Why Some Schools Are Selling All Their iPads
While I was working in the Google Apps group a few years ago, we would bring in groups of teachers for focus groups and feedback on upcoming features for Apps.<p>My biggest takeway from those meetings was that educators have a <i>really</i> hard job, much harder than even what educated people assume.  On top of actually being a useful educational tool, there are a ton of other boxes to check in order to get any kind of technology into the classroom:<p>* Compliance with the myriad of federal, state, and local laws surrounding education procurement, student data, what can and can't happen on government property and around children, and cash-strapped educational IT departments.<p>* Able to be simple enough for any educator to use and maintain, but also have enough features to add value as a educational tool.<p>* Bureaucracies and procurement policies that run the gamut: administrators, local government, state government, federal government, parents, the school board, the PTA, the teachers union, etc.<p>* Extreme price sensitivity.<p>* Long life:  Even rich districts struggle to get budgets to upgrade technology regularly, and by regularly I mean every 2-4 years.<p>* The mechanics of running a classroom filled with children ... who would often rather spend a class period  figuring out how to bypass a firewall to get to facebook, rather than half a class period writing.<p>Getting by all these requirements, and reaching educators at the end, requires a concerted, long running effort on the part of the company.  We were lucky that Google had a running a edu program for Apps/Chrome and made it a priority.  Consequently a lot of the core features of the offering are targeted specifically at educators:<p>* Strong central administrative control.  In order to use your chromebook at all, you really need to log into your web account.  It's only able to install things locally (and bypass administrative restrictions) if you really work hard to get around it.  This helps get the tools approved by IT departments and administrators. Compare this to the fleets of windows machines or ipads that lots of IT departments have to maintain, where they basically solve the problem by re-imaging the machine regularly to wipe out locally installed apps.<p>* Price.  Edu Google Apps accounts are essentially free.  Compared to other computing solutions, Chromebooks are cheap and get the job done.<p>* Tools that both educators and students can use.  The biggest selling point on apps is actually calendar.  Gmail is great but most schools already have a email system in place.  A calendar that syncs, has proper access control, is central to your school, and free, saves educators a lot of hassle.  Once a teacher is hooked on calendar as a "gateway drug", it's not hard to take the leap.  Docs, gmail, chrome, and chromebooks all have the same login, contact list, and access control.  Being able to use these tools makes it easier to pass this knowledge onto the student.<p>* Maintenance: A student can work on one chromebook, drop it in water, and then immediately log onto another one and have all his work.  Also for a educator in the classroom, it's easy to understand that refreshing the page will fix the problem 90% of the time.<p>* Shared home / school: A student can log onto his apps account at home, and get all his state as if he were still at school.<p>* Platform cross compatibility: Apps can work well on a Chromebook, but also will do a best-effort attempt on IE9 on windows.  Apple's core philosophy has never tilted that way.  This isn't just to adapt to varying levels of tech in classrooms, but also for taking the tools home.<p>* And finally, lots of bells and whistles that often get overlooked: ADA compliance, language support, student data compliance, etc.<p>All that being said, for young children, an iPad is an irreplaceable educational tool.  I doubt any Google product has the kind of widespread appeal as iPads do among young children.  Maybe YouTube, but even that is a stretch.