School and Chromebooks

 This year schools shifted to remote learning because of COVID-19. Before the semester started, our school district planned on a hybrid approach, where students attended schools physically a couple of days a week, and studied from home for the rest of the week. The thinking behind the plan was to balance the students’ exposure vs the benefits of in-person learning, however as the virus situation did not improve by the school start, the district abandoned the plan and opted for a full-time at home learning schedule.

Before the school started, my plan was to have the kids use their iPads to access their learning materials. They were comfortable with their iPads, knew how to use a web-browser, and switch between applications well. As school start neared, I started thinking that they would benefit from a bigger screen, and a decent physical keyboard, so I began to look for reasonably priced laptops that would do the job. As I started looking late, and I think a lot of parents had  similar ideas, almost all the laptops that I wanted to get were out of stock, with a month out expected delivery time. 

A friend recommended looking at Chromebooks instead. They are reasonably priced, and powerful enough for schoolwork. They have touchscreens, and good keyboards, and more importantly they are well integrated with the Android system and have good parental controls. I gave it a try and searched online for reasonably priced Chromebooks.

Again, most were out of stock, but I was lucky to stumble upon the Acer Chromebook 15. At $350, with reasonable memory and disk storage, a touch screen, and a keyboard, it was a good deal. And luckily it was in stock and shipped in 2-days, just in time for when the school started.

When it arrived, I was impressed with the build quality for the price, and the features the laptop had. Setting up Chrome-OS was a breeze, and when I used my son’s account for the laptop, Chrome-OS automatically enabled Parental Controls, tied them to my Google account, and Parental Link app. App purchase approvals were a breeze afterwards.

Next, I installed Microsoft Teams—the school uses that for classes, video conferences, and homework submission. I prefer having the application installed, instead of using the web-based application, however after a couple of tries, my son ended up using the web-based one. On the iPad, he became familiar with browsers, and switching between tabs felt more natural to him, and that carried over to the Chromebook.

It has been a couple of weeks now with the Chromebook, and everyone is happy. The battery life on the Acer is great—about 12 hours on a single charge, with good usage during the day for video conferencing, and educational games. The CPU is reasonably fast, and the thing is always on, so booting up is instantaneous. I forgot how satisfying that feeling is, when you want to do something, open the laptop lid, and you’re instantly ready to go. Perhaps I am justifying getting one for myself.