 3 universities and everyone uses canvas for LMS and microsoft for mail

I don't know how stuff works in the states, but in Canada, IT for schoolboards is managed centrally at the board level, for hundreds of schools. That means you're *definitely* running Active Directory for group policy stuff. And with the moves to Azure AD/Intune.... start throwing in some E1 licences for students and... It's one vendor instead of two, you're getting better discounts with volume, and Google doesn't have an Active Directory replacement.

I'm a high school teacher and I LOVE the Google Office Suite. It also seems like most of my colleagues do too. Google Classroom is easy and intuitive as well, the only alternative I've used was Microsoft Teams which I absolutely despise. This video provided a very interesting perspective.

Chromebooks always sucked. I never understood the kind of mentality that tried to justify them. I'm not anti-google, but those things were dreadful. None had good keyboards. Heck, the keyboards didn't have a DELETE key, you had to use (I kid you not) an ALT BACKSPACE. That's fisher-price level design there.

These kids got it easy. I went through school during a HORRENDOUS time for computing. The schools were filled with Macs, everyone that had a computer at home had windows. You couldn't even save a text file at the computer lab at school on a floppy disk to take home because Windows won't recognize that floppy disk and require you to reformat it.

0:54 Can confirm. I did chromebook repair to fulfill my community service hours requirement for graduation, and I ran into so many damaged Chromebooks. They obviously looked to be from normal wear and tear rather than irresponsible use. Plus, so many of them were damaged in general. Thankfully I rescued a bunch of older gens (with permission from the school) which I use as on the go laptops. I love my gen 1s that I jailbroke and put Linux on, which I ofc named Larry, Moe, and Curly. (following my naming system of using commedians for my devices. I nicknamed my optiplex "Fluffy" and my Thinkpad "Carlin". I also have 2 gen 2 chromebooks named Laurel and Hardy, which was a suggestion from the IT guy at the school lol)

Microsoft has always been good to me so far as a customer. No matter what whether I'm in warranty or not, they take care of you. Google has failed at so many product offerings. Why trust them? At least Microsoft will generally money pit the thing until it works like Xbox.

I am a teacher and microsoft is a superior option for many reasons. Google presumes that an entire school can simultaneously have students all working online simultaneously, however local wireless networks have connection limits, and large bandwidth internet connections are expensive. Microsoft products, however, provide the option for online OR offline use and thus use less bandwidth and internet connections. Then there is the problem of student privacy. Microsoft identified this and gave power to the institution, which is a big deal in many countries. hence, Schools opt for Microsoft, despite the price difference.

My school got chromebooks for 1 class when I was in 5th grade. Now, my sister is in kindergarten and every class including hers has one.

My school district is beginning the process of sunsetting Google. Last year we moved staff email from Gmail to Outlook (though both accounts are kept active) and began using Teams for virtual meetings. We use a district shared drive rather than Google Drive, and we began using Outlook Calendar for school events and parent interviews rather than Google Calendar. I still use Google Drive for my own teaching files, since Dropbox has more limited storage and only lets me access files from three devices, but I may have to migrate to OneDrive if they decide to cut that too. The main reason we keep Google accounts for all our students is that we still use Chromebooks in our classrooms, and our students don’t have Microsoft Office licences. Also, as limited and featureless as Google Classroom is, it does have the advantage of being able to share Google Docs with teachers, which is tougher to do without Classroom or using local file storage.

I sang praises about my Chromebook until it locked me out of my account permanently. I had to create a new one just to use the damn thing and now everything that wasn't backed up on it is just gone. So yeah, don't blame anyone for ditching Chromebooks.

I hope that schools can try open-source software instead of just switching between proprietary ones (especially those provided by large companies such as Google, Microsoft, etc.) For example, LibreOffice instead of MS Office or GSuite (Markdown and LaTeX are also widely used nowadays, though not strictly Office replacements), Linux instead of Windows/MacOS, Jitsi instead of Zoom/Microsoft Teams, etc.

I remember my district having Office 365 in 2013 when I entered middle school, and we all had to make accounts for it. Then, in either 2014 or 2015 they switched everything to Google and used that pretty much exclusively at least until 2020 when I graduated. Doubtful that they're still using GSuite now though lol. Went from using Dell Dimensions with XP and Office 2003 in the Elementary school computer labs, to Dell laptops with Windows 7 all throughout middle school, then chromebooks all throughout high school except for tech classes where they had Windows PCs. Went through all the eras xD

I remember back in 2013 when I worked at Best Buy a google rep came in and sold so many of us on chromebooks with "why have a powerful PC yourself when you can use a cloud computer?". I suggested the consumer wants to own their own stuff. He laughed. Now im laughing.

My school switched to microsoft, but had such a big ass firewall that basically nothing worked. You couldn’t rename a file or make a folder without it throwing some sort of cryptic error. Not to mention the usual website block, as well as full, live access to every student’s screen output, and the ability to lock all the pc’s in one click.

My school uses both, along with Schoology 🤯 The students use ChromeOS, and prefer Docs (but I use Word sometimes), and the teachers (windows) mostly use Word, aside from Schoology (docs). Email is Outlook. Find it funny that Google sign in is through Microsoft though. This results in redundant services, which I all use. During virtual learning, they used Google Meet, but for chatting between staff, Teams seems to be used. Students used Windows until 2019-20, when they started replacing elementary, middle, and high school devices with ChromeOS. This year, replacement devices are a newer model, which are ALREADY discontinued. smh

Thankfully, my school has always been a microsoft 365 school and it is so nice. Happy that it is this way

1:54 at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, my district was forced to spend the last month or so online. Having nowhere else to go, they turned to Google Meet. That one month was enough for them to realize how bad GM is. The 2020-2021 school year was spent on Zoom (although they continued to use GSuite and still do to this day).

I was an exchange student in the US last year, in Europe we use Microsoft office for most things. While I still dislike Chromebooks just as much as I disliked them on day 1, G Suite kinda grew on me. Microsofts offerings do have a LOT of options which is great if you are doing something serious, like writing a resume, study, corporate report, but as a student I never needed 90% of the tools, and the 10% I did need were scattered all over in different menus. G suite threw that clutter out and just let me focus on my work. Add to that the convenience of the web application and instant saving to the cloud, and I was happy, especially because I often, but not always, used my MacBook in class instead of the Chromebooks. I didn't miss Microsoft for a second. I might be the only one to say this but G suite will be missed.

I currently have a crapbook😂😂 and my flip phone still has more capabilities seriously tho it’s like the whole computer is literally locked bc you can’t do shiii on it 😂. I MEAN NOTHING it literally does nothing. Even their own apps struggle on the pos 😭😭

I cheap laptop/desktop running tailored Linux distro is better than a Chromebook with an expiration date. And Microsoft Office 365 works just fine in a browser, so it works well with Linux.

I hate Google classroom with a passion. It's okay for multiple choice questions, but with any other type of question, it is bad. Even warning students ahead of time about how short and long-answer responses will initially show as incorrect until I manually grade it, students complained about how it marked them wrong.

One day, my Web Design teacher was absent, so my class had to sit in another classroom with another teacher. However, we couldn't do our work (coding html files) because this teacher only had Chromebooks. Also, the school blocked the Google Play Store servers, so we couldn't even use apps like Sublime Text. Our only choice was to type code onto a Google Doc & hope it worked, but we couldn't test that out since we had no programs to export html files, & Chrome OS couldn't open html files anyway.

Google still acts like a start up despite being so big and established. Google docs make me laugh compared to Microsoft Word.

My college switched just as I was finishing, and it caused a lot of people problems due to compatibility and performance problems. My college campus was the creative stuff, so people had Adobe, Unreal Engine, other fairly powerful and intensive software. We had to install Teams and Outlook and log into a college given ID, that was fine until it started eating up resources on our devices. I know people joke about Chrome hogging memory, but Teams would often kick you out of software to read a message, force you to tab into it, mute the rest of your Windows device to hear people in a call or just to make sure you heard a ping. It also locked my friend out of her Xbox account and hijacked her home PC, locking her out of Discord and other apps that the college blocked. I do game design and use UE4 to make prototypes, and Teams and Outlook often made the engine crash, lag or just drop inputs. We also have a trans friend who had their old name shown to everyone because Teams refused to do what admins told it to, even removing their old name kept it showing up in Outlook and Teams, and caused them a lot of distress.

Crazy how much tech in education has changed. I graduated high school in 2014 and giving us all individual computers or tablets wasn’t even thought of. I never had tests, quizzes or assignments online until I went to university

I went to HS in 2013-17. We didn't use Google classroom, but a lot of students would use Google docs and slides. To turn in our work, we had to email our teacher the link for slides and go by honesty that we won't edit it. For Google docs, just print it out like you would in word. I can't tell you how many essays I wrote on my phone because they have mobile apps.

Here in Extremadura, Spain, we've worked with Linux for ages. I don't remember when we started, but when I did my first work experience as a teacher, back in 2005, it was already a fact of school life. Back then it was a spin of Debian, now a it's a custom config of Xubuntu LTS. The systems are tied down, each school has its admin, and taking into account the paleolithic hardware, things work very, very well. Plus, not a Euro needs to be spent on licenses and stuff. And, of course, unlike Microsoft products, there is zero spyware. Still, the Google Suite for Education thing became big some years ago, and the regional government made a deal with Google. It's almost exclusively web services, though, very few Chromebooks.

My current school uses Chromebook and all the google stuff on there. It’s pretty limited. I used windows at one of my previous schools and there’s definitely a lot more to work with in terms of learning. Not only do you have access to google softwares, but you also have programs like PowerPoint, Word, and Excel (idk if it comes pre-installed or not). There’s also a lot of downloadable programs to choose from.

At my school, I’m pretty sure one of the chromebooks actually caught fire in the middle of a test. Quite a short lifespan.

Who still remembers armourgames/miniclip? #nostalgia

Thank you for a really comprehensive and interesting analysis. The most valuable course I took in high school a long, long time ago was touch typing. We've come such a long way since then. I'm totally immersed in the Apple ecosphere and loving it.

I work doing IT for schools, Chromebooks are such junk.

I have been using the same chrome book for 3 years.. so i dunno. 6:45 - Umm, kids are still working on their projects after they get turned in? Seems odd, we always had to complete our work before we turned it in.

My grade schools always stuck with Windows and Office even when I got to High School through the early to mid 2010s. We even got access to Office 365 for our own laptops. I never heard of Chromebooks until after High School. We did use Google Drive to turn in assignments and that stuck around to a few classes in college where we had to turn in large files. A lot of my peers do use the G Suite and I had to use Slides at times but prefer to use Office and have licenses to 2019 and 2021.

This is good news. Chromebooks are fischer-price computers designed to create technology-illiterate adults who are dependent on google. College professor are meeting new students who don't know what folders are. That is no accident.

TL;DR: My whole school, including our admins, thought google was superior than everything else they tried. I do agree that google isn't the best feature wise, but oh my god it has a nice interface. I've dug through the code of websites like schoology and some of microsofts products, and it's honestly a mess. Schoology looks like it hasn't been updated since 2007 because it still uses shitty CSS tactics and has a VERY old HTML header. It's slow, it's chunky, and when my high school was using it, it had not even half the usefulness and features that google classroom had. I hated it so much. Also, many of the tools that google drive has are more than enough for kids, especially with all the restrictions and rules we had for writing docs or making presentations, or even making spreadsheets. We couldn't format the docs any other way than MLA format, slideshows were laughed at if they had transitions or were formatted with anything but the normal dark or light theme, and we couldn't use the equations in spreadsheets, we would do the math ourselves. It made no sense to use microsoft when it has a complicated UI and too many features we would never be able to use. Gmail was fast and effective, with basically no data caps or file sending restrictions. It hadn't mantener built in safety protocols that worked just fine for everyone. My peers and Teachers hated using anything but google products, and even our admins and tech guy said anything non-google related was a hassle to work with. Plus, chromebooks were totally able to be restricted, and so they became less of a distraction, which I actually liked. I wasn't able to play games in class, which made my grades skyrocket from middle school. Google was overall way better for schools than anything else we used. Including for the admins and the teachers. If someone had a Mac, they just looked entitled and they still used google things because they genuinely thought google was better, they just wanted to play games and not deal with slow chromebooks.

College student here, specifically in a ptogram that teaches network engineering, the Chromebooks in highschools are absolutely awful for tech literacy. For context, we're in a BYOD environment, but we mainly use Office 365 and Blackboard. Fellow students coming in from a Chromebook school district often have to be pulled aside in programming classes to have the bare basics of a file system explained to them. Most of them wind up dropping out.

I just went back to public school recently, after doing homeschool since like when the lockdown happened, and noticed that all the chromebooks where replaced with cheap lenovo laptops running windows. I was super confused why, and now a few weeks later, this video was recommended to me.

Both my mom and sister work in elementary schools that use chromebooks. One of their biggest complaints is that when they get broken Google won't sell parts to their technicians to fix them. Even basic shit like the plastic bezel that covers the lcd panel that kids love to peel at until it breaks.

The year I graduated in high school, at the start of the year two schools in our city were provided with iBooks. Simply because those two schools were literally the worst two schools in the city! The computers were restricted, the Internet was provided through apples wi-Fi ports throughout the school. The computers and Internet or restricted, to the Internet you're only able to access the counties website, a lot of this was ins infancy. Towards the end of the year during the Second semester, a friend of mine worked with the tech guy, he managed to grab the bootable CD, allowing you to overwrite & gain Full access to the computer. On top of that, we had the access to Remote desktop any student without them knowing. Fun times, six weeks before graduation, I was snitched on from one of the kid to thought they were cooler because they were interested in learning anything. One thing lead to another, I was kicked out. Ironically enough to complete your classes was literally the same exact content that adults were taking for the GED. I thought nothing of it. Now especially in America, if I had kids “with the availability of online resources” I would homeschool my kid in a heartbeat! At the time, I honestly thought Schools just go to Apple Microsoft for their computers. The iBook g4, seemed cheap at the time of need you to CD to upgrade macOS, other than that the only issue seem to be kids breaking them constantly, taking them home only to lose them at least that's what they told the school and they were provided with another one! I know that program lasted at least another year!

Armorgames ayyyyy. The childhood memories I have of playing Armed With Wings during school times

Used Gsuite professional and changed country. Now Google wants me to give a tax code which I don’t have from my old country and is grhethening to shut down my 10 years old account and won’t listen to reason. Not to mention, Chromebook’s cost like an iPad and it’s absolutely crap.

You get what you pay for. Google Chromebooks may be cheap, but they are also horribly limited from both a software and hardware standpoint. Schools only needed "dumbed down" computers when teachers were drowning trying to keep up with technology. Today's teachers grew up with computers from a very young age. 💁🏻‍♂️💻🧑‍🏫

The kids break the chromebooks all the time. They don't need really long life-spans because of the turnover rate.

Working at the university IT department, we often get people who go and buy Chromebooks and they have nothing but problems. Many professors require assignments to be completed on Microsoft Excel, which only the web version can be accessed on there and it is just as bad as sheets.

When do we get a good version though? Even canvas and every other solution I have seen, has at least a few hundred issues of varying sizes.

I had experience with Canvas in my recent college studies, but otherwise I'm the paper and pencil generation. Now I have children, and honestly my only concern with tech being the primary means of education is that I'm going to have a harder time dealing with screen time management because it's becoming a primary tool. So while it sounds "old man yells at cloud" like, I wish computers weren't so heavily integrated into teaching in some ways.

I think the Framework laptops + Linux Mint might be a good sollution for high schools. The laptops Framework makes are 100% customizable and user-repairable which would make them last much longer and cheaper in the long run. Also, I think both ChromeOS and Windows suck.

This is not the case with any of our local school districts. As an employee in my kids school district I can say that we have found the Google suite of products and Chromebooks have worked quite well.

I'm glad when I went to elementary school the only computers used were Apple II's and playing the occasional educational game like Number Munchers, Oregon Trial, Cross- Country Canada. That was the extent of computers in education in 1986 :-)

I had a personal chrombook way back in the day. It lasted me about 5 years which wasnt bad. I took good care of it. But in schools, I remember when we got hundreds of brand new chrombooks, it maybe lasted a month before they had constant issues that needed fixing. When the pandemic happended, the school gave out hundreds ot chromebooks to students who needed them. I've had so many friends always complaining about theirs. Its a shame really.