Chris Betcher

I saw my first Chromebook, the original Cr48, over 10 years ago. I’ve deployed them into my own school with great success. And I now use them as my primary computing device every day. As a Mac user for many years, an occasional dabbler in Linux, and a Windows user for many more before that, I found the simplicity and ease of use of ChromeOS a refreshing and welcome change. Despite initially seeing a Chromebook as an easy alternative for a bit of web browsing, it took me a while to get to the point where I could see it as a viable option for my primary computer. Despite finding myself regularly using my Chromebook to present at conferences and workshops, I’d bring my MacBook along “just in case”. Eventually, after a lot of travelling around the world carrying two computers, I realised that I almost never used the Mac anymore, and I actually preferred to use the Chromebook. I still remember packing for a trip one day, and looking at my MacBook on the desk and thinking “should I or should...

I just had a couple of thoughts on Chromebooks that I wanted to share. There has been a growing interest in Chromebooks over the past year or so. I ran a Chromebook session at the IT Managers Conference in Canberra earlier this year and there was quite a bit of interest there, and I hear of a growing number of schools here in Sydney that are starting to look at Chromebooks as a possible option for student devices. At PLC Sydney we started with a small set of 10 Chromebooks about 2 years ago, and have been steadily adding more, mainly in our junior school. They have been a major success with students and teachers alike. Easy to deploy and manage. Robust and reliable. Simple to use, and they do most everything we need. You might notice I didn't tout price as the advantage... while Chromebooks are quite inexpensive (around $300 each) I think it would be a major mistake to view them as nothing more than "a cheap alternative" to a "proper computer". Being inexpensiv...

For a while now I've been really keen to get my hands on one of the new Chromebooks but they have been as scarce as the proverbial rocking horse poop. I played with the original CR-48 units at the 2011 Sydney Google Teacher Academy , and although I thought they were a brilliant concept, troubles with the wifi at the time (at Google HQ of all places!) had me going back to my MacBook Pro sooner than I planned. The basic concept of a Chromebook is a computer where the operating system is basically just a browser (although I don't think it's really fair to refer to Chrome as "just a browser".) Still, by minimising the operating system to little more than a support system for the web browser, it really enables the web to emerge as the platform. With most of the data stored away from the machine - in the cloud - it means that users don't have to worry about locally stored data. With the "software" on the machine really just being web services on cloud-ba...