It is inevitable that some school districts may have a limited budget. The Chromebooks cost much less than standard computers, and is even cheaper than ipads. Google has already tried to make the Chromebooks much more appealing to schools by launching a leasing arrangement as Google makes a great deal with schools to allow them to get one Chromebook at $20 per month. “When we started on our digital evolution path we were looking for just the right tool”. Unlike ipad, the Chromebook has been equipped with a keyboard which makes it convenient to use in classroom writing project. Students using Chromebooks will work entirely on the web without installing any software and since the Chromebooks are cloud computing devices, no anti-virus software will be necessary. “Chromebook simply support teachers in what they do best while giving students the resources they need to be productive citizens.” They assist K-12 schools and universities to implement Google Apps for Education. With Google accounts, students will easily engage themselves in reading ebooks alone or together, chatting with their teachers and classmates via Gtalk anytime, anywhere to share with their problems, concerns and suggestions, arranging their classroom activities together with Google calendar, facilitating their collaborating group project through Docs and brainstorming to make collaborative presentations. Chromebooks enable students enjoy the freedom of expressing themselves and sharing with others at the same time and help teachers to group students heterogeneously and design fascinating activities in their classroom. For instance, among several useful features of the Chromebook, Google drawing will be an excellent and effective tool to use to instruct students to create and edit some graphic organizers in groups, inserting text, shapes, arrows, and scribbles as they need after book reading or storytelling to develop their learning to learn strategy. As the article said, “setting up this many laptops would have typically taken our team at least 3 months”, it may hard to estimate the exact time to integrate Chromebooks into my future classroom since I could not predict the actual size of my classroom. But it will be totally worth it. After the Chromebooks set up, there is no need to assign each student a device number for they could access their current or uncompleted works by logging in any Chromebooks since they provide Cloud-based storage.
The fifth paragraph which was cited from David Fringer, executive director, information systems at Council Bluffs Community school district, Iowa is quite thought-provoking. While using a new technology, we as teachers should always bear purpose of learning in mind while finding an effective way to balance content and technology. What was missing in the article is the weakness of Chromebook and the minor bumps teachers may encounter when utilizing the technology in classrooms. I have done some researches on the possible difficulties of using Chromebook. There use to be a fear that documents will become inaccessible offline, however, after some updates, documents can be edited offline now. Those who are used to the windows environment may complain a little and students who are fans of tablets may find Chromebook inconvenient for lacking of touch screen. I am sure they will love it eventually and I would like to recommend it to other teachers.