There are, now, apparently, 30 million Chromebooks for education being used around world with the majority of them in the United States, ![]() He knows his Sales Culture, and audiences love him. ![]() It’s true: if you listen to this guy talk, you’re gonna buy what he’s selling. Markey said, he abandoned his previous plans to buy Microsoft Windows laptops for 3,500 high school students. Students in his blue-collar district near O’Hare International Airport faced similar struggles. In the audience, Jason Markey, principal of East Leyden High School in Franklin Park, Ill., was converted. His message: Education is the great equalizer, and technology breaks down barriers between rich and poor students. Instead, he held the audience spellbound as he described the challenges he had faced as a Latino student growing up on welfare in a tough Manhattan neighborhood. Casap, hoping to interest them in Chromebooks. In the fall of 2011, Google invited school administrators to its Chicago office to meet Mr. Hoping to find a non-consumer market for them, the company invited schools to take a look. And it has outmaneuvered Apple and Microsoft with a powerful combination of low-cost laptops, called Chromebooks, and free classroom apps.Īround the same time, Google was also making a push into hardware with Chromebooks, which were initially a flop. It has directly reached out to educators to test its products - effectively bypassing senior district officials. It has enlisted teachers and administrators to promote Google’s products to other schools. In the space of just five years, Google has helped upend the sales methods companies use to place their products in classrooms. What they did was then bypass administrators and talk to teachers directly, a ready audience, who led to wider adoption across schools for GSuite, as this very good New York Times article from 2017 describes, Having found success in the university space, Rochelle and Jamie Casap, now Google’s Chief Education Evangelist started trying to introduce the products to schools, but found themselves stymied by privacy concerns and crippling bureaucracy. Google rolled out Drive apps specifically tailored towards college students, which no one else was doing at the time. Initially, the effort was led by Jonathan Rochelle ,now CPO at Zapier, who was in charge of product management for Google Drive Docs. There are two core products under the Google for Education umbrella, software and hardware. After talking to friends who have kids in schools, as well as current and former teachers, I learned that Chromebooks have been gaining a lot of momentum in schools over the last decade, through Google’s massive lobbying and marketing efforts at schools, and without any checks and balances on privacy whatsoever. When I went to my local school district’s website to investigate schedules and policies for the upcoming year, I noticed that they said they provided Chromebooks to all kids first grade and up. There are hundreds of thousands of ed tech vendors, but one company in particular stands out: Google, and it’s shaping how things happen inside the classroom in a big way.Īll of the concerns I listed are important, but my eye turned in particular to Chromebooks. ![]() The industry is, at this point, well over $10 billion dollars. īut underpinning all of this is a foundational issue: the steady creep of technology into every aspect of the classroom.įrom the students’ perspective, there are the same device companies that rule all of our lives, that create the phones and tablets that most kids now bring to school and create a number of new issues: harassment and bullying on Instagram, cell phones in the classroom, and revenge porn, are all just the surface.Ĭoming at the students from the other side is the behemoth ed tech industry, which includes everything from apps to computers to devices, pouring money and energy into getting into classrooms. And then, there are the more mundane, but still urgent problems: growing class sizes, an increasing spate of tests, kids going to school tired, school lunch debt shaming, decreased recess times, and soda companies sponsoring vending machines. Of course, the biggest headlines have been school shootings and how their aftermath has turned schools onto surveillance. With my daughter quickly approaching school age, I’ve been doing some research on the current state of the American public school system. Art: The Country School, Winslow Homer, 1871
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