Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Coming Soon***** Stay tuned to the bottom of this post for information about Chromebooks from my peers who researched accessibility, apps to use on Chromebooks and productivity!

Disadvantages of Chromebooks in the classroom

Chromebooks can be a great tool for the classroom, but with every great tech we have to look at the disadvantages. For this post I wanted to drive deep then the concern about increased screen time for students, the distraction or lost learning time that tech can sometimes present in the classroom. This are also very important to consider when deciding to use Chromebooks in the classroom! At the bottom is real anecdotal experiences from students and teachers who are using Chromebooks in their class!

First lets explore that Chromebooks are a google product! We must consider that google is a huge corporation with immense power in the industry, education and the whole world.

Google:

Chromebooks are a google product and run the Chrome OS. This means students are using this OS, g suite, gmail, google meet, google classroom, google docs, google sheets ect for their school work. They work is being saved in cloud based storage. There are many concerns and disadvantages to consider when considering using Chrome books as the main technology in your classroom.

You can read Googles Policies here in more detail: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US

Google Data Collection:

Google is transparent in that they collect

• Things that you search for
• Videos that you watch
• Ads that you view or click
• Your location
• Websites that you visit
• Apps, browsers and devices that you use to access Google services

Further to that they state that they collect and *protect*

• Your name, birthday and gender
• Your password and phone number
• Emails that you write and receive on Gmail
• Photos and videos that you save
• Docs, Sheets and Slides that you create on Drive
• Comments that you make on YouTube
• Contacts that you add
• Calendar events

Here is a link to Googles privacy policies: https://safety.google/privacy/data/

Although they state that they do not sell your data they state “We use data to make our services more useful and to show relevant advertising, which helps make our services free for everyone”. This means they use your data to provide companies to sell directly to you.

Check out this great video that explains the information google collects and how they use it to target ads to you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRJGRbi2g3c

Reliance on Google:

Another consideration in using Chromebooks in classrooms is that it may limit students and create a reliance on google products. Due to them being geared towards all their products it exposes children and youth to exclusive use of google products. It gets them hooked on using these products for all their needs. Which means they might be more likely to use them for life. This is a great advantage to google and creates a monopoly on this demographic. Furthermore, it creates a reliance on google to store their information, work, settings and could give them a false sense of security in that because it was safe for school they my not question its practices.

Do we need all this tech in the classroom?

Check out this interesting article questioning how access to the web is changing our brains.

https://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/how-the-web-affects-memory

Do children need access to Chromebooks? Do they support deeper learning? Are there any negatives?

Nicholas Carr who wrote the book “What the internet is doing to our brains”. He states that “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists and educators point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning”.

Teacher and Student Concerns about Chromebooks in the Classroom:

Reading Stories from teachers online it seems the major concerns about having Chromebooks in the classroom is that they are cloud based and that WIFI in schools is not always consistent.  Students spend a lot of time trying to access materials. They also feel that it distracts students from the more concrete learning. That there are too many distractions on the Chromebooks. They also state that children save their work on them but then because they don’t have access to the Chromebooks all the time that when they have free time to work on the assignment but don’t have the Chromebooks in the classroom they cannot work on that assignment as it is on the Chromebook. So teachers wish they had better access to the Chromebooks for their class to make the learning more fluid and accessible.

My Interview With a Grade 6 Class About Chrome Books:

Questions for Students: What do you not like about Chromebooks?

Students answers:

• It is not as fast as my computer and I can’t edit the photos I need to so I can upload them to google classroom.
• I like Apple products better. The apps you can use are better and they are faster.
• I think they are slow. It takes a long time to log on and I always get kicked off the internet or it can’t connect. Also, when we tried to edit our videos the videos were too big.
• We used Freshgrade last year and I liked it better the google classroom. I wish we could use that this year.

Question for Teachers: What are the disadvantages of using Chromebooks in the classroom.

• I use them often because I think we need to expose to children to the tech. People don’t research in books anymore; it is all online. But you have to remember to teach them where to find information. I don’t let them just “google” topics. I usually give them direct sites to start their research. I am not a fan of kids just googling things as there is so much misinformation and children do not know how to tell the difference.
• I think that they take away from some learning time for sure as we spend a lot of time learning how to use them. I also know that the children sometimes spend a lot of time looking up things that are not relevant to what we are learning. I wish I could put more controls on google. But obviously google is not going to do that.

 

Link for more information on Chromebooks from the broader Inquiry of Chromebooks

Jamie: Implementing Tech in the classroom: https://jaimemillar.opened.ca/2021/02/24/ed-tech-inquiry-implementing-technology-in-the-classroom/

Gabrielle:Accessibility of Chromebooks:  https://gabrielle.opened.ca/2021/02/24/chromebooks-accessibility/

Interesting Apps: TBA