Chromebooks for Education

I've been looking a bit more at Chromebooks for Education. Thinkamingo has been doing quite well building up a portfolio of educational mobile apps, but the rise of Chromebooks in schools is something that we can't ignore. So we'll continue to think what role we could take in an entirely web-based environment rather than a on-device tablet environment like iPads.

Chromebooks certainly make sense for a school, especially given the difficulty of managing iPads (or other devices) as a group. I really like the idea of schools being able to quickly swap out broken devices or even loan devices to students without needing to install or replicate anything.

One great point is that adopting an online-only environment, with or without Chromebooks, is really the best way to enable bring your own device (BYOD) because it opens up the environment to a wide range of devices. Right now, it's virtually impossible for an app-based curriculum to allow students to bring a mix of iPads, Kindle Fires, etc. because so many apps are only available on one platform. But as long as each device has a decent browser, all can use well-designed websites.

A couple Chromebook resources I've been looking at:

• A decent blog post about the different models of Chromebook available
• Google's own list of Chromebooks for Education
• This Google+ Hangout talking about a school's deployment of Chromebooks
• Some Google+ communities: Chromebook EDU, Google Apps for Education, and Google Apps in Education

I'll keep adding to this post if we go anywhere with Chromebooks. I played with booting ChromeOS in a VMWare instance but have had some problems. I'm really tempted to get one of the Samsung Chromebooks as a test device, but I think my desk and laptop bag are finally at their limit of devices.

Update: This isn't really for educators, but this is a good post on developing on the Chromebook.