Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

I have a daughter in the local school district.<p>They use Lenovo Chromebooks which are built like brick sh*thouses with proper full-travel keyboards and touchscreens.<p>Chromebooks work, and I am a big fan of them in education. I have a pretty good idea how hard our teachers work, and I&#x27;d hate to think of the Windows bullshit being imposed them, like it&#x27;s imposed on me and my coworkers.<p>Chromebooks free up teachers and IT admins from Windows update administration, anti-virus software install and administration at the computer level, and from most other malware other than browser extension malware.<p>Google Docs is incredible and a huge step forward to the point that where possible, most of my own notes are accessible to me from anywhere I can get into my Google account.<p>For a child, this means they no longer have to schlep a laptop around. Just an account and a Chromebook or other thin client are needed.<p>I&#x27;m a big fan of Microsoft&#x27;s recent changes, and generally a pretty heavy Windows user warts and all, but it&#x27;s interesting that Microsoft have never been able to make say cross-machine sync&#x27;d folders work, despite pushing it for like 15 years, whereas DropBox has built a giant business from it.

A couple personal anecdotes related to this: I volunteer at a school to help maintain around 300 iPads and ~20 iMacs. It&#x27;s awful. (I am a longtime Mac user at home BTW). The management tools around updating the iPads, installing apps, and configuring users are all terrible, unreliable and old. It leads to teacher frustration and less use of the equipment in the classroom. The only thing worse are the windows computers, which are in such bad shape that they just stopped using them.<p>An example: To install an app for all students on the iPads, we need to plug them all in to a big USB hub, then connect a Mac with management software to it and run a sync procedure. It fails on about 10% of the devices, so we run it again. Each run takes several minutes. There are over-the-air methods for doing this, but they&#x27;re corporate solutions not provided by Apple and are pretty expensive.<p>So given all that, if ChromeBooks promise per-user customization and document storage with much simpler administration, it&#x27;s no wonder they&#x27;re taking over.

I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, working as a contractor at Google was one of the interesting jobs I have had and I generally like Google.<p>That said, after reading Dave Eggers&#x27; excellent book &quot;The Circle&quot; last year and having watched the movie yesterday, I was reminded of the dangers (even if fictional in the case of the book) of a monopoly controlling knowledge. The book&#x2F;movie is obviously about Google and information monopolies even if the fictional company is named The Circle. Buying the education business with free&#x2F;inexpensive services definitely increases Google&#x27;s chance of being the information monopoly.<p>Personally I like to pay for services. I pay for FastMail and just use GMail as a backup email. I pay for Evernote instead of using free offerings like Keep. I pay for Office 365 to get lots of cloud storage and the Office apps for the rare times when I need them. I pay for using GCP and I buy movies and TV shows from Google Play and Apple. It is a cliche, but I like to be the customer and not the product.<p>I understand that School districts are on a tight budget, so it is understandable that they make use of free (or priced under-market) services.

&gt; he said: “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” He added, “And I don’t know why they can’t ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there.”<p>Wow. Back when I worked for Boeing on the 757 design, there were engineers that were &quot;formula pluggers&quot; who pulled formulas out of manuals and used them. Then there were engineers who understood the formulas - where they came from, what assumptions they were based on, and how to derive them.<p>The latter used the formulas correctly, the former often blindly misused and misapplied them.<p>Googling for a formula is not how proper engineering is done.

<p><pre><code> “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” </code></pre> If Mr Rochelle cannot answer this question, and recommends just googling it, he might not be a good person to be anywhere near STEM eduction.

&gt; I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it<p>This sounds disingenuous to me. There are lots of things kids and college students and adults learn that have no immediately foreseeable application. I&#x27;m sure most people on HN have thought about it. I wonder what the consensus is.<p>My take is that learning how to use technology should not be a classroom priority, for many reasons. One of those reasons is that there is no guarantee that whatever tech you learn will stick around. I had a high school teacher insist that we use Ask Jeeves rather than Google because she &quot;liked it better.&quot;<p>It feels as if the adoption of Google products is driven much more by convenience for the school system than by a strong belief that it improves learning. I&#x27;m not an expert, but I remember reading more than once that technology doesn&#x27;t seem to have a meaningful main effect on learning (though perhaps has a mild interaction effect with the teacher.)<p>The article itself barely addresses the question of learning outcomes, and focuses so much more on privacy.

For us Microsoft tools were the highest price point and we didn&#x27;t use 50% of the features. Apple Enterprise is a joke though they are making good progress now. Google had just enough of a tool at a price we could really justify to the tax payers. As for Google evangelism we offer Google docs and office 365 online. Students are free to choose as Google and Microsoft have been awesome at cooperation in tools. We also have a training with outgoing seniors about how and why free accounts exist on websites. I&#x27;ve always told them they can used a paid account to retain privacy. To this date no seniors have chosen this. Most don&#x27;t even convert accounts but just use takeout, the bulk data download tool.

Google is providing cheap, stable laptops for education and most people commenting here are painting Google as an evil data-hungry corporation. I get that companies should be subject to scrutiny due to their outsized responsibility and impact, but this is just silly.<p>In 2013 only 60% of children had internet access at home in the U.S.[0]<p>It might not seem like a big deal for HN readers, but computer access is still a really, really big deal for kids in the U.S.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.childtrends.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2012&#x2F;07&#x2F;69_fig1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.childtrends.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2012&#x2F;07&#x2F;69_fi...</a>

I teach high school kids as a part time.<p>I have around 15 students, and afaik all of them use Android. Most of them are 13-14 years old. They have absolutely no understanding of how advertising-based businesses work, a poor knowledge of privacy settings or the workings of data deletion, nor do they have any remotely adult conception of why they should worry about those things.<p>They share everything. Sometimes they even take pictures of my whiteboard doodles.<p>Google&#x27;s objective is in plain sight for everyone to see. Imo, this Chromebook move is not good at all.

&gt; “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” He added, “And I don’t know why they can’t ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there.”<p>To me, this is giving Google much more than your privacy, customer loyalty or ad exposure. Your are giving away some of your very basic abilities: if you only learn to search with Google, you will not learn how to reason on your own. Knowledge stored in your brain is of much better use than that on Google, because your brain is capable to perform much more powerful queries on it.<p>However, using a brain at its maximum power needs years of training, which is what one would really expect to receive in school. This training requires that your brain works on its own, without external help from a search engine, for more or less the same reason you will hardly become a strong cyclist if you train on a motorbike.<p>Schools should really be wary of too much computer time for children.

This is a great business move, the children probably have no option but to provide their personal information to Google.

Google I feel has broken Microsoft Office monopoly the difference will be felt 10 years from now though. Earlier everyone had grown up using Microsoft office now most children will grow up using Google Office suite. Though I still think Google sheets is still way behind Microsoft Excel. The day Google can build a convertor that can convert all excel files and macros etc I would shift to Google sheets currently I have too many years of work to move to Google sheets. The next generation of students growing up with Google won&#x27;t have the same problems.

They are also building profiles on every single one of those students which is not only creepy but downright dangerous.<p>Imagine if Trump decided he no longer wanted to hire anyone for a public sector job, if they are pro-green politics.<p>Society will come to regret this and I&#x27;ll probably still be alive to witness it.

Honestly, this isn&#x27;t a big issue for two reasons:<p>1. The Google stuff works. I would have loved for that kind of organization and management in my elementary school classes. Google docs is also great and means I don&#x27;t have to beg my not so wealthy parents for a Microsoft word license (or learn in the 4th grade how to pirate it).<p>2. Let&#x27;s not kid ourselves, everyone is going to make a Google account anyway. As long as the school accounts aren&#x27;t used in collecting ad data (which they&#x27;re not) this is a non issue.

&quot;Free&quot; apps.<p>The only cost is the student&#x27;s privacy. Gotta get them sucking at the Google teat early, and in to their database as soon as possible.

With regards to quadratic equation comment, Aside from being one of the simplest non trivial derivations&#x2F; uses of algebra you could teach children (and often the derivation is not taught...), the solutions to polynomials have a very important place in the history of mathematics and the development of modern algebra (which of course is also not taught...) Should children all be forced to gain an appreciation for the significance and origins of modern algebra? I think, yes. We force them to learn history of whatever country they reside in, year after year. We force them to learn and appreciate novels and literary analysis (equally &quot;useless&quot;). If they don&#x27;t have an appreciation for mathematics is or does (and quadratic equation is a simple example leading up to some VERY important developments), how will they really know whether or not they want to have a career involving math some way in the future?

Google Classroom has an interesting monopolising effect on schools. Google Classroom has changed the price dynamics hugely; making it impossible for other providers to really compete since they give so much away for free. It is really a shame - Google Classroom (the app) isn&#x27;t the best LMS as it is quite unresponsive and confusing.

Chromebooks are much better than iPads for this kind of a task for sure, but I wouldn&#x27;t want everything my child wrote and looked up throughout his development sent to a major advertising corp. This data should still be maintained by the school or by a company the school partners with with a zero internal or external sharing policy.

If there was a chromebook that came with a SIM card and an unlimited data plan, worldwide, I would buy it in a heartbeat and replace my Macbook. I like the idea of cloud storage, the ability to instantly log onto a new machine and have everything there. This critically depends on 100% connectivity though.

This is a <i>huge</i> step in the right direction. Microsoft Office and Windows are a huge unnecessary and practically unmaintainable approach.<p>That being said, public education would benefit even more from using a consistent, maintainable, and free Linux distribution.<p>Public schools but <i>a lot</i> of worthless effort into providing computers for students that are (attempt to be) secure and usable. A good Linux distribution (like NixOS, or even Ubuntu) has tools to provide a consistent maintained operating system for tens or hundreds of systems. This has been the case for <i>over a decade</i>, but administrations have assumed that since everyone uses Windows, that they would be swimming upstream to do otherwise.

Is there any evidence that computers in the classroom improve results of the 3 R&#x27;s ?

15 yo high school student here; we have Google Apps accounts and use chromebooks every once and a while. The district has carts of chromebooks that are brought in when students need to do research or work on projects in class. They work pretty well. (The district also has Mac Minis, which are used by the teachers and in the library; they are imaged to Windows if the teacher chooses.)<p>Happy to answer any questions.

&gt; Referring to his own children, he said: “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.”<p>In case anyone is curious, this video has a good visual explanation of how to derive the quadratic formula:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EBbtoFMJvFc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EBbtoFMJvFc</a>

I&#x27;m still on the fence to whether or not the ability for big companies to give away free software is a net good or not. On one hand, schools theoretically have more money now to spend on mission critical things. On the other hand, the theoretically best possible product will in all likelihood will not be free. Such a product could give exponential gains in productivity to teachers, easily offsetting whatever cost is incurred.