Chromebooks now account for more than half of US classroom devices

[Shawn Knight]

Chromebooks have become immensely popular in US classrooms in recent memory. Market research firm IDC last December reported that Chromebooks had displaced iPads as the teaching tool of choice in schools across the country, a trend that’s shown no signs of deviating.

A new report from Futuresource Consulting reveals that Chromebooks now account for more than half of all electronic devices in US classrooms. Of the 8.9 million devices sold to K-12 schools and school districts this year, 4.4 million were Chromebooks.

The stat becomes even more impressive considering Chromebooks made up less than one percent of such devices in 2012.

Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder told CNBC that while it was clear that Chromebooks had made progress in education, the latest stats are shocking. The analyst added that Chromebooks were able to leap over Apple and Microsoft in just a couple of years with seeming ease.

One of the driving factors to the success of Chromebooks in education (and elsewhere) is the fact that they offer an excellent value proposition for education. Gownder correctly points out that they’re easy to manage, secure, can easily switch between users and are critically cost-effective.

Google seems just as surprised as Gownder.

Rajen Sheth, director of product management for Android and Chrome in business and education, said it’s been amazing for them to see that growth happen in such a short amount of time.

Images courtesy of CNBC, Futuresource Consulting

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https://www.techspot.com/news/63045-chromebooks-now-account-more-than-half-us-classroom.html

 

[oldikes]

I havent heard of a single school doing this, so this is odd/news to me. I suppose its better than ipads, at least...still not as ideal as a full windows laptop id say but at least you can competently type schoolwork and such on these.

 

[psycros]

Utter nonsense. Chromebooks are making inroads, no question, but their still relatively rare in most classrooms around the country. Ask any teacher how many of them are being used in their school..chances are they'll go, "What's a Chromebook? Is that like an iPad?"

 

[Puiu]

It will take another generation or 2 until such devices become common in the classroom. (at least in well developed countries) education and teaching in general need to change a lot.

 

[AnonymousSurfer]

I don't know any schools that use a chromebook or an iPad. My school (and schools around me) used laptops and cloud computers.

 

[captaincranky]

What's this amount to, Google's "Head Start" program? I guess they figure, "if we can get them addicted early, we'll be able to track them for life".

 

[misor]

I think I was misled by some tech reports that say chromebooks are a fail.

 

[Agnomen]

I'm an outlier here in that I work the help desk at a high school that has over 800 chromebooks in it's fleet. They're great for students and Google's management console has made a lot of progress. Interaction with services such as Hapara make it easy for teachers to share, grade, and observe what students are doing. For the most part the devices run themselves, but due to their cheap price point I've had some pretty horrible failure rates on certain components and a noticeable lack of durability. Only in the past year or so have manufacturers really started making models that can actually take a drop and keep going.

Let me just say I'm going to be seeing Acer C720s in my nightmares for years to come. These things basically explode on impact and I have had a stupid amount of motherboards fail in them, many of which happened out of warranty. But that's probably just Acer's QC problems that shouldn't come as a shock to too many.

Also, since these things are basically 100% cloud storage, when Google Drive gets finicky (it happens) or something happens with our ISP, you might as well just shut down for the day because getting anything done is pretty much impossible. Offline files sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't. Definitely some room for improvement.

 

[Willow Creek]

Utter nonsense. Chromebooks are making inroads, no question, but their still relatively rare in most classrooms around the country. Ask any teacher how many of them are being used in their school..chances are they'll go, "What's a Chromebook? Is that like an iPad?"

It's interesting how some people really do believe their personal experience is relevant to what millions of others are experiencing. As a teacher, I can tell you our elementary schools have only Chromebooks. Each grade level has Chromebook "carts" where 25 Chromebooks are secured and charge so we can wheel them into any class grade 1 through 5. That's 25 Chromebooks times 5 grades times 22 elementary schools in our district =2750 Chromebooks just for our district. We could never have funded that many iPads.