Living in a shiny Chrome world.

As I mentioned in my last post my new edu-world is a Chromebook world.

To give you an idea of the scope of this world I should tell you that my Applied Science BTEC groups are completely paperless. All assignments, all administration, all resources are accessed through Chromebooks linked to the College's wireless infrastructure.

The College is defined by three software suites: Google Docs, Moodle and an in house MIS called Crystalweb.

My theme from last week was the end of ICT, where I looked back over eight years of blogging about schools.  The 'end' was defined by having nothing more to say, but I did not say exactly what it is I have nothing to say about. I pointed out what had not happened but here in Chrome world it is like a fairy read my blogs and waved her wand and told me to shut up.

See what I mean, blasts from the past:

I was appalled at the 200 watt plus power haul of school Desktops:  Chrome books sip 8 watts.

Schools wasted 5000 sheets of A4 paper per student:   my classes use almost none.

I railed against insane support army for Windows fat clients:   now we use netbook thin-clients.

I lost count of my Capita-SIMS rants:   sorry who are they?

I may have mentioned in the past the joys of slow boot up times with large classes, roaming profiles, getting lost in the P: drive's tree/branches/twiglets, Edugeek armies etc etc?  So, as I said earlier what is left to say? You are either entombed in a school/college frozen in 2002 or you live in a post MS paradigm... like I do now.

But is it paradise? Have we saved the planet?  Has it made us truly happy?

We do have some glitches, wireless bandwidth for one. The whole-scale embracing of all things wireless by an improbable number of devices shocked the IT folk who are busy, as I type, buying in more kit, conscious that poor performance may kill the goose.

We do have still have old fashioned computers running Windows 7 and specialised applications and this will continue for a while no doubt. Those who cling on without a good reason are mostly the elderly and can be easily spotted looking for their USB keys which 'they know they had with them' or claiming 'I know I saved it' or sending emails with ( gasp) attachments!

As the OECD pointed out this weekend just to rub in their October report. The UK is pretty much bottom of the developed world for science, maths and reading and has been in that position for more than five years now.  When you ask teachers  'what did you do so wrong to make us bottom of the heap?' they look at you slightly panicked..'we did it right they say'..hmm.

Maybe the paradigm shift I described above will 'background' computers and allow us to move on to reboot our teaching and learning without technical distractions.