Update : 12 May 2011 Google has announced the pricing for the Google Chrome OS notebooks for Schools and Business. They are talking about $20 per month rent for the school note books and $28 per month for the business notebooks. See the article from Mashable here.
Update : 26 Jan 2011 So, Google has now released an Education category on the Google Marketplace. It contains Haiku LMS, also a free gradebook and lesson plan software from Learnboost, and many many others. I definitely think that maybe the Google Chrome OS is the best things for schools.
Ok, so Google Chrome is currently is testing phase and some information has been released.
What we know so far
- It is a cloud based operating system, rather then having everything locally on your computer it is all saved to the cloud.
- Every application on Chrome OS is a web application
- The web applications will run offline
- It is device independent
- It is not backward compatible. Therefore it might not work on machines, laptops and desktops that were not designed for Chrome OS.
- The Google Chrome OS is designed to be secure. Google says it’s the most secure desktop operating system ever shipped.
- There is no CAPS lock key, it has been replaced by a search key. This can be remapped if you really need to have a shouting sentence. Or you could just use the Shift key.
- There are no F1, F2 … keys.
- Battery life should be around 8 hours.
- Connectivity comes in 2 flavours, 3g and wireless N
- It is a free Operating System (OS)
Ok, so if nothing is actually on the computer, what web applications can I use? Well there is the new Google Chrome Web Store. It has many many things in there. And it is only just getting started. People are developing their bums off. Quite a lot of the apps are also free, which is cool.
Ok, now actually down to the point of this article. I think that the Google Chrome Notebook and OS are a great idea. However they are a great thing for certain people. I assume that it will get better and it might replace all other OS’, but I am not sure.
I think that the perfect place for the Google Chrome OS to start is actually at schools. In South Africa for the last couple of years, Microsoft has been giving government schools free software and private schools, software that is much cheaper. The reason I feel that they have done that is to get pupils into the habit of using Microsoft software. They would then buy it for themselves when they leave school and encourage others to use it too. I am not saying that this is bad, but it is not out of the goodness of their hearts that they are doing this.
So it is now the turn of Google. Subsidise the laptops because you know that people will be tied into using Google and they will therefore use and see Google Ads. Because they also come with 3g from local network providers, they could also subsidise that. You obviously want the people to use the internet as much as possible. So the more they subsidise, the more the people will search and the more they will click on advertising, which means that Google will get more money.
So, based on my thought that this is great for schools, what do kids or teachers need?
- They need access to the internet for research
- They need email
- They need to be able to do projects in a Word, Excel and PowerPoint equivalent.
So let’s see what can be done. Well firstly Google Apps is free to all schools and this includes; Gmail (25gb), Google talk, Google Calendar, Google docs (which includes documents, presentation, spreadsheet, and drawing), Google Reader, Google sites, blogger, Picasa (for Photos), YouTube.
So that covers pretty much all their needs. The only thing that that they might need is the ability to play music, and while you can do that in Google Chrome OS, it would use quite a lot of bandwidth, but they can always use their mp3 player.
So how much might this cost?
Now with the new Google Chrome OS and laptops, there are rumours of them being sold to developing countries at around $100 per laptop. Now if you look at a typical South African School. Let’s say that each of those kids had a Google Chrome OS laptop for $100, that, in South Africa at the time of writing is about R695. That is about the cost of a decent blazer. Would the parents pay or would the school have to subsidise? I am not sure, but I do know that if they didn’t have to buy text books and stationary as all their stuff was on their laptop, that would possibly be about the same amount. Due to the fact that it would have a battery that would last 8 hours, they could charge it over night and use it for the whole day without needing to charge it.
All the kids would have a Google Apps loaded on their laptops, and this means that all their emails would be there, including all their docs.
The school might not have internet access, but each of the kids would, so that would save the school money.
The school would not have to worry about Microsoft Exchange, backups and file servers, as all the info is in the cloud.
All the kids can be put into groups under Google Apps groups. So they can be put into classes, subjects and sport groups. So if a teacher needs to email the u16a cricket team, he would just email u16acricket@example.com and the same for each class that could be emailed on grade8a@example.com.
So what would we need to make this work?
Well the first thing is for Google to release the laptops and release them at a reasonable price.
Secondly, we would need a good service provider to provide internet access for the laptops. Now in South Africa, we have 5 cellphone providers; Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, Virgin and 8ta.
Now I am not a fan of Vodacom, so I suggest that Cell C gets involved with Google. Cell C is doing a promotion right now of R149 per month for 2gb. Now I know that this is a introductory offer, so let’s say they can do 1gb of data for R100 per month. That should be fine for most usage.
Then all the parents would need to do is pay for the laptop and then R100 per month for access.
What do you think? Have I missed anything important? I do know that some parents won’t be able to afford this, but the government of South Africa is already buying desktops for schools. So they could subsidise or even provide these computers for free.
Below is a little more info in videos about Google Chrome OS.
