Chromebooks may not have made the impact Google wished, but it does seem that they are at least beginning to appear in schools across the U.S.
At the Florida Educational Technology Conference, Rajen Sheth, the leader of the Chromebook initiative, announced a number of deals pertaining to the use of Google Chromebooks in schools.
According to the official Google Chrome blog, ‘hundreds of schools in 41 states across the U.S. are using one or more classroom sets of Chromebooks today’. The exact figures of how many Chromebooks have actually entered the wider school system were not shared, however — so potentially the ‘hundreds’ of schools may only possess a single set of Chromebooks each. In addition, what a ’set’ entails has not been disclosed.
In addition, three school districts — Illinois, Iowa and South Carolina — are going to be going ‘1-to-1′; in other words, making sure over 27,000 students have use of a Chromebook each.
The exact figures reported for each school district ‘victory’ are:
- Council Bluffs Community School District, Iowa: A Chromebook each for 2,800 students, and an additional 1500 Chromebooks to share among two middle schools.
- Leyden Community High School District, Illinois: 3,500 devices.
- Richland School District, South Carolina: A Chromebook per student, 19,000 in total.
A few thousand Chromebooks will not make much of a difference in the education market, but Google does have to start somewhere. I wonder how many of those students would have preferred an iPad?
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