Chromebooks

Chromebooks are Google-based laptops running google’s own operating system. This means products like Microsoft or Apple’s iOS can’t run. But there are ways around it. This is essentially a cloud-based system so running Office365 means you can work with your documents and emails online directly from the cloud. The attractiveness of this system is that it is very fast to use. My laptop is ready to use in 7-14 secs. It requires wifi but with my mobile wifi that isn’t a problem. I have been testing it against my usual windows laptop and there are few tasks it can’t do effectively that I use regularly.

If I was recommending this for SEN pupils and schools it has the following advantages:-

• cost- very cheap at the moment £169 from PCWorld at the time of writing. I am amazed at what can be done for that.
• it can run office365 and any cloud based solution such as ClaroCloud therefore making it very attractive as dyslexic learner’s solution.
• battery life – I have had this fully charged 3 days ago and haven’t had to charge since. So 10 hours may really be 10 hours and I am using it heavily i.e. internet, mulitple sites, even editing my website and adding posts like this
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• hough there isn’t the range of apps their are useful ones like Google Keep, Google docs, Google Drive. This means work done on the chromebook can be accessed on other systems.

The drawbacks are limited disc space only 16gb so really don’t store on the drive use the cloud or sd card which is part of the system on the toshiba chromebook I am using to write this article. It needs good wifi to be useful so schools with that win out. On the whole I am really impressed!