Chromebooks summer work

Giving your students Chromebooks? Before the handing out of hardware there's work to be done. 

In May, we did the testing. Teacher took Chromebooks home and played with them. We met with Google to talk about setup. 

Switching to Chromebooks is a bigger switch then you would think. It's more than just handing out a new piece of hardware. You are changing operating systems and moving to the Google platform. Changing operating systems means you need to double check your software. In our case we will be switching most of it. We were using Open Office that will switch to Google Drive. We were using Skype that will switch to Hangout ( there's a catch here ( see other post)). Then you are switching your browser.  Our default installed browser was IE. It will now be Chrome ( duh!).

Our critical pieces are web based. One is the LMS Connexus. The other is Adobe Connect for webinars. These both are capable with Chrome. With Connect, it's compatible for attending webinars but not hosting and sharing your screen. This may be fixed in future releases. 

Many public Wifi do not play nice with Chrome. The default IP for login is 192.168.1.1. Chrome does not always pop up the page to login as guest. If you have the IP, you can login as guest. 

Shock wave is not supported on the ChromeOS. We have spelling tests that will say the word on command. When you load the test, all the sound files go off at once and will not repeat. Not sure how we are going to solve this. I think the parents may need to say the word to the student. 

Then there is the Google ID. We have spend the summer going through the security settings. The administration is easy, web base, and centralized - but it is something you need to do. There are advantages of pushing out apps, black listing sites, and setting home pages. 

Going to the Google ID adds all the Google services such as Blogger, Drive, and Sites.