@@rishirajsaikia1323 who said anything about ‘overpriced’? But if the competition has a better price, many organizations are going to switch. Budgets are not unlimited.
As the tech person in the school I work at, I can tell you that the Chromebooks really don’t last long if kids aren’t careful with them. I have had to put repair tickets in on average of 3-5 per day. Broken screens and headphone jacks that get broken.
Which is why I hate giving people free stuff ❤ don’t get me wrong, I was a kid too, but I SHOULD HAVE been taught responsibilities like NOT breaking a free computer 😂
@@TBH_Inc Exactly. I used to sub in a district that had ipads. When a kid would break or lose their ipad, there was a lot of hand-wringing over the cost of a replacement, was the kid being irresponsible, should the family cover part of the cost...sometimes it would be weeks before the kid could get a replacement.
my school had “chromebook insurance” where if you paid $60 at the beginning of year and severely damaged your chromebook, you wouldn’t have to pay for a new one. This led to kids purposely destroying their chromebooks, knowing they would be replaced for free. They would do it in front of other kids for laughs. I watched someone stab the camera out with a screwdriver and said it didn’t matter because his parents bought the insurance
Managing Google services as an admin is horrible. Everything is User based and the Admin has very little control to do things, unlike Microsoft, where an admin can control everything.
@@NONO-hz4vo yet they lack user its a huge problem for both, outlook is trash compared to Gmail as well as much more, that team viewer was so bad during the pandemic schools started using Discord or Zoom the fact I heard teachers being forced to use office when they knew it was a huge problem and still is to date
Microsoft gives too much admin power imo. For instance, there should be no reason why I can't disable Camera Access or Microphone Access for my privacy and my sanity. You don't need to spy on me Mr. Krabs!
Using Google to find out that Google pretty much can't get anything right anymore, and is looking pretty grim outside of the basics like actual Google search, TH-cam, etc.
@@RyTrapp0 Search, TH-cam, Maps and Translate are where they have the biggest leads, everything else is looking open to be replaced sooner rather than later.
@@RyTrapp0unfortunately even the search engine has recently gone down in quality Whenever you search something, the First results are often garbage useless sites that have successfully used SEO techniques to exploit the search engine but the content is garbage Even Bing and stuff based on Bing like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia give better results
Our university dropped Google drive soon after we decided to switch to it because they up and jacked up the price on us and freaked out when their "unlimited storage" actually got tested by our users and they pulled a "wait.. we didn't ACTUALLY mean 'unlimited'" move and then set limits.
well, you didn't actually need unlimited storage, the reason they limited it was bc of piracy, many chinese universities offered free Team drives to anyone via an online form. and pirates took advantage of it
10:48 I used to be a middle school and high school teacher, including during the pandemic. These kids are NOT good with technology. When I was growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, we had exposure to rapidly evolving computers and phones that forced us to problem solve and troubleshoot on our own because UX designs weren't as streamlined as they are now. Everything is now too simple that these kids have no clue what to do when procedures or solutions aren't stupidly obvious.
Yep. I’m a comp sci teacher for Middle/High School students. Can confirm my current group of middle school students are terrible at problem solving technology issues.
@@leonidas14775I agree with you Gentoo will definitely teach how an OS works, however, you have to remember the audience "middle schoolers." What do you think they will do with that knowledge? Let's just say fun to watch. Lol
Having used both, I have to say while Microsoft is a lot more powerful, Google is a lot more simple and intuitive. So it’s probably better for students, especially younger students like those in elementary/middle school. However, it’s complicated by the fact that a majority of employers use Microsoft, so maybe students should just have to deal with it so they are prepared for the workplace? I used Google all throughout school, and so having to use Microsoft now that I’m working is driving me insane. A lot of the features I use are harder to use because it is crammed with so many other features I don’t use and/or they simply don’t work as well. Maybe after a year or two of usage I’ll be able to close the gap, but man it’s killing me.
I honestly thought that ChromeOS and G Suite was terrible and not intuitive despite being simple, although I would say modern versions of Windows are not intuitive either, but at least office is a lot nicer to use than g suite. If schools actually wanted something simple and intuitive they could just buy macbooks.
I kind of find the opposite. Google's primary advantage is in collaboration, but I find their functionality to be very non intuitive and not simple at all. In Google, I'm always trying to figure out how to do some task that in Office I'd be finished and on to something else.
Personally, this is why I use a bit of both. Believe it or not my siblings, parents and I use to use Microsoft Office back in the day. Heck, we still have cases and old CD-Roms of Windows XP, 7, and even versions of 20 year old Microsoft Office to this very day, both the 2006 ones and the 2010 one (which I feel the 2010 version of Microsoft office is their best version to date). However, once I got into Libreoffice, I immediately switched to that program and have not looked back.
Meanwhile our school was like "Get your own computer scrub.". Funny thing is despite being one of the best privet schools in West Bengal, our school was pretty clueless about how to go about with the online classes situation. Many of us senior students found ourselves volentering to help the teachers with their classes. Basically every teacher selected one of us 12th grade students to set up and manage and admin all of their class. We were given the freedom to choose the platform (We managed to convince them to settle on discord somehow. And I would say Discord is way undersated in the education market.) So basically we people just sat there listening to our teachers tell 6th graders stories while serving as the teacher's personal Alexa....
@@NotOnlyLiveOnce I lived in a third world country and we had some really cool teachers. I convinced the school principal to make the school more digital based.
My school actually was kind of the opposite. They happily gave laptops to students that didn't have one, although the drawback was that they were of questionable quality.
@@NotOnlyLiveOnce Whats 3rd world country classification got to do with this? third world means a country that was officialy neutral during cold war i think u mean to say developing/underdeveloped
"Students don't go to the computer lab to learn typing" I find this quote very funny, since in my experience most students can't actually type properly. They couldn't 20 years ago when I was in high school and the situation has not improved in a positive way since then.
It's funny how you mentioned that, because in private school in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, we learned how to do typing thanks to program that taught up typing. Heck, we still have Jumpstart Typing that actually teaches you how to type. And let me tell you this typing class happened every thursday for a good 2 hours. And considering that I wanted to write stories better in my documents, I went from using pointer fingers to actually do the asdfjkl; typing. And before you know it, by the time 2011 came around, I was already proficient in typing. And then, when I started writing my own fan-fiction in 2014, it really drove home my typing skills I learned from 8th grade to put them in use for writing stories and typing documents. So while my hands do hurt a bit, it's nowhere near as bad as writing on paper. Unfortunately public schools don't really teach this type of stuff unless you took a separate class for it. Otherwise, it would not even exist in public schools.
@@SuperFlashDriver Consider trying Dvorak. Speed increase is debatable, but it definitely causes less strain on your hands. It's easier to learn than you're thinking.
@@OryAlle I'll have to check that out. But I'm just saying at that time in 8th grade we used a different typing program than the one I mentioned (Which Jumpstart Typing was back in the early to mid-2000s, not in the late 2000s and early 2010s).
@@Joseph-ke3xc Google definitely did have true prestige back in the day, around 20 years ago. It was the era when even Microsoft made good-quality products in comparison to today, code bloat and planned obsolescence in software were almost nonexistent and UIs were professionally designed. While about every piece of software by every vendor were of high quality in comparison to today's bloated crap with horrible UI design, Google was exactly the forerunner and innovator on good quality, lightweightness, and truly useful functionality on software design. Masterpieces were the early versions of Google search engine, Gmail, newsgroup web agent, Chrome, and about everything up to early versions of Android, which barring the horrible user-uncontrollable memory management scheme (which was/is introduced and praised stupidly as an innovation while actually being crippled new clothes of emperor) was really prestigious over (or at least among) contemporary mobile operating systems. But, then came the but. In late 00s and early 10s, all the professionality was lost and replaced with planned obsolescence and constant changes for sake of change, driving users into insanity in having to constantly learn new with more and more horrible UIs they are forced into, through forced updates and droppings of support for old versions for sake of dropping, everything getting bloated literally into at least tenfold and often even thousandfold than what they technically should be if developed even with mediocre professionality. Rendering huge tonnes of old devices into e-waste and blocking financially poor people from using the services, all while hypocritically preaching their "environmental and equality sustainability policy". And this plague of unprofessionality with horrible code bloat and UI design, crippled functionality, and planned obsolescence, somehow infected all major vendors since about a decade ago - Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft with all their products, and even mainstream Linux distros, have become into all but inoperable bloated crap. All the prestige completely decayed, long ago.
@@TheSimoc I would still argue there are benefits to current tech today, but I want to build on your statement. Google as a search engine alone has gone incredibly down hill in the last decade. I believe I just saw someone discuss about it maybe a month ago, in which their system no longer operates as a 'search' realm, and instead is only an advertising campaign to the highest bidder. Facts become part of pay walls, opinions are advertised at the top. Quality answers for the questions you maybe asking are a thing of the past. Platforms like Reddit are ganging popularity as Google is beginning to lose credibility on the very thing that made them who they are today. Which is a shame that they have absolutely dissolved their reliability in the thing that should be their premier product. And if your best product isn't functioning correctly, how do you ever expect the others to do well?
I would say that schools ditching google was a good thing if it didn't mean turning back to Microsoft. The reason MS has such a dominant position in the corporate sector isn't because the software is amazing, it's because they worked hard to fill schools with their software and ensure that an entire generation grew up learning how to use their software. Well, that in combination with their Embrace Extend Extinguish philosophy...
THIS! And the crummy "standard" of Word that makes it impossible to properly edit Word docs outside Microsoft (yes Libreoffice and GDocs can to that, but that's after years of work by highly funded companies)
Agree, but on the other hand have to see a little irony. Up to Windows XP and Office 2000 (NOT Office XP), practically no particular learning was needed for average usage - UIs were clear, intuitive, and user friendly (and not to even mention - beautiful). Since Windows 7 and Office XP, UIs have turned into more and more horrible by every release, necessitating even professional users to learn using each new release, hard-working to find each function from within all the scrambled scatter and clutter, while just trying to stay sane with the ugliness. Same applies to Google's crap, though. Unfortunately.
@@TheSimoc They opted to have more symbols and less english text on the ribbon-menus in Office, which makes explaining how to do something harder, and harder to remember multiple steps.
@@leonidas14775 Exactly. That has been the horrible UI design trend since then with majority of software. Combined with loss of logical categorization, scatter and clutter of functions with too much and too deep subcategorizations and redundancies, inconsistent and non-categorical styling of elements, too little function-based distinctivity of elements, more and more unclear symbols with oversimplification and loss of color usage, and with all the changes for sake of change. And one of probably the most ludicruous - with all the horrible code bloat, they decided to save maybe one megabyte by dropping the thorough, complete and comprehensive offline help documents!
Pretty much agree. Basically Office reached it's peak functionality in the early 2000s. Since then, it's been rename, change icons, change color schemes, and move things around, hiding them in illogical places just so they could release a "new, upgraded" version of the same functionality.
@earthblob2058 True but MS had way more advanced features than Google had and to this day. While I was in school we were required to learn Office and had an option of getting an MS MOS cert. That's smart on the school's part when was the last job that you worked that didn't use Microsoft in some sort of way. My school did try out GSuite but as I said we all hated it. I work in IT now and we have a heap load of clients most of them either have Exchange or M365 already. There is only a handful of companies that we get that are on GSuite and we migrate them off to M365.
@@TheBooban We had iPads as well. We actually had a club called the iClub (yes... I know) back in 2012 we put together a grant and got the grant we got an iPad for the whole school so kids could work on stuff when they were at home and such.
My university class revolted, after hearing our coding exam would be done on pc's with MS Windows garbage. The campus reacted and let us use Debian Linux, as requested by the students. I now hate everything closed source (MS, Apple, Google, etc)
More big companies use MS so if it's about preparing students, MS seems smarter. Managing Google as an admin is awful. MS is complex, but far easier to manage once you get a handle on it. Now that MS is charging next to nothing for student versions of office, it's going to be tough for Google.
My senior year I took a “computer surveys” class because I watching a lot of LTT at the time. Literally every single day we where tasked with fixing Chromebook’s. They break so easily
In my state(Gujarat) in India, from like 9th grade we are taught to install and learn how to use linux on computer(majorly Ubuntu), along with open source softwares like apache office, libre office etc. I think this is a great idea.
@@christinanull5098 not only my school, it applies to all the schools in my state which follow state board curriculum(which apart from some fancy and international ones do)
I’d like to put my two cents and say my school switched from Microsoft to google suite for both high school and college and it was actually a lot better experience for most of us. It might just depend on the types of schools and students.
MS 365 is honestly not as good as Google Drive. Drive is powerful in real-time server saving, while I found 365 to be buggy and slow. I get that there are more tools at your disposal for MS products, but sometimes having an easy UI goes a long way for what you are trying to accomplish. Not to mention, if you understand Drive (like docs or slides), you can find that it's way more easily customizable than what powerpoint or word can offer. MS sort of feels like a slower, more dictated version, despite having more 'options'. Drive always felt extremely flexible in which, despite what it lacks, it really does open the user to more opportunity.
But... they're schools. They should only be allowed to use APPLE, no Windows Licenses! The world is officially upside down... How are the students to learn if they aren't all forced to play low quality Oregon Trail all day? How will they learn to fear dying of Dysentery?
@@kaicandoit I've found Google Drive Office files (Docs, Sheets, Slides) to open more quickly than Microsoft Office when mostly text but more slowly than when mostly graphics. MS Office is extremely customizable if scripting and Add-Ons are allowed. In terms of _easy_ customization, though, I admit that I don't know what the situation is with Google Drive Office files.
@@kaicandoitGoogle Drive is way slicker and more intuitive than Office, plus I've found the sharing and real time collaboration work way more smoothly on Google, especially on mid and trash tier devices. You can easily do things in Google Sheets on a cheap laptop that would freeze the same laptop if you tried to do them in Excel. Plus the GSuite apps have been upgraded a lot in the last few years, and the feature gap is a lot smaller than it was even 3-4 years ago. There's very little left that the vast majority of people need to do that MS can do that GSuite can't. And even if you are a bit of a power user who can find some shortcomings, a lot of the time you can fill the gap with AppsScript.
As a director for a school district google is nice for easy management. Honestly we need to stay diverse in everything. We also run windows and Ubuntu.
You missed the bit where Google jacked up pricing, and MS bundles everything into 365 now, so it actually became cheaper to go with 365 than G Suite, because you'd get so many more features. I personally don't like 365, it is bloated with complex features that work poorly, while Google's simplicity leads to a better overall experience. But my uni made the switch from primarily G suite to full on 365 because of the price hike.
@@adrianalexandrov7730 Libre is great for a individual. But for a school of business it isn't great. If you are a school where your job is to try to teach kids to not smear shit on the wall and being able to read without a D** joke, you are not going to teach them about Linux. They barely know how to count to 10. If you are a business you are also not there to teach them about Linux. You are there to make money and make things run efficiently. You only make employees learn something new, if they have to learn something new. Their job is to make money. Not to take paid time off to learn a system they do not have to learn.
@@Cloud_Seeker 1. Libre doesn't mean Linux. I use it on one of my PC's at work where there's Windows cause sadly not every CAD system make a Linux version of their software. 2. There's nothing so difficult in teaching kids Linux today. I've been to school 20 years ago and not even in the US, so don't know what they teach now, but back in the day of Win95 and 98 they still teached us how to use the console, some basic text and spreadsheet editing and basics of programming, first on some playingfield like "here're the commands, enter those here and make this robot go though the labyrinth" and then in high school teached us to code in Pascal. If they teach something similar nowadays -- the system doesn't matter much. 3. And if you're a business that depends what you do and who you hire. For most businesses, I'd say it might be fairly easy to switch. It's just that there's no reason: Windows is not so expensive, Linux administrators are (at least where I am) a bit more expensive and teaching some employees how to do stuff would also cost. But what I was saying that Libre worked for me personally, as well as I use it in business for the reason of portability across systems, useful features, old hotkeys and interface that is still there, while being slashed in MS Office in 2013. I'm sorry, but I'm more productive when I can save as by ctrl+shift+s, or paste text only without formatting by ctrl+shift+v, not ctrl+v and reaching for a mouse. As of Latex -- that's a really interesting tool for doing complicated documents where you might want to embed different chapters coming from different people, include code that might change after and other pieces. But it has a learning curve that is not worth it for everyone, thus I suggested looking into it only if OP would have to write some big scientific papers of something similar. But I personally sometimes do even such things as contents for a scanned PDF document through Latex. Works for me.
Another issue with the chrome books was that they only lasted about 2 years before they essentially would crumble to dust. They had practically no resell value and there were too many models to reliably get replacement parts. Leading to cannibalising broken chromebooks until the end of the year amd then a huge cost to repurchase hundreds of newer model chromebooks to start the cycle again
We were loyal Dell/MS-Win Customers from 1998-2010, when I was adopted into the CR-48 Pilot Program. Dells became trash. Out of the 10 Chromebooks we own eight of them are still functional and one of them is a CR-48 from 2010. 2 Acers from 2014, a 2017 Acer, 2 2022 Samsung's and 2 HP 360's
My 2017 chromebook is still working just fine with the same battery. And never once shut down and had to reboot because it said I did something illegal while writing an email. And none of this crap about updating anti virus software. No more trouble loading internet pages. What a relief getting rid of the pos MSFT.
even better, from the day they exit the factory they have an expiration date after which they get cut from google support and updates, not per model, per unit, so an old chromebook even if its still pristine untouched has lost its technical support which really cuts into how useful it is and this is regardless of if that specific model is still in production or not
Be careful what you wish for. My company transitioned to Microsoft for their services (aka "360"), and things break more often, run much slower, and essential business data gets deleted on a time schedule. I think all of this stuff, whether instigated by Google or Microsoft, will come back to haunt those who abandoned their private solutions.
I'm kind of the same but different. I manage a client that has all their services self hosted locally (email, web, nextcloud, XMPP, etc) and their downtime has been negligible since 2013, compared to several major O365 stuff ups. Backups are all scripted and recovery to a backup server takes about 1 hour. 2 hours if there's something interesting on TH-cam at the time. And no, it doesn't need as much maintenance as I thought. It's all been running without any intervention for the past few years,m except the odd Ubuntu upgrade. I did try 365 for a bit and the amount of stuffing about in the admin panel, not to mention their horrific licensing interface is painful. We do use the Office suite but we just buy grey market licenses for about $40 a pop and just use them for years until the PC carks it.
If things are getting deleted on a schedule that's your admins making the choice to manage data that way on purpose (for compliance or cost) and not an actual quality of M365. If Office or Azure outages were common it would be widely reported across every industry, it's more likely whoever in your organization handles cloud integration just isn't getting the funding for the training they need or deflects blame to "the cloud" for things they don't understand.
@@Quiet_9 Once upon a time, mail services was located a lot closer to my desktop than they are now, and were a lot more reliable. Mail services is now located in the cloud, and all of the latency and problems with proxy servers et al which were not present in the older regime are now front and center. My company has close to 20,000 employees, and I can feel the network load increase as the day progresses in a way I never could before. Things become sluggish in the middle of the day -- Outlook 365 takes minutes to obtain e-mails that Outlook took seconds. Sharepoint webpages have to be reloaded several times to load properly. When you go from a reliable system to an unreliable system, you know it's happened, regardless of the putative reason. The people are part of the system, and the system sucks. I don't believe it's the people, I believe it's "agile" and "cloud" -- things which decrease quality of service and place the services much further away from the consumers than ever before.
@@yoshepop Unlike Amazon, I have yet to hear of Google limiting services to Americans based on political viewpoint. That said, I own Google Pixel 7 and I'm quite happy with it, for its software quirks are manageable. I use gmail, but I tier it to my own mailserver, so gmail is used for outgoing mail, but incoming goes directly to my server. As for Microsoft, I'm experiencing it now and I don't like it.
The main problem with people adapting to G Suite is probably the lack of desktop apps. And whats worse is when you try to use the web apps the extensions you were familiar with from Office end up triggering browser related shortcuts.
The main problem for me is interoperability. Documents made in google documents are NOT compliant across word, libreoffice, and similar office programs. An excel sheet made in google can outright break when you download and try to modify it offline. That alone is why I hate it. I have a few corporate documents that they made with the online tools and those are abominations.
I am someone who got to use a whole group of computer based experiences in my education. In elementary school, pretty much every computer was a ThinkPad or ThinkCentre. In kindergarten (which was 2007-2008 for me), there was one computer lab full of old ThinkPads all with slow internet connections, which we used primarily for playing certain educational games from what I remember, and in like 1st grade we had to check the weather online each day. We also had a few old ThinkCentre desktops in the classroom used for less all at once activities. Then around the middle of 3rd grade, they switched us to a 1:1 device to student ratio, so there was a full cart of newer ThinkPads in each classroom (which the WiFi was often painfully slow to use on) and the computer lab was renovated to newer ThinkCentres, all while keeping the few extra older desktops in each classroom. This is the solution we had for 3rd through 5th grade. We never did any coding projects or anything, but we did certain online learning activities along with writing final papers in Word. We also had demonstrations of Excel and made a few PowerPoint presentations (which I had a lot of fun with actually even outside the classroom). Then, after 5th grade, I went to a private Christian school right as my county was switching primarily to iPads students take home with them, which in 2013 was not super popular yet from what I remember, but they still use this method today. What I got instead was a complete mess of technology going forward. In 6th grade, we only had a typing class where we used a remote desktop Windows 7 server. Then that server broke by 7th grade and instead of risking using out of support Windows XP computers, they actually put Linux on their older computers, specifically the Edubuntu distro (the education version of Ubuntu with bundled basic education software). This was pretty much my first introduction to Linux and I probably learned more about Linux in that class than the typing and, I kid you not, LibreOffice lessons we had. During 8th grade, they bought a cart of Chromebooks, but only 1 cart, as the school didn't have enough money for everyone to have one. Around this time they also got the remote desktop server running again, this time with Windows Server 2008 R2, which had horrible screen tearing on the remote desktop client monitors. We mostly used the Chromebooks though outside of our 9th grade computer science class (basically just learning Microsoft Office and some basic Scratch), except when somebody nobody knows for sure messed up the wiring of the server causing it to not work correctly for over a month, while my class was punished with a massive assignment despite not having proof who did it. Apart from that, most of our computer based assignments from this point on were through Google Classroom. However, most of our assignments were still done the old fashioned way, which it was throughout a lot of my schooling career.
it just sounds incredible to my ears when I hear grown adults now talk about actually having pc compatible computers in kindergarten. I was in Kindergarten in 1983. I think I saw my first computer in school around 1986, an Apple II.
Randomly losing access to a product because you lose an Internet connection to "verify" a product, or need to update it with authentication randomly, is bad. This is what you get with the Microsoft ecosystem. Then the random bugs that seem to be creeping in more and more into Office. For Google to make a worse product, lol. Personally I have access to both and still prefer to use LibreOffice. Funnily enough the Excel variant has more functional formulas, and I often have used this at work to fix Excel sheets when looking to reorganise data sets. If you are familiar with a bit of programming a lot of free AI tools (Python especially) are so useful for converting PDFs to text or word/spreadsheets, and just so much that was previously tedious.
I fully switched to Libre when MS forced new ribbon interface and got rid of a lot of shortcuts. I'm not reaching for a mouse instead of ctrl+shift+v or ctrl+shift+s. Plus some features of Libre, like graphs in Calc looks friendlier to me
My school has been using windows for years but instead of getting every student a windows laptop they would get cheap Chromebooks and all you had to do was connect to a VMware VDI to get full windows access.
God I can't imagine the trash performance that would have. Trash chrome book hardware + the initial bad performance that comes with virtualization? Yikes😬
@@TheBoobanhuh? have you used VDI's recently? Although I guess your internet speed plays a big part in the amount of latency you experience. Or the infrastructure of the school.
I always thought that was the actual reasons schools favored Chromebooks: it saved documents to the cloud rather than cluttering up individual hard drives.
Thinking of the last remark about what students will go on to use outside of school, I thought a lot about that when I was trying to become a high school teacher (abandoned because I realized the career is terrible, as much as I enjoy teaching). In the courses I took we talked a lot about integration of technology into the classroom, both to enhance learning and to teach "21st Century Skills," but I was frustrated by how much of what I saw felt like a closed ecosystem of educational technology that had no relevance outside the classroom, wouldn't ever be useful to students again. I would have preferred to teach students using free-open-source everything as much as possible, almost everything can be accomplished with that, but there were a lot of limitations with Chromebooks, they could really only do things the "approved" ways - which often felt far more limiting than other readily-available open-source free software that the students could use whenever they want in or out of the classroom. For example, Google Sheets is far less capable of data manipulation and graphing than Excel or Libreoffice Calc, meaning current high school students have gone back to doing things by hand that I did in spreadsheets 10 years ago - a step backwards! Likewise, the whole Microsoft Office license thing - screw that, just have everyone use LibreOffice!
I never understood why schools used chromebooks. When my step kid was in 6th grade using a chrome book, he had to use a regular computer and he had no idea how to use it. No clue. It was terrible because companies dont use chromebooks, they use computers.
I think the big problem with Canvas is that most teachers don't know how to use it, and most school districts are too cheap to train them. We use Canvas for everything at my college, but still write it all in MS Office. It's readily apparent which teachers are tech savvy, which ones care about figuring out Canvas, and which ones begrudgingly use Canvas because they have to. I got to play around with Canvas instructor mode a little bit. It seems like pretty powerful software when used properly. The problem is at least 80% of the teachers barely know how to use Canvas (yeah, I'm guessing here).
Your guess is correct, Wesley. My district uses Canvas for teacher training. The English language does not have words to express how much I hate it. The design of its navigation alone should have sent someone to prison. But yeah, maybe with some training . . .
I used PowerPoint and Word so much ever since Kindergarten, and I knew how to use it and was a savvy power user! Then they forcibly switched to G Suite and I felt so limited, I felt like it was stifling my creativity. I hated it. I was happiest when there was an opportunity in school to use PowerPoint anyways, like when I made a PowerPoint cartoon for English in 6th grade or when I made PowerPoint games for Game Dev in 10th grade. And then they started switching to Chromebooks, and they just felt so stifling. My school district would use GoGuardian and go completely overkill with the website blacklist, and they were able to block TH-cam entirely, full stop. I couldn't search for any TH-cam video tutorials for anything. I hated it so much. I was so happy when I got to take home Windows laptops during the pandemic, and my IT class was assigned Windows laptops to carry around instead of Chromebooks during my senior year. I HATE Google. And the students or even teachers couldn't do anything about it, since it came from the highest levels of the district and they refused to change back. And don't get me started on Google Classroom or Canvas. I hate them so fucking much. Fucking hate my school district for forcing it down everyone's throat.
As a teacher, I am actually in a bit of an opposite situation: my District recently banned Google Classroom and are forcing us to switch to Canvas. I find Canvas' UI to be poorly constructed, and the amount of coding knowledge and time required to create or change simple things is stupid. But, I think we can both agree: District Bureaucrats are the worst and forcing switches is at the heart of either issue.
As someone who has worked with both for years, it's kind of like leaving Moloch for Baal. They're both evil, but the latter doesn't require quite so many human lives.
I switched to Libre after 2013. Used both before that, but after 2013 I switched to Libre even at work mostly. Strange interface and MS dumping a lot of hotkeys was a dealbreaker
Younger kids don't necessarily need all the functionality of MS Offfice immediately. But becoming familiar with it is great for when you do need it later. Perhaps it's not worth the cost, perhaps it is. I didn't use Google Docs until a few years into college, Docs was fine, but Sheets and Slides are extremely lacking compared to PowerPoint and especially Excel.
We had a laptop cart room so each class room could have laptops with the whole Ms suite. This saves money on having to buy devices every year. Now we need to eliminate homework. I guess virtual classrooms need personal devices, while devices have gotten much cheaper than before. Replace buying some books and the ti-84 and buy a 300 dollar Notebook I guess
@@racool911 Google doesn't even have that advantage anymore. MS Office has a browser based version that's feature stripped and has cooperative access as well.
Shouldn't Microsoft be paying schools to market their products to kids? Maybe teach kids about how programs from different companies work. Google, Microsoft, Libreoffice, and others
In my first three years of high school, we had Windows laptops, and we had cracked versions of Halo and Minecraft that worked on the school LAN, so we could have dozens of players all within the school playing together. It was a great time, and many did play responsibly so it didn't get in the way of classes. In senior year, everything was replaced with Chromebooks...I hated those things. Minecraft and Halo sessions were over.
in Canada, New Brunswick (province) we get IPads to make art and films and also get to play minecraft for tech because the school thinks Minecraft enchances our brain, we also get to play other games and no homework till u are in high school and no tests till u are in highschool, it is pretty much a student's dream.
Our school is really strict on games and have so many ways to block them we have gotten to point where we make our own sites to download things like minecraft for chrome os to the chromebooks
I worked in G Suite support from pre-pandemic into the first year of it. What you're saying is pretty much all true, a lot of schools realized Google Classroom couldnt meet their needs and just used other software and downgraded their subscription to Workspace for Education fundementals as it was free in order to continue using Gmail and Google Meet. I remember Google Meet itself sucked ass for schools for a few months into the pandemic.
"Everyone is using MS or Apple" I beg to differ. All companies I work with have either a pure MS environment or use Linux for back-end with MS Clients. At best Apple is an over-priced after thought for marketing or consultants, but not the general 9 to 5 office grunt...
Our school switched because we wanted OneNote (handwriting assignment submissions). Let’s face it office is a disaster in terms of collaboration but OneNote is the only option for handwriting based assignment submission
we also used onenote in college. at least i did for my second course since my first one was not assignment based since we made a website instead. it was not very fun using microsoft teams, onenote, shared powerpoint slides etc. but it did work just about, so there's that.
i've noticed my high school started using canvas and outlook. when i became a sophomore (which was during the pandemic), my school switched from google classroom to canvas because "a lot of colleges/universities use canvas and there's more features" and in my senior year, we switched from gmail to outlook. they never provided a reason why
Ngl that’s actually pretty good. Even though I hate the Microsoft suite, I think it’s better overall to learn so you don’t struggle like me and others. Canvas admittedly is a lot better than classroom. I don’t think I’ve seen a single college professor use anything else
My school district changed over to Canvas and everyone I have talked to has said they would rather Google Classroom (even teachers). The schools mixed together Gradebook but in the 2018-2019 school year, they changed to Studentvue & Parentvue for the grading issue. The only flaw teachers and students found is that G classroom would say you are missing an assignment if you unsubmited it to redo something.
As a Gen Z kid who is using both, yeah. Issue with canvas is that all the Dual Credit or Dual Enrollment classes want a separate canvas for their school, so it's divided between 3 separate canvases, rather than 1 central one.
As a UK student, in secondary school we used Microsoft 365 (Word, PowerPoint, etc) for literally everything. The only time we used google docs was because of the collaboration features, because simply it’s easy to use. Teachers tried to use Google classroom across all our subjects but in the end they just switched back to what we were using before - as google classroom made the process more complicated and nobody knew how to properly use it. We had iPads in our school; every student had one to make learning easier and to use less paper for resources, and they never, ever, used chromebooks. There were some apple Mac computers for music and creative subjects, but windows computers for everything else. We really didn’t use google for much.
Office 365 the only option? You can still buy a stand-alone one-time purchase license for office. It's $150 for the home & student version and $440 for the professional version. It won't get new features, but it will still get security updates for quite a while.
Office 365 does not get updates either. Just reskins. It is basically 30 years of repacked Office 95. If you can stand the blocky low-fi look of Office 95, install that. It will still run and do the exact same job. A lot faster though with apps of a few MB.
I do IT for a few schools. I don't understand why you would want a Chromebook if all the programs you're going to be using are Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Powerpoint. Sometimes they also add iPads... It's really fun to deal with a student that has a GSuite account, an MS account and AppleID :(
@@qtsssim Apps, apps, apps! Do you wanna shoot a short film and edit - iPad with imovie Do you wanna make some own songs and play them back - Ipad with carage band And so on… Ipad is great because it has so many build in apps that you have to buy separately to chrome pads… Yeah. You could buy them separately to chrome pads, but schools don´t do so and they try to use crap ”free” versions with terrible funktionality, adds, artificial limits etc. Eith enough money it could be possible to get close Ipad experience, but in reality that newer happens…
I liked google classroom as a student a lot and I'm upset that got rid of it. Schoology, one of the third party apps mentioned, has a terrible interface, shoddy google suite connectivity at best, a terrible mobile app for keeping up with assignments, and flimsy anti-cheat measures for tests and quizzes that locked me out when I wasn't trying to cheat and couldn't figure out how to lock me out when I was. I don't know a single student that liked the switch.
As a teacher my district is about to switch to Canvas and I feel very similarly. Students are going to have a hard time navigating Canvas, and while I am tech savvy and will eventually figure out the weird, HTML based interface and editing you have to do in Canvas to make changes or make certain things work, my tech illiterate colleagues are going to have a rough time.
@@aurenkleige My district uses Canvas for teacher training. The English language does not have words to express how much I hate it. The design of its navigation alone should have sent someone to prison.
I'm 47 years old... ... and grown up since my primary school with technology: at 7 got my C=64... then an Amiga 500... then the Amiga 1000... then briefly with first DOS PC and early Mac (at school only... then were too costly)..then turned to the consoles (Nintendo, Super intendo, Sega Mega drive...) then the whole PlayStation (from 1 to 3) in combinattion, since late 90's and internet peeking in Life, PCs again (since Windows 3.1)... I still Remember some DOS "hacks" I kept using up to Win98/XP/VISTA, that helped me so much. A lor of kids today are Just exposed to more tech, but they do not know much about how that works, unlikely those that grew up with "less user friendly" tech that teached us the real working behind the scene....
I am a teacher and microsoft is a superior option for many reasons. Google presumes that an entire school can simultaneously have students all working online simultaneously, however local wireless networks have connection limits, and large bandwidth internet connections are expensive. Microsoft products, however, provide the option for online OR offline use and thus use less bandwidth and internet connections. Then there is the problem of student privacy. Microsoft identified this and gave power to the institution, which is a big deal in many countries. hence, Schools opt for Microsoft, despite the price difference.
Google for education is closed system, so student privacy is at least as good (or bad) as with Microsoft. You have to just do the addmin setting like they should be done (in both systems) The other parts are mainly a matter of taste.
@@haukikannel microsoft allows for the insitution to keep user data withing its own system. Microsoft has no access to it. Google, however, does have access to google class user data.
@@TBH_Inc becasue the google offline mode only works for specific devices. meanwhile, Microsoft has offline mode for ALL devices, including Android and Apple.
i just graduated, and my school is so heavily ingrained in e-learning, our schools network was int even optimized for all those connected devices running nearly 24/7 and it nearly caused me and my peers to fail our finals! when we all logged on to take our test online, the network couldn't handle the strain of all those devices communicating at once and it bottle necked the whole school. no one could connect to the site to take the test as our router was prolly under so much strain and the service was already cheap and bad to begin with, there are random dead zones in some classrooms. so you can imagine the panic as 325 students got locked out mid test or couldn't even take it to begin with! had to spend an hour or more getting the bottleneck fixed, no idea how our ONE IT GUY did it but he single handedly saved all the senoirs!
I've been quite happy with G Suite but I never use Classroom with my students. I just use calendar, since that is what students are going to have to learn when they start working for some company. I invite students to lesson with calendar and attach my assignments and presentations to calendar events. My school never touched Chromebooks because it already had Macs in their labs.
Microsoft has always been good to me so far as a customer. No matter what whether I'm in warranty or not, they take care of you. Google has failed at so many product offerings. Why trust them? At least Microsoft will generally money pit the thing until it works like Xbox.
@@alok.01 I actually liked the Microsoft Lumia phones. For all the hate it got on PC, the modern UI does look and work well on touchscreens. I agree, they should have stuck with the plan to support android apps.
As a student in the class of 21, I've seen everything you are talking about. I remember learning Word, Exel, and some other Microsoft stuff. I remember in Highschool when we got our own dedicated Chromebook and having google classroom. I was there during the peak of the pandemic with the google video call stuff. I even saw the switch from Classroom to Canvas in my final year
I'd go completely open source, but then what would I know. Years ago I got reprimanded in College for suggesting to my peers on a class forum that we all use Libre Office and provided a download link. No amount of explanation was sufficient to get the learned staff to understand the concept of "free" software and I was told that it was against school policy to post links that promote software piracy. My "act" was never escalated so I stopped trying to explain and just deleted the message.
@@zyxwvutsrqponmlkh I can't count the number of distros I have downloaded over the years. On that note, I offered to give my distro collection to my local library so others could use them (this was before fast internet) and they refused, just like in your case, on the grounds that they do not condone piracy!
@@jnharton Given that, apparently, ALL schools are in the dark about FOSS or actively don't promote it due to financial kickbacks, that wouldn't really be an option.
Lots of people running and controlling education are unfortunately below average intelligence. They all say "I don't know much about computers" (useless education degree at your service), yet it's everywhere and more than ever. They happily regurgitate corporate claptrap as they cannot possibly think by themselves.
My team just completed the migration of thousands of mailboxes and drive data for a whole state and it's agencies from GSuite to O365. Even got a write up in the state paper. Users miss some things but the pros outweigh the cons.
In elementary school I used windows, then after moving to a different state I used Mac for three terms in 6th grade, then used Chromebooks for grades 7-12. In all honesty I liked windows the best in the classroom, but when I buy for myself I choose Apple.
I sang praises about my Chromebook until it locked me out of my account permanently. I had to create a new one just to use the damn thing and now everything that wasn't backed up on it is just gone. So yeah, don't blame anyone for ditching Chromebooks.
Office 365 isn't the only option but as it was the 2010s so Office 2014 or Office 2016 would be out. It is a pain to find them on the Microsoft site as they want to promote their subscription software more than sell you the buy once own the license forever version. Microsoft Office still has all the normal versions: Home & Student, Pro, and Enterprise. Microsoft just made it harder to find the non-subscription version of Office they never stopped offering it and making newer versions every 3 or 4 years. and right now we are on Office 2021 which is a pain to find on the Microsoft store site.
And they can easily ditch MS Office for Libre Office for the students right now. The people who actually need the features exclusive to MS Office are a tiny minority of professionals, not students.
@@Roxor128LibreOffice does have a much more clunky UI, though. And most schools already own a bunch of MS Office copies, so there's no reason to switch.
Growing up, our schools had Macs, which during that time, Windows was the defacto standard in business. Macs in classrooms were a sickening market strategy to build life long consumers. Ideally, in public spaces, Operating Systems and software should be unbiased and not proprietary unlike slapping an Apple or Windows logo on the computer and the opening screen of software. Sure, Linux has Tux but Tux is agnostic and doesn't have anything to sell you unlike Microsoft or Windows or Google or Amazon who want you forever trapped in their ecosystems to extract your money and data out of you. Plus, getting kids to understand 'there is an alternative' to Microsoft, Windows, Amazon and Google and that there is this thing called 'open source' will stop this proprietary insanity and turning end users into nothing more than profitable data extraction points.
My Chromebook stopped receiving updates after 5 years. The hardware was still good but it became trash. Unacceptable, I will never buy another Chromebook. I have iPads older than that and STILL receives OS updates
You get what you pay for. Google Chromebooks may be cheap, but they are also horribly limited from both a software and hardware standpoint. Schools only needed "dumbed down" computers when teachers were drowning trying to keep up with technology. Today's teachers grew up with computers from a very young age. 💁🏻♂️💻🧑🏫
Fairly recently my school county ditched Google for Microsoft and supposedly its not because Google was cumbersome to use, but rather Google refused to enter into an agreement that would protect student data, so they say.
My school district is beginning the process of sunsetting Google. Last year we moved staff email from Gmail to Outlook (though both accounts are kept active) and began using Teams for virtual meetings. We use a district shared drive rather than Google Drive, and we began using Outlook Calendar for school events and parent interviews rather than Google Calendar. I still use Google Drive for my own teaching files, since Dropbox has more limited storage and only lets me access files from three devices, but I may have to migrate to OneDrive if they decide to cut that too. The main reason we keep Google accounts for all our students is that we still use Chromebooks in our classrooms, and our students don’t have Microsoft Office licences. Also, as limited and featureless as Google Classroom is, it does have the advantage of being able to share Google Docs with teachers, which is tougher to do without Classroom or using local file storage.
I'm a high school teacher and I LOVE the Google Office Suite. It also seems like most of my colleagues do too. Google Classroom is easy and intuitive as well, the only alternative I've used was Microsoft Teams which I absolutely despise. This video provided a very interesting perspective.
Please enlighten me. I am being forced to switch to it from Classroom and to me it seems the developers decided: "we'll make the teachers code their own damn LMS, bwahahahahahah!!!"
I don't know how stuff works in the states, but in Canada, IT for schoolboards is managed centrally at the board level, for hundreds of schools. That means you're *definitely* running Active Directory for group policy stuff. And with the moves to Azure AD/Intune.... start throwing in some E1 licences for students and... It's one vendor instead of two, you're getting better discounts with volume, and Google doesn't have an Active Directory replacement.
Chromebooks always sucked. I never understood the kind of mentality that tried to justify them. I'm not anti-google, but those things were dreadful. None had good keyboards. Heck, the keyboards didn't have a DELETE key, you had to use (I kid you not) an ALT BACKSPACE. That's fisher-price level design there.
@@me-myself-i787I mean, right-click on a Macbook is Control+Click. I will never understand why pressing on a trackpad counts as a left-click even on laptops with a proper left and right button for the trackpad.
I'm glad when I went to elementary school the only computers used were Apple II's and playing the occasional educational game like Number Munchers, Oregon Trial, Cross- Country Canada. That was the extent of computers in education in 1986 :-)
Even when I was in elementary school (late 90s and early 2000s) we mostly used the school computers for writing assignments. I think maybe we had to make a presentation once or twice? My school had the early generation of iMac G3s.
These kids got it easy. I went through school during a HORRENDOUS time for computing. The schools were filled with Macs, everyone that had a computer at home had windows. You couldn't even save a text file at the computer lab at school on a floppy disk to take home because Windows won't recognize that floppy disk and require you to reformat it.
@@LifeMadeEasiest public school in Bothell, WA you would think being so close to Microsoft HQ In Redmond that we would have been set with windows but nope. All the student use computers were the colorful iMac all in ones
My school switched to microsoft, but had such a big ass firewall that basically nothing worked. You couldn’t rename a file or make a folder without it throwing some sort of cryptic error. Not to mention the usual website block, as well as full, live access to every student’s screen output, and the ability to lock all the pc’s in one click.
Maybe the admin is still in his learning phase? Where I live, actual administration often gets outsourced to external contractors because the school's IT staff is so inexperienced and uneducated they can't do anything well, and they are all underpaid anyway.
0:54 Can confirm. I did chromebook repair to fulfill my community service hours requirement for graduation, and I ran into so many damaged Chromebooks. They obviously looked to be from normal wear and tear rather than irresponsible use. Plus, so many of them were damaged in general. Thankfully I rescued a bunch of older gens (with permission from the school) which I use as on the go laptops. I love my gen 1s that I jailbroke and put Linux on, which I ofc named Larry, Moe, and Curly. (following my naming system of using commedians for my devices. I nicknamed my optiplex "Fluffy" and my Thinkpad "Carlin". I also have 2 gen 2 chromebooks named Laurel and Hardy, which was a suggestion from the IT guy at the school lol)
i had a circle charger chromebook that could go up to 8 hours of continuous usage it stopped connecting to the wifi and instead of fixing it, they replaced it, so the battery can only last 3 hours on half charge, because it takes so long to charge they never even gave me a charger
I was an exchange student in the US last year, in Europe we use Microsoft office for most things. While I still dislike Chromebooks just as much as I disliked them on day 1, G Suite kinda grew on me. Microsofts offerings do have a LOT of options which is great if you are doing something serious, like writing a resume, study, corporate report, but as a student I never needed 90% of the tools, and the 10% I did need were scattered all over in different menus. G suite threw that clutter out and just let me focus on my work. Add to that the convenience of the web application and instant saving to the cloud, and I was happy, especially because I often, but not always, used my MacBook in class instead of the Chromebooks. I didn't miss Microsoft for a second. I might be the only one to say this but G suite will be missed.
I hope that schools can try open-source software instead of just switching between proprietary ones (especially those provided by large companies such as Google, Microsoft, etc.) For example, LibreOffice instead of MS Office or GSuite (Markdown and LaTeX are also widely used nowadays, though not strictly Office replacements), Linux instead of Windows/MacOS, Jitsi instead of Zoom/Microsoft Teams, etc.
While open source should be taught as an option, FOSS distributions still have a ways to go before they are intuitive and compatible enough to replace the proprietary programs that paid for inputs from graphic artists and UX professionals. I say this as someone who uses FOSS applications as much as practical, and had installed and used LibreOffice for a couple months while waiting for a replacement to a stolen laptop.
As someone who has helped maintain an open source language for the better part of 20 years... no. Open source is a wonderful idea. But it's an idea. Schools need implementations. They need support. They need a repeatable experience. They need tools that are easy enough for a child to use.
Mainstream Linux distributions are a viable option for the most part, as long as you can find the needed IT people to support them. But LibreOffice is no replacement for MS Office in an education or enterprise environment.
@@jnhartonWhy it is not a suitable replacement? Which features are you missing? What are those "advanced features" used in education only available in MS Office?
My college switched just as I was finishing, and it caused a lot of people problems due to compatibility and performance problems. My college campus was the creative stuff, so people had Adobe, Unreal Engine, other fairly powerful and intensive software. We had to install Teams and Outlook and log into a college given ID, that was fine until it started eating up resources on our devices. I know people joke about Chrome hogging memory, but Teams would often kick you out of software to read a message, force you to tab into it, mute the rest of your Windows device to hear people in a call or just to make sure you heard a ping. It also locked my friend out of her Xbox account and hijacked her home PC, locking her out of Discord and other apps that the college blocked. I do game design and use UE4 to make prototypes, and Teams and Outlook often made the engine crash, lag or just drop inputs. We also have a trans friend who had their old name shown to everyone because Teams refused to do what admins told it to, even removing their old name kept it showing up in Outlook and Teams, and caused them a lot of distress.
Gods yes. Teams has no right being so heavy on resources for what it is. Like, I'm sure it's because it has excel and such built-in, but why are those built in? Open in it a new window, fuck's sake. It not having its own volume control and instead hijacking the system's global volume is horrible design.
Honestly, microsoft needs to stop hijacking personal PCs. I noticed that on windows 11, signing into a school account will encrypt your entire device without your consent and store the backup keys with said school account. Not fun.
When will they learn to just switch to Linux? There are certain distros easier for users and certain distros easier for the I.T. workers to the point of just making a config file and copying it to every computer on their network.
I remember my district having Office 365 in 2013 when I entered middle school, and we all had to make accounts for it. Then, in either 2014 or 2015 they switched everything to Google and used that pretty much exclusively at least until 2020 when I graduated. Doubtful that they're still using GSuite now though lol. Went from using Dell Dimensions with XP and Office 2003 in the Elementary school computer labs, to Dell laptops with Windows 7 all throughout middle school, then chromebooks all throughout high school except for tech classes where they had Windows PCs. Went through all the eras xD
Crazy how much tech in education has changed. I graduated high school in 2014 and giving us all individual computers or tablets wasn’t even thought of. I never had tests, quizzes or assignments online until I went to university
When I was in middle school in 2013-2014 (7th grade at the time), the district had extra money to buy iPads for all the 8th grade students. I was stoked about next year, since moving on to being an 8th grader meant having my own iPad for the whole year. But my mom, being a substitute teacher at the time, said that the school would no longer give out iPads to students, because nearly 80% of them were either "lost", had cracked screens, or just flat-out broke. Way to ruin it for everyone.
@@salaniorgaan2296 That's unfortunate, but not really surprising. There was one school in my area that was giving students iPads, I believe it was a STEM-focused school. Not sure how that ended up working out. I wonder if they held the students (or really the parents) financially responsible for the damaged/lost iPads? They used to tell us if we lost our textbooks, we'd have to pay for them.
365 is nice but very expensive. To me, it makes sense for corporations to stick to Microsoft but schools should probably be using G suite but not Google classroom. My high school gave all students iPads, and we used G Suite and Canvas (plus Google Meet during the pandemic). Worked pretty well.
My school uses both, along with Schoology 🤯 The students use ChromeOS, and prefer Docs (but I use Word sometimes), and the teachers (windows) mostly use Word, aside from Schoology (docs). Email is Outlook. Find it funny that Google sign in is through Microsoft though. This results in redundant services, which I all use. During virtual learning, they used Google Meet, but for chatting between staff, Teams seems to be used. Students used Windows until 2019-20, when they started replacing elementary, middle, and high school devices with ChromeOS. This year, replacement devices are a newer model, which are ALREADY discontinued. smh
i transfered from a school where they used microsoft, outlook, schoology, windows laptops to a school that used everything in google. i instantly felt the difference and pefered my previous schools ways because it was faster, used microsoft office, windows in general just so much better than chromeOS.
@@lucaskp16 Tho to be fair if Google should wait much longer before killing something since some of them are good its just a lot of them get paid for making new ideas and google doesn't care to continue the lifespan
I remember back in 2013 when I worked at Best Buy a google rep came in and sold so many of us on chromebooks with "why have a powerful PC yourself when you can use a cloud computer?". I suggested the consumer wants to own their own stuff. He laughed. Now im laughing.
Personally, I miss the pre-rona days in school where learnging was less computery and more hands on. It's now almost 100% on the computer. I'm more of a hands-on learning, so I guess there is that to go off of.
One day, my Web Design teacher was absent, so my class had to sit in another classroom with another teacher. However, we couldn't do our work (coding html files) because this teacher only had Chromebooks. Also, the school blocked the Google Play Store servers, so we couldn't even use apps like Sublime Text. Our only choice was to type code onto a Google Doc & hope it worked, but we couldn't test that out since we had no programs to export html files, & Chrome OS couldn't open html files anyway.
TL;DR: My whole school, including our admins, thought google was superior than everything else they tried. I do agree that google isn't the best feature wise, but oh my god it has a nice interface. I've dug through the code of websites like schoology and some of microsofts products, and it's honestly a mess. Schoology looks like it hasn't been updated since 2007 because it still uses shitty CSS tactics and has a VERY old HTML header. It's slow, it's chunky, and when my high school was using it, it had not even half the usefulness and features that google classroom had. I hated it so much. Also, many of the tools that google drive has are more than enough for kids, especially with all the restrictions and rules we had for writing docs or making presentations, or even making spreadsheets. We couldn't format the docs any other way than MLA format, slideshows were laughed at if they had transitions or were formatted with anything but the normal dark or light theme, and we couldn't use the equations in spreadsheets, we would do the math ourselves. It made no sense to use microsoft when it has a complicated UI and too many features we would never be able to use. Gmail was fast and effective, with basically no data caps or file sending restrictions. It hadn't mantener built in safety protocols that worked just fine for everyone. My peers and Teachers hated using anything but google products, and even our admins and tech guy said anything non-google related was a hassle to work with. Plus, chromebooks were totally able to be restricted, and so they became less of a distraction, which I actually liked. I wasn't able to play games in class, which made my grades skyrocket from middle school. Google was overall way better for schools than anything else we used. Including for the admins and the teachers. If someone had a Mac, they just looked entitled and they still used google things because they genuinely thought google was better, they just wanted to play games and not deal with slow chromebooks.
I couldn't agree with you more, I feel like such a minority rn because I completely disagree with this video. I feel like this whole thing is wrong entirely.
I hate Google classroom with a passion. It's okay for multiple choice questions, but with any other type of question, it is bad. Even warning students ahead of time about how short and long-answer responses will initially show as incorrect until I manually grade it, students complained about how it marked them wrong.
I preferred Google Classroom as someone who is primarily paper-pencil and requires simplicity. I am being forced to switch to Canvas next year, and my general impression is the UI is a mess that is incredibly rigid, and anything that can be edited requires a lot of bizarre coding knowledge that while I can figure it out eventually, is wastefully time consuming compared to the functions that Classroom already has built in.
@aurenkleige My other gripe was any time chromebooks were used, getting students to put them away when it was time to put them away was an absolute pain. Then they would get them back out and start playing games thinking they were being sneaky.
@@karlrovey That's hilarious in a way that they thought they could be sneaky with chromebooks. Which grade level are we talking? I teach High School, and the students are smart enough to try and use their phones to play games or message friends during class. Always a pain to deal with that.
@@aurenkleige Jr High. That would also argue about needing to "turn it off correctly to save battery" even through it was either their last class of the day or they were going to PE or art for their final class of the day. They had to turn in their phones at the beginning of the day.
@@aurenkleige The other obvious thing was chewing gum, pretending to spit it out, and then getting caught chewing gum before even getting back to their seats. If it were something other than music, I wouldn't care about the gum.
My current school uses Chromebook and all the google stuff on there. It’s pretty limited. I used windows at one of my previous schools and there’s definitely a lot more to work with in terms of learning. Not only do you have access to google softwares, but you also have programs like PowerPoint, Word, and Excel (idk if it comes pre-installed or not). There’s also a lot of downloadable programs to choose from.
1:54 at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, my district was forced to spend the last month or so online. Having nowhere else to go, they turned to Google Meet. That one month was enough for them to realize how bad GM is. The 2020-2021 school year was spent on Zoom (although they continued to use GSuite and still do to this day).
Here in Extremadura, Spain, we've worked with Linux for ages. I don't remember when we started, but when I did my first work experience as a teacher, back in 2005, it was already a fact of school life. Back then it was a spin of Debian, now a it's a custom config of Xubuntu LTS. The systems are tied down, each school has its admin, and taking into account the paleolithic hardware, things work very, very well. Plus, not a Euro needs to be spent on licenses and stuff. And, of course, unlike Microsoft products, there is zero spyware. Still, the Google Suite for Education thing became big some years ago, and the regional government made a deal with Google. It's almost exclusively web services, though, very few Chromebooks.
@@Dave102693 same here. I did pay around with it at the start. Initially when Google docs was launched I thought there was potential. However years later Google docs look like a kids word processor and is far from a professional tool. It's the word processor you jump on when you're on your phone. And that is the same for the rest. Google sheets has some redeeming qualities but far from a product coming from an advertising behemoth like Google
I cheap laptop/desktop running tailored Linux distro is better than a Chromebook with an expiration date. And Microsoft Office 365 works just fine in a browser, so it works well with Linux.
I currently have a crapbook😂😂 and my flip phone still has more capabilities seriously tho it’s like the whole computer is literally locked bc you can’t do shiii on it 😂. I MEAN NOTHING it literally does nothing. Even their own apps struggle on the pos 😭😭
College student here, specifically in a ptogram that teaches network engineering, the Chromebooks in highschools are absolutely awful for tech literacy. For context, we're in a BYOD environment, but we mainly use Office 365 and Blackboard. Fellow students coming in from a Chromebook school district often have to be pulled aside in programming classes to have the bare basics of a file system explained to them. Most of them wind up dropping out.
In my school we use everything from google. I find Classroom and Gmail to work very well, but I don't like Google Docs/Slides/Sheets (although they get the job done) and absolutely hate chromebooks. We also use canvas in conjunction with classroom for some classes. It's not as simple as Classroom, but it also works really well.
This is not the case with any of our local school districts. As an employee in my kids school district I can say that we have found the Google suite of products and Chromebooks have worked quite well.
I largely have had the same experience, Brad. And I notice that the video did not provide any numbers to support it's claim that Google is being ditched. I'm sure some have, but is the number significant? Are there others switching *to* Google?
7:00 Why would you want students to be able to edit work that they've turned in? When you hand in a physical copy of the work, you can't still make changes. The teacher can return a submitted work to a student to edit in real life and in Google Classroom.
The real reason: Google decided to increase prices quite a lot and started charging for things that had been free.
Greed. Greed never changes.
For development everything costs. Microsoft or other companies may try to get it in another way. But they will eventually do the same
@@hilmyakatsuki1665 True. Expecting free services forever is not realistic.
@@ADHJkvsNgsMBbTQefree and overpriced are not the same thing
@@rishirajsaikia1323 who said anything about ‘overpriced’? But if the competition has a better price, many organizations are going to switch. Budgets are not unlimited.
As the tech person in the school I work at, I can tell you that the Chromebooks really don’t last long if kids aren’t careful with them. I have had to put repair tickets in on average of 3-5 per day. Broken screens and headphone jacks that get broken.
Which is why I hate giving people free stuff ❤ don’t get me wrong, I was a kid too, but I SHOULD HAVE been taught responsibilities like NOT breaking a free computer 😂
I don’t think any computer lasts long if kids aren’t careful with them 😆Might as well get the cheapest ones if it’s breaking anyways.
I resell chromebooks and have them die on me for no reason, no waterdamage, no fall damage or anything. Just dead
@@TBH_Inc Exactly. I used to sub in a district that had ipads. When a kid would break or lose their ipad, there was a lot of hand-wringing over the cost of a replacement, was the kid being irresponsible, should the family cover part of the cost...sometimes it would be weeks before the kid could get a replacement.
my school had “chromebook insurance” where if you paid $60 at the beginning of year and severely damaged your chromebook, you wouldn’t have to pay for a new one. This led to kids purposely destroying their chromebooks, knowing they would be replaced for free. They would do it in front of other kids for laughs. I watched someone stab the camera out with a screwdriver and said it didn’t matter because his parents bought the insurance
Managing Google services as an admin is horrible. Everything is User based and the Admin has very little control to do things, unlike Microsoft, where an admin can control everything.
Microsoft has devoted a ton to make sure the admin is in fact the admin.
@@NONO-hz4vo yet they lack user its a huge problem for both, outlook is trash compared to Gmail as well as much more, that team viewer was so bad during the pandemic schools started using Discord or Zoom the fact I heard teachers being forced to use office when they knew it was a huge problem and still is to date
@@xxdesertstormteams has improved a lot compared to early 2020 and is now miles ahead of Zoom
And do you trust Microsoft with your children's data? And there HORRBILE software?
Just sayin'
Microsoft gives too much admin power imo. For instance, there should be no reason why I can't disable Camera Access or Microphone Access for my privacy and my sanity. You don't need to spy on me Mr. Krabs!
Ironic that we use Google to find out that schools are ditching Google.
Using Google to find out that Google pretty much can't get anything right anymore, and is looking pretty grim outside of the basics like actual Google search, TH-cam, etc.
@@RyTrapp0 Search, TH-cam, Maps and Translate are where they have the biggest leads, everything else is looking open to be replaced sooner rather than later.
@@RyTrapp0unfortunately even the search engine has recently gone down in quality
Whenever you search something, the First results are often garbage useless sites that have successfully used SEO techniques to exploit the search engine but the content is garbage
Even Bing and stuff based on Bing like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia give better results
Google is only better at certain consumer applications, but for work and productivity, Microsoft 365 is the better suite for work and school
And document it on google‘s video site
Our university dropped Google drive soon after we decided to switch to it because they up and jacked up the price on us and freaked out when their "unlimited storage" actually got tested by our users and they pulled a "wait.. we didn't ACTUALLY mean 'unlimited'" move and then set limits.
well, you didn't actually need unlimited storage, the reason they limited it was bc of piracy, many chinese universities offered free Team drives to anyone via an online form.
and pirates took advantage of it
@@arjix8738 That and who does the most Pirating? College age Young Adults. Who's limited budget pays for School and Beer for the weekends.
Good luck finding an alternative
@@arjix8738Chinese Universities don’t (and are officially not allowed to) use google services, drive included
@@hilmyakatsuki1665 Alternative: Microsoft Azure
10:48
I used to be a middle school and high school teacher, including during the pandemic. These kids are NOT good with technology. When I was growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, we had exposure to rapidly evolving computers and phones that forced us to problem solve and troubleshoot on our own because UX designs weren't as streamlined as they are now. Everything is now too simple that these kids have no clue what to do when procedures or solutions aren't stupidly obvious.
Yep. I’m a comp sci teacher for Middle/High School students. Can confirm my current group of middle school students are terrible at problem solving technology issues.
This is a sad reality - I assumed that kids would be _more_ competent with computers than my generation was.
They are not.
Make them learn to build Gentoo from the command line lol
@@leonidas14775I agree with you Gentoo will definitely teach how an OS works, however, you have to remember the audience "middle schoolers." What do you think they will do with that knowledge? Let's just say fun to watch. Lol
@@aodfr I was kidding, but kids can achive incredible things if they're pushed to and given the resources.
Having used both, I have to say while Microsoft is a lot more powerful, Google is a lot more simple and intuitive. So it’s probably better for students, especially younger students like those in elementary/middle school. However, it’s complicated by the fact that a majority of employers use Microsoft, so maybe students should just have to deal with it so they are prepared for the workplace? I used Google all throughout school, and so having to use Microsoft now that I’m working is driving me insane. A lot of the features I use are harder to use because it is crammed with so many other features I don’t use and/or they simply don’t work as well. Maybe after a year or two of usage I’ll be able to close the gap, but man it’s killing me.
I honestly thought that ChromeOS and G Suite was terrible and not intuitive despite being simple, although I would say modern versions of Windows are not intuitive either, but at least office is a lot nicer to use than g suite. If schools actually wanted something simple and intuitive they could just buy macbooks.
I kind of find the opposite. Google's primary advantage is in collaboration, but I find their functionality to be very non intuitive and not simple at all. In Google, I'm always trying to figure out how to do some task that in Office I'd be finished and on to something else.
Personally, this is why I use a bit of both. Believe it or not my siblings, parents and I use to use Microsoft Office back in the day. Heck, we still have cases and old CD-Roms of Windows XP, 7, and even versions of 20 year old Microsoft Office to this very day, both the 2006 ones and the 2010 one (which I feel the 2010 version of Microsoft office is their best version to date). However, once I got into Libreoffice, I immediately switched to that program and have not looked back.
Google combined with a third-party service. The thing is that most jobs are tech-based now and not done on a chromebook.
@@WiiUniverse Macbooks are exponetially more expensive though, assuming the model isn't oudated as heck.
During my last few years at University, we changed from g suite to office 365. I'm qualified to say it was a massive upgrade.
Same here. I didn't like it at first but office was better.
@@HMKfilms360 True. Thing is we are too comfortable to google we don't appreciate ms enough
@@nightking8490 Very same applies also the other way around. Both Google and Microsoft are horrible. Especially these suites.
@@carlk.3264 Sounds like LaTeX, which is mainly used for scientific papers and advanced math courses
@@nightking8490"how much could a banana cost?" -M$
Meanwhile our school was like "Get your own computer scrub.". Funny thing is despite being one of the best privet schools in West Bengal, our school was pretty clueless about how to go about with the online classes situation. Many of us senior students found ourselves volentering to help the teachers with their classes. Basically every teacher selected one of us 12th grade students to set up and manage and admin all of their class. We were given the freedom to choose the platform (We managed to convince them to settle on discord somehow. And I would say Discord is way undersated in the education market.) So basically we people just sat there listening to our teachers tell 6th graders stories while serving as the teacher's personal Alexa....
You shouldn't expect much from a third world country
@@NotOnlyLiveOnce I lived in a third world country and we had some really cool teachers. I convinced the school principal to make the school more digital based.
My school actually was kind of the opposite. They happily gave laptops to students that didn't have one, although the drawback was that they were of questionable quality.
@@NotOnlyLiveOnce Whats 3rd world country classification got to do with this?
third world means a country that was officialy neutral during cold war
i think u mean to say developing/underdeveloped
Discord Mods were born that day
"Students don't go to the computer lab to learn typing" I find this quote very funny, since in my experience most students can't actually type properly. They couldn't 20 years ago when I was in high school and the situation has not improved in a positive way since then.
It's funny how you mentioned that, because in private school in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, we learned how to do typing thanks to program that taught up typing. Heck, we still have Jumpstart Typing that actually teaches you how to type. And let me tell you this typing class happened every thursday for a good 2 hours. And considering that I wanted to write stories better in my documents, I went from using pointer fingers to actually do the asdfjkl; typing. And before you know it, by the time 2011 came around, I was already proficient in typing. And then, when I started writing my own fan-fiction in 2014, it really drove home my typing skills I learned from 8th grade to put them in use for writing stories and typing documents. So while my hands do hurt a bit, it's nowhere near as bad as writing on paper. Unfortunately public schools don't really teach this type of stuff unless you took a separate class for it. Otherwise, it would not even exist in public schools.
I graduated in 2019 quite often the school system starts too late with proper typing habits and they don't put enough of an effort in
@@SuperFlashDriver Consider trying Dvorak. Speed increase is debatable, but it definitely causes less strain on your hands. It's easier to learn than you're thinking.
@@OryAlle I'll have to check that out. But I'm just saying at that time in 8th grade we used a different typing program than the one I mentioned (Which Jumpstart Typing was back in the early to mid-2000s, not in the late 2000s and early 2010s).
I learned to type properly using FrEdWriter and All The Right Type on an Apple II in school around 1985 :-)
This video hit at a good time for me. I was feeling Google's prestige in many areas is starting to decay.
Google is awful and cancerous. I'm not even talking about their blatant political bias.
@@Joseph-ke3xcagreed
@@Joseph-ke3xc Google definitely did have true prestige back in the day, around 20 years ago. It was the era when even Microsoft made good-quality products in comparison to today, code bloat and planned obsolescence in software were almost nonexistent and UIs were professionally designed. While about every piece of software by every vendor were of high quality in comparison to today's bloated crap with horrible UI design, Google was exactly the forerunner and innovator on good quality, lightweightness, and truly useful functionality on software design.
Masterpieces were the early versions of Google search engine, Gmail, newsgroup web agent, Chrome, and about everything up to early versions of Android, which barring the horrible user-uncontrollable memory management scheme (which was/is introduced and praised stupidly as an innovation while actually being crippled new clothes of emperor) was really prestigious over (or at least among) contemporary mobile operating systems.
But, then came the but. In late 00s and early 10s, all the professionality was lost and replaced with planned obsolescence and constant changes for sake of change, driving users into insanity in having to constantly learn new with more and more horrible UIs they are forced into, through forced updates and droppings of support for old versions for sake of dropping, everything getting bloated literally into at least tenfold and often even thousandfold than what they technically should be if developed even with mediocre professionality. Rendering huge tonnes of old devices into e-waste and blocking financially poor people from using the services, all while hypocritically preaching their "environmental and equality sustainability policy".
And this plague of unprofessionality with horrible code bloat and UI design, crippled functionality, and planned obsolescence, somehow infected all major vendors since about a decade ago - Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft with all their products, and even mainstream Linux distros, have become into all but inoperable bloated crap. All the prestige completely decayed, long ago.
🤞 Hoping Microsoft phone makes a comeback. Really still miss my 950xl. 😢
@@TheSimoc I would still argue there are benefits to current tech today, but I want to build on your statement. Google as a search engine alone has gone incredibly down hill in the last decade. I believe I just saw someone discuss about it maybe a month ago, in which their system no longer operates as a 'search' realm, and instead is only an advertising campaign to the highest bidder. Facts become part of pay walls, opinions are advertised at the top. Quality answers for the questions you maybe asking are a thing of the past. Platforms like Reddit are ganging popularity as Google is beginning to lose credibility on the very thing that made them who they are today. Which is a shame that they have absolutely dissolved their reliability in the thing that should be their premier product. And if your best product isn't functioning correctly, how do you ever expect the others to do well?
I would say that schools ditching google was a good thing if it didn't mean turning back to Microsoft. The reason MS has such a dominant position in the corporate sector isn't because the software is amazing, it's because they worked hard to fill schools with their software and ensure that an entire generation grew up learning how to use their software. Well, that in combination with their Embrace Extend Extinguish philosophy...
THIS! And the crummy "standard" of Word that makes it impossible to properly edit Word docs outside Microsoft (yes Libreoffice and GDocs can to that, but that's after years of work by highly funded companies)
Agree, but on the other hand have to see a little irony. Up to Windows XP and Office 2000 (NOT Office XP), practically no particular learning was needed for average usage - UIs were clear, intuitive, and user friendly (and not to even mention - beautiful). Since Windows 7 and Office XP, UIs have turned into more and more horrible by every release, necessitating even professional users to learn using each new release, hard-working to find each function from within all the scrambled scatter and clutter, while just trying to stay sane with the ugliness.
Same applies to Google's crap, though. Unfortunately.
@@TheSimoc They opted to have more symbols and less english text on the ribbon-menus in Office, which makes explaining how to do something harder, and harder to remember multiple steps.
@@leonidas14775 Exactly. That has been the horrible UI design trend since then with majority of software. Combined with loss of logical categorization, scatter and clutter of functions with too much and too deep subcategorizations and redundancies, inconsistent and non-categorical styling of elements, too little function-based distinctivity of elements, more and more unclear symbols with oversimplification and loss of color usage, and with all the changes for sake of change. And one of probably the most ludicruous - with all the horrible code bloat, they decided to save maybe one megabyte by dropping the thorough, complete and comprehensive offline help documents!
Pretty much agree. Basically Office reached it's peak functionality in the early 2000s. Since then, it's been rename, change icons, change color schemes, and move things around, hiding them in illogical places just so they could release a "new, upgraded" version of the same functionality.
When I was in school we had MS and then switched to Google, all the students hated it so much and basically revolted they made the switch back.
@earthblob2058 True but MS had way more advanced features than Google had and to this day. While I was in school we were required to learn Office and had an option of getting an MS MOS cert. That's smart on the school's part when was the last job that you worked that didn't use Microsoft in some sort of way. My school did try out GSuite but as I said we all hated it.
I work in IT now and we have a heap load of clients most of them either have Exchange or M365 already. There is only a handful of companies that we get that are on GSuite and we migrate them off to M365.
We had Apple. Apple were first in schools.
@@TheBooban We had iPads as well. We actually had a club called the iClub (yes... I know) back in 2012 we put together a grant and got the grant we got an iPad for the whole school so kids could work on stuff when they were at home and such.
My university class revolted, after hearing our coding exam would be done on pc's with MS Windows garbage.
The campus reacted and let us use Debian Linux, as requested by the students.
I now hate everything closed source (MS, Apple, Google, etc)
More big companies use MS so if it's about preparing students, MS seems smarter.
Managing Google as an admin is awful. MS is complex, but far easier to manage once you get a handle on it. Now that MS is charging next to nothing for student versions of office, it's going to be tough for Google.
My senior year I took a “computer surveys” class because I watching a lot of LTT at the time. Literally every single day we where tasked with fixing Chromebook’s. They break so easily
It's always wired that the "ultra durable" ones are the cheapest and the break the easiest
Maybe it's cuz people get the durable ones and decide to put it to the test lol
In my state(Gujarat) in India, from like 9th grade we are taught to install and learn how to use linux on computer(majorly Ubuntu), along with open source softwares like apache office, libre office etc. I think this is a great idea.
I wish this was taught in our schools here in my country
based af school
@@christinanull5098 not only my school, it applies to all the schools in my state which follow state board curriculum(which apart from some fancy and international ones do)
we just dualbooted linux on the Chromebooks by ourselves
W school
I’d like to put my two cents and say my school switched from Microsoft to google suite for both high school and college and it was actually a lot better experience for most of us.
It might just depend on the types of schools and students.
MS 365 is honestly not as good as Google Drive. Drive is powerful in real-time server saving, while I found 365 to be buggy and slow. I get that there are more tools at your disposal for MS products, but sometimes having an easy UI goes a long way for what you are trying to accomplish. Not to mention, if you understand Drive (like docs or slides), you can find that it's way more easily customizable than what powerpoint or word can offer. MS sort of feels like a slower, more dictated version, despite having more 'options'. Drive always felt extremely flexible in which, despite what it lacks, it really does open the user to more opportunity.
But... they're schools. They should only be allowed to use APPLE, no Windows Licenses! The world is officially upside down...
How are the students to learn if they aren't all forced to play low quality Oregon Trail all day? How will they learn to fear dying of Dysentery?
@@kaicandoit I've found Google Drive Office files (Docs, Sheets, Slides) to open more quickly than Microsoft Office when mostly text but more slowly than when mostly graphics. MS Office is extremely customizable if scripting and Add-Ons are allowed. In terms of _easy_ customization, though, I admit that I don't know what the situation is with Google Drive Office files.
@@kaicandoitGoogle Drive is way slicker and more intuitive than Office, plus I've found the sharing and real time collaboration work way more smoothly on Google, especially on mid and trash tier devices. You can easily do things in Google Sheets on a cheap laptop that would freeze the same laptop if you tried to do them in Excel.
Plus the GSuite apps have been upgraded a lot in the last few years, and the feature gap is a lot smaller than it was even 3-4 years ago. There's very little left that the vast majority of people need to do that MS can do that GSuite can't. And even if you are a bit of a power user who can find some shortcomings, a lot of the time you can fill the gap with AppsScript.
As a director for a school district google is nice for easy management. Honestly we need to stay diverse in everything. We also run windows and Ubuntu.
You missed the bit where Google jacked up pricing, and MS bundles everything into 365 now, so it actually became cheaper to go with 365 than G Suite, because you'd get so many more features.
I personally don't like 365, it is bloated with complex features that work poorly, while Google's simplicity leads to a better overall experience. But my uni made the switch from primarily G suite to full on 365 because of the price hike.
@@adrianalexandrov7730 Libre is great for a individual. But for a school of business it isn't great. If you are a school where your job is to try to teach kids to not smear shit on the wall and being able to read without a D** joke, you are not going to teach them about Linux. They barely know how to count to 10.
If you are a business you are also not there to teach them about Linux. You are there to make money and make things run efficiently. You only make employees learn something new, if they have to learn something new. Their job is to make money. Not to take paid time off to learn a system they do not have to learn.
Education orgs don't pay for Google
Workspace
My school uses both yet nobody uses 365 since collaboration is much more straightforward on gsuite.
Not everything is included in 365. For instance Microsoft Project has to be purchased separate.
@@Cloud_Seeker 1. Libre doesn't mean Linux. I use it on one of my PC's at work where there's Windows cause sadly not every CAD system make a Linux version of their software.
2. There's nothing so difficult in teaching kids Linux today. I've been to school 20 years ago and not even in the US, so don't know what they teach now, but back in the day of Win95 and 98 they still teached us how to use the console, some basic text and spreadsheet editing and basics of programming, first on some playingfield like "here're the commands, enter those here and make this robot go though the labyrinth" and then in high school teached us to code in Pascal.
If they teach something similar nowadays -- the system doesn't matter much.
3. And if you're a business that depends what you do and who you hire.
For most businesses, I'd say it might be fairly easy to switch. It's just that there's no reason: Windows is not so expensive, Linux administrators are (at least where I am) a bit more expensive and teaching some employees how to do stuff would also cost.
But what I was saying that Libre worked for me personally, as well as I use it in business for the reason of portability across systems, useful features, old hotkeys and interface that is still there, while being slashed in MS Office in 2013.
I'm sorry, but I'm more productive when I can save as by ctrl+shift+s, or paste text only without formatting by ctrl+shift+v, not ctrl+v and reaching for a mouse.
As of Latex -- that's a really interesting tool for doing complicated documents where you might want to embed different chapters coming from different people, include code that might change after and other pieces.
But it has a learning curve that is not worth it for everyone, thus I suggested looking into it only if OP would have to write some big scientific papers of something similar.
But I personally sometimes do even such things as contents for a scanned PDF document through Latex. Works for me.
Another issue with the chrome books was that they only lasted about 2 years before they essentially would crumble to dust. They had practically no resell value and there were too many models to reliably get replacement parts. Leading to cannibalising broken chromebooks until the end of the year amd then a huge cost to repurchase hundreds of newer model chromebooks to start the cycle again
Indeed. If Google made Chromebooks to last 5 to 10 years it wouldn't be a problem. The resell value is none.
@@RemziCavdar if they made them to last that long they wouldn't be so cheap
We were loyal Dell/MS-Win Customers from 1998-2010, when I was adopted into the CR-48 Pilot Program. Dells became trash. Out of the 10 Chromebooks we own eight of them are still functional and one of them is a CR-48 from 2010. 2 Acers from 2014, a 2017 Acer, 2 2022 Samsung's and 2 HP 360's
My 2017 chromebook is still working just fine with the same battery. And never once shut down and had to reboot because it said I did something illegal while writing an email. And none of this crap about updating anti virus software. No more trouble loading internet pages. What a relief getting rid of the pos MSFT.
even better, from the day they exit the factory they have an expiration date after which they get cut from google support and updates, not per model, per unit, so an old chromebook even if its still pristine untouched has lost its technical support which really cuts into how useful it is and this is regardless of if that specific model is still in production or not
Be careful what you wish for. My company transitioned to Microsoft for their services (aka "360"), and things break more often, run much slower, and essential business data gets deleted on a time schedule. I think all of this stuff, whether instigated by Google or Microsoft, will come back to haunt those who abandoned their private solutions.
I'm kind of the same but different.
I manage a client that has all their services self hosted locally (email, web, nextcloud, XMPP, etc) and their downtime has been negligible since 2013, compared to several major O365 stuff ups.
Backups are all scripted and recovery to a backup server takes about 1 hour. 2 hours if there's something interesting on TH-cam at the time.
And no, it doesn't need as much maintenance as I thought. It's all been running without any intervention for the past few years,m except the odd Ubuntu upgrade.
I did try 365 for a bit and the amount of stuffing about in the admin panel, not to mention their horrific licensing interface is painful. We do use the Office suite but we just buy grey market licenses for about $40 a pop and just use them for years until the PC carks it.
Microsoft is a lot less limited than Google though. At least in my case, there was a lot more freedom.
If things are getting deleted on a schedule that's your admins making the choice to manage data that way on purpose (for compliance or cost) and not an actual quality of M365. If Office or Azure outages were common it would be widely reported across every industry, it's more likely whoever in your organization handles cloud integration just isn't getting the funding for the training they need or deflects blame to "the cloud" for things they don't understand.
@@Quiet_9 Once upon a time, mail services was located a lot closer to my desktop than they are now, and were a lot more reliable. Mail services is now located in the cloud, and all of the latency and problems with proxy servers et al which were not present in the older regime are now front and center. My company has close to 20,000 employees, and I can feel the network load increase as the day progresses in a way I never could before. Things become sluggish in the middle of the day -- Outlook 365 takes minutes to obtain e-mails that Outlook took seconds. Sharepoint webpages have to be reloaded several times to load properly. When you go from a reliable system to an unreliable system, you know it's happened, regardless of the putative reason. The people are part of the system, and the system sucks. I don't believe it's the people, I believe it's "agile" and "cloud" -- things which decrease quality of service and place the services much further away from the consumers than ever before.
@@yoshepop Unlike Amazon, I have yet to hear of Google limiting services to Americans based on political viewpoint. That said, I own Google Pixel 7 and I'm quite happy with it, for its software quirks are manageable. I use gmail, but I tier it to my own mailserver, so gmail is used for outgoing mail, but incoming goes directly to my server. As for Microsoft, I'm experiencing it now and I don't like it.
The main problem with people adapting to G Suite is probably the lack of desktop apps.
And whats worse is when you try to use the web apps the extensions you were familiar with from Office end up triggering browser related shortcuts.
yea some things like increasing font size with a shortcut ends triggering what chrome thinks it should do and also on chromebooks the actual apps suck
This is it.
office 365 has that same issue
The main problem for me is interoperability. Documents made in google documents are NOT compliant across word, libreoffice, and similar office programs. An excel sheet made in google can outright break when you download and try to modify it offline. That alone is why I hate it. I have a few corporate documents that they made with the online tools and those are abominations.
@@WhatWillYouFind And vice versa. Presentations made in PowerPoint aren't entirely compliant across G Suite or LibreOffice.
I am someone who got to use a whole group of computer based experiences in my education. In elementary school, pretty much every computer was a ThinkPad or ThinkCentre. In kindergarten (which was 2007-2008 for me), there was one computer lab full of old ThinkPads all with slow internet connections, which we used primarily for playing certain educational games from what I remember, and in like 1st grade we had to check the weather online each day. We also had a few old ThinkCentre desktops in the classroom used for less all at once activities.
Then around the middle of 3rd grade, they switched us to a 1:1 device to student ratio, so there was a full cart of newer ThinkPads in each classroom (which the WiFi was often painfully slow to use on) and the computer lab was renovated to newer ThinkCentres, all while keeping the few extra older desktops in each classroom. This is the solution we had for 3rd through 5th grade. We never did any coding projects or anything, but we did certain online learning activities along with writing final papers in Word. We also had demonstrations of Excel and made a few PowerPoint presentations (which I had a lot of fun with actually even outside the classroom).
Then, after 5th grade, I went to a private Christian school right as my county was switching primarily to iPads students take home with them, which in 2013 was not super popular yet from what I remember, but they still use this method today. What I got instead was a complete mess of technology going forward. In 6th grade, we only had a typing class where we used a remote desktop Windows 7 server. Then that server broke by 7th grade and instead of risking using out of support Windows XP computers, they actually put Linux on their older computers, specifically the Edubuntu distro (the education version of Ubuntu with bundled basic education software). This was pretty much my first introduction to Linux and I probably learned more about Linux in that class than the typing and, I kid you not, LibreOffice lessons we had.
During 8th grade, they bought a cart of Chromebooks, but only 1 cart, as the school didn't have enough money for everyone to have one. Around this time they also got the remote desktop server running again, this time with Windows Server 2008 R2, which had horrible screen tearing on the remote desktop client monitors. We mostly used the Chromebooks though outside of our 9th grade computer science class (basically just learning Microsoft Office and some basic Scratch), except when somebody nobody knows for sure messed up the wiring of the server causing it to not work correctly for over a month, while my class was punished with a massive assignment despite not having proof who did it. Apart from that, most of our computer based assignments from this point on were through Google Classroom. However, most of our assignments were still done the old fashioned way, which it was throughout a lot of my schooling career.
it just sounds incredible to my ears when I hear grown adults now talk about actually having pc compatible computers in kindergarten. I was in Kindergarten in 1983. I think I saw my first computer in school around 1986, an Apple II.
Randomly losing access to a product because you lose an Internet connection to "verify" a product, or need to update it with authentication randomly, is bad. This is what you get with the Microsoft ecosystem. Then the random bugs that seem to be creeping in more and more into Office. For Google to make a worse product, lol.
Personally I have access to both and still prefer to use LibreOffice. Funnily enough the Excel variant has more functional formulas, and I often have used this at work to fix Excel sheets when looking to reorganise data sets. If you are familiar with a bit of programming a lot of free AI tools (Python especially) are so useful for converting PDFs to text or word/spreadsheets, and just so much that was previously tedious.
I fully switched to Libre when MS forced new ribbon interface and got rid of a lot of shortcuts.
I'm not reaching for a mouse instead of ctrl+shift+v or ctrl+shift+s.
Plus some features of Libre, like graphs in Calc looks friendlier to me
@@adrianalexandrov7730 When an office program _requires_ use of the mouse, its hot garbage.
@@carlk.3264 I just won't put up with that loss of freedom, that software on my device must get permission from a server to let me use it.
based, FOSS > fed corporate shit
My school has been using windows for years but instead of getting every student a windows laptop they would get cheap Chromebooks and all you had to do was connect to a VMware VDI to get full windows access.
Ah, that’s a smart solution!
God I can't imagine the trash performance that would have. Trash chrome book hardware + the initial bad performance that comes with virtualization? Yikes😬
@@LogicallyAnsweredbecause VDI is so fast and responsive? Like typing in quicksand.
@@TheBoobanhuh? have you used VDI's recently? Although I guess your internet speed plays a big part in the amount of latency you experience. Or the infrastructure of the school.
@@JL_____I don't know if they have, but I have. You can absolutely make VDIs run fast. I work in IT and we use them extensively at my work.
It also didn't help that a Chromebook was practically useless without an internet connection with the availability of online only apps.
I always thought that was the actual reasons schools favored Chromebooks: it saved documents to the cloud rather than cluttering up individual hard drives.
Thinking of the last remark about what students will go on to use outside of school, I thought a lot about that when I was trying to become a high school teacher (abandoned because I realized the career is terrible, as much as I enjoy teaching). In the courses I took we talked a lot about integration of technology into the classroom, both to enhance learning and to teach "21st Century Skills," but I was frustrated by how much of what I saw felt like a closed ecosystem of educational technology that had no relevance outside the classroom, wouldn't ever be useful to students again. I would have preferred to teach students using free-open-source everything as much as possible, almost everything can be accomplished with that, but there were a lot of limitations with Chromebooks, they could really only do things the "approved" ways - which often felt far more limiting than other readily-available open-source free software that the students could use whenever they want in or out of the classroom. For example, Google Sheets is far less capable of data manipulation and graphing than Excel or Libreoffice Calc, meaning current high school students have gone back to doing things by hand that I did in spreadsheets 10 years ago - a step backwards! Likewise, the whole Microsoft Office license thing - screw that, just have everyone use LibreOffice!
I never understood why schools used chromebooks. When my step kid was in 6th grade using a chrome book, he had to use a regular computer and he had no idea how to use it. No clue. It was terrible because companies dont use chromebooks, they use computers.
I think the big problem with Canvas is that most teachers don't know how to use it, and most school districts are too cheap to train them. We use Canvas for everything at my college, but still write it all in MS Office. It's readily apparent which teachers are tech savvy, which ones care about figuring out Canvas, and which ones begrudgingly use Canvas because they have to. I got to play around with Canvas instructor mode a little bit. It seems like pretty powerful software when used properly. The problem is at least 80% of the teachers barely know how to use Canvas (yeah, I'm guessing here).
Your guess is correct, Wesley. My district uses Canvas for teacher training. The English language does not have words to express how much I hate it. The design of its navigation alone should have sent someone to prison. But yeah, maybe with some training . . .
I used PowerPoint and Word so much ever since Kindergarten, and I knew how to use it and was a savvy power user! Then they forcibly switched to G Suite and I felt so limited, I felt like it was stifling my creativity. I hated it. I was happiest when there was an opportunity in school to use PowerPoint anyways, like when I made a PowerPoint cartoon for English in 6th grade or when I made PowerPoint games for Game Dev in 10th grade. And then they started switching to Chromebooks, and they just felt so stifling. My school district would use GoGuardian and go completely overkill with the website blacklist, and they were able to block TH-cam entirely, full stop. I couldn't search for any TH-cam video tutorials for anything. I hated it so much. I was so happy when I got to take home Windows laptops during the pandemic, and my IT class was assigned Windows laptops to carry around instead of Chromebooks during my senior year. I HATE Google. And the students or even teachers couldn't do anything about it, since it came from the highest levels of the district and they refused to change back.
And don't get me started on Google Classroom or Canvas. I hate them so fucking much. Fucking hate my school district for forcing it down everyone's throat.
As a teacher, I am actually in a bit of an opposite situation: my District recently banned Google Classroom and are forcing us to switch to Canvas. I find Canvas' UI to be poorly constructed, and the amount of coding knowledge and time required to create or change simple things is stupid. But, I think we can both agree: District Bureaucrats are the worst and forcing switches is at the heart of either issue.
As someone who has worked with both for years, it's kind of like leaving Moloch for Baal. They're both evil, but the latter doesn't require quite so many human lives.
I switched to Libre after 2013.
Used both before that, but after 2013 I switched to Libre even at work mostly. Strange interface and MS dumping a lot of hotkeys was a dealbreaker
I'll bet that Moloch and Baal are offended you compared them to tech oligopolies
@@leonidas14775Baal couldn't kindle the wood on the altar to him, so honestly he's more of a BBM. Died long ago. 😆
@@leonidas14775 Even Khorne would take offense...
Younger kids don't necessarily need all the functionality of MS Offfice immediately. But becoming familiar with it is great for when you do need it later. Perhaps it's not worth the cost, perhaps it is. I didn't use Google Docs until a few years into college, Docs was fine, but Sheets and Slides are extremely lacking compared to PowerPoint and especially Excel.
We had a laptop cart room so each class room could have laptops with the whole Ms suite. This saves money on having to buy devices every year.
Now we need to eliminate homework.
I guess virtual classrooms need personal devices, while devices have gotten much cheaper than before. Replace buying some books and the ti-84 and buy a 300 dollar Notebook I guess
Yea Google is far easier to use and having it internet based is extremely comfortable. But Microsoft does have more advanced features
@@racool911 Google doesn't even have that advantage anymore. MS Office has a browser based version that's feature stripped and has cooperative access as well.
Shouldn't Microsoft be paying schools to market their products to kids? Maybe teach kids about how programs from different companies work. Google, Microsoft, Libreoffice, and others
In my first three years of high school, we had Windows laptops, and we had cracked versions of Halo and Minecraft that worked on the school LAN, so we could have dozens of players all within the school playing together. It was a great time, and many did play responsibly so it didn't get in the way of classes.
In senior year, everything was replaced with Chromebooks...I hated those things. Minecraft and Halo sessions were over.
😢
in Canada, New Brunswick (province) we get IPads to make art and films and also get to play minecraft for tech because the school thinks Minecraft enchances our brain, we also get to play other games and no homework till u are in high school and no tests till u are in highschool, it is pretty much a student's dream.
Our school is really strict on games and have so many ways to block them we have gotten to point where we make our own sites to download things like minecraft for chrome os to the chromebooks
@@quantumxpThat probably won't work. They'll just block all websites outside a whitelist.
Minecraft is soon launching on Chromebook :)
I worked in G Suite support from pre-pandemic into the first year of it. What you're saying is pretty much all true, a lot of schools realized Google Classroom couldnt meet their needs and just used other software and downgraded their subscription to Workspace for Education fundementals as it was free in order to continue using Gmail and Google Meet. I remember Google Meet itself sucked ass for schools for a few months into the pandemic.
"Everyone is using MS or Apple" I beg to differ.
All companies I work with have either a pure MS environment or use Linux for back-end with MS Clients.
At best Apple is an over-priced after thought for marketing or consultants, but not the general 9 to 5 office grunt...
I was working in a company where the whole engineering team, HR etc. had macs. I hated it
Our school switched because we wanted OneNote (handwriting assignment submissions). Let’s face it office is a disaster in terms of collaboration but OneNote is the only option for handwriting based assignment submission
we also used onenote in college. at least i did for my second course since my first one was not assignment based since we made a website instead. it was not very fun using microsoft teams, onenote, shared powerpoint slides etc. but it did work just about, so there's that.
i've noticed my high school started using canvas and outlook. when i became a sophomore (which was during the pandemic), my school switched from google classroom to canvas because "a lot of colleges/universities use canvas and there's more features" and in my senior year, we switched from gmail to outlook. they never provided a reason why
Ngl that’s actually pretty good. Even though I hate the Microsoft suite, I think it’s better overall to learn so you don’t struggle like me and others. Canvas admittedly is a lot better than classroom. I don’t think I’ve seen a single college professor use anything else
Oddly enough, my school system is currently transitioning TO google.
Time is a flat circle.
My school district changed over to Canvas and everyone I have talked to has said they would rather Google Classroom (even teachers). The schools mixed together Gradebook but in the 2018-2019 school year, they changed to Studentvue & Parentvue for the grading issue. The only flaw teachers and students found is that G classroom would say you are missing an assignment if you unsubmited it to redo something.
As a Gen Z kid who is using both, yeah. Issue with canvas is that all the Dual Credit or Dual Enrollment classes want a separate canvas for their school, so it's divided between 3 separate canvases, rather than 1 central one.
@@derpfluidvariant0916 sounds really annoying I also hate the canvas bug where when you submit something it does not show up on the teachers side
As a UK student, in secondary school we used Microsoft 365 (Word, PowerPoint, etc) for literally everything. The only time we used google docs was because of the collaboration features, because simply it’s easy to use. Teachers tried to use Google classroom across all our subjects but in the end they just switched back to what we were using before - as google classroom made the process more complicated and nobody knew how to properly use it. We had iPads in our school; every student had one to make learning easier and to use less paper for resources, and they never, ever, used chromebooks. There were some apple Mac computers for music and creative subjects, but windows computers for everything else. We really didn’t use google for much.
Office 365 the only option? You can still buy a stand-alone one-time purchase license for office. It's $150 for the home & student version and $440 for the professional version. It won't get new features, but it will still get security updates for quite a while.
Office 365 does not get updates either. Just reskins. It is basically 30 years of repacked Office 95. If you can stand the blocky low-fi look of Office 95, install that. It will still run and do the exact same job. A lot faster though with apps of a few MB.
I do IT for a few schools. I don't understand why you would want a Chromebook if all the programs you're going to be using are Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Powerpoint.
Sometimes they also add iPads...
It's really fun to deal with a student that has a GSuite account, an MS account and AppleID :(
Because that is cheaper than paying for Microsoft licenses.
Hail, fellow broken glass victim.
I have no idea why schools started buying iPad
@@tcbobb1613 Because Apple is a walled garden. It's very easy to do admin work.
@@qtsssim
Apps, apps, apps!
Do you wanna shoot a short film and edit - iPad with imovie
Do you wanna make some own songs and play them back - Ipad with carage band
And so on… Ipad is great because it has so many build in apps that you have to buy separately to chrome pads… Yeah. You could buy them separately to chrome pads, but schools don´t do so and they try to use crap ”free” versions with terrible funktionality, adds, artificial limits etc.
Eith enough money it could be possible to get close Ipad experience, but in reality that newer happens…
I liked google classroom as a student a lot and I'm upset that got rid of it. Schoology, one of the third party apps mentioned, has a terrible interface, shoddy google suite connectivity at best, a terrible mobile app for keeping up with assignments, and flimsy anti-cheat measures for tests and quizzes that locked me out when I wasn't trying to cheat and couldn't figure out how to lock me out when I was. I don't know a single student that liked the switch.
As a teacher my district is about to switch to Canvas and I feel very similarly. Students are going to have a hard time navigating Canvas, and while I am tech savvy and will eventually figure out the weird, HTML based interface and editing you have to do in Canvas to make changes or make certain things work, my tech illiterate colleagues are going to have a rough time.
@@aurenkleige My district uses Canvas for teacher training. The English language does not have words to express how much I hate it. The design of its navigation alone should have sent someone to prison.
I'm 47 years old...
... and grown up since my primary school with technology: at 7 got my C=64... then an Amiga 500... then the Amiga 1000... then briefly with first DOS PC and early Mac (at school only... then were too costly)..then turned to the consoles (Nintendo, Super intendo, Sega Mega drive...) then the whole PlayStation (from 1 to 3) in combinattion, since late 90's and internet peeking in Life, PCs again (since Windows 3.1)...
I still Remember some DOS "hacks" I kept using up to Win98/XP/VISTA, that helped me so much.
A lor of kids today are Just exposed to more tech, but they do not know much about how that works, unlikely those that grew up with "less user friendly" tech that teached us the real working behind the scene....
I am a teacher and microsoft is a superior option for many reasons.
Google presumes that an entire school can simultaneously have students all working online simultaneously, however local wireless networks have connection limits, and large bandwidth internet connections are expensive.
Microsoft products, however, provide the option for online OR offline use and thus use less bandwidth and internet connections.
Then there is the problem of student privacy. Microsoft identified this and gave power to the institution, which is a big deal in many countries.
hence, Schools opt for Microsoft, despite the price difference.
Could you elaborate on what specifically is meant by "the problem of student privacy"?
Google for education is closed system, so student privacy is at least as good (or bad) as with Microsoft. You have to just do the addmin setting like they should be done (in both systems)
The other parts are mainly a matter of taste.
Why can’t students use google’s offline mode?
@@haukikannel microsoft allows for the insitution to keep user data withing its own system. Microsoft has no access to it.
Google, however, does have access to google class user data.
@@TBH_Inc becasue the google offline mode only works for specific devices.
meanwhile, Microsoft has offline mode for ALL devices, including Android and Apple.
i just graduated, and my school is so heavily ingrained in e-learning, our schools network was int even optimized for all those connected devices running nearly 24/7 and it nearly caused me and my peers to fail our finals! when we all logged on to take our test online, the network couldn't handle the strain of all those devices communicating at once and it bottle necked the whole school. no one could connect to the site to take the test as our router was prolly under so much strain and the service was already cheap and bad to begin with, there are random dead zones in some classrooms. so you can imagine the panic as 325 students got locked out mid test or couldn't even take it to begin with! had to spend an hour or more getting the bottleneck fixed, no idea how our ONE IT GUY did it but he single handedly saved all the senoirs!
I've been quite happy with G Suite but I never use Classroom with my students. I just use calendar, since that is what students are going to have to learn when they start working for some company. I invite students to lesson with calendar and attach my assignments and presentations to calendar events. My school never touched Chromebooks because it already had Macs in their labs.
Microsoft has always been good to me so far as a customer. No matter what whether I'm in warranty or not, they take care of you. Google has failed at so many product offerings. Why trust them? At least Microsoft will generally money pit the thing until it works like Xbox.
Forget the Microsoft phone?
@deth3021 Mahn It was good, only if they stuck around a little longer and rolled out android emulation
@@alok.01 I actually liked the Microsoft Lumia phones. For all the hate it got on PC, the modern UI does look and work well on touchscreens. I agree, they should have stuck with the plan to support android apps.
As a student in the class of 21, I've seen everything you are talking about. I remember learning Word, Exel, and some other Microsoft stuff. I remember in Highschool when we got our own dedicated Chromebook and having google classroom. I was there during the peak of the pandemic with the google video call stuff. I even saw the switch from Classroom to Canvas in my final year
I'd go completely open source, but then what would I know. Years ago I got reprimanded in College for suggesting to my peers on a class forum that we all use Libre Office and provided a download link. No amount of explanation was sufficient to get the learned staff to understand the concept of "free" software and I was told that it was against school policy to post links that promote software piracy. My "act" was never escalated so I stopped trying to explain and just deleted the message.
My uni would monitor network traffic for torrents, they were convinced the only reason to ever use a torrent was to pirate stuff.
@@zyxwvutsrqponmlkh I can't count the number of distros I have downloaded over the years. On that note, I offered to give my distro collection to my local library so others could use them (this was before fast internet) and they refused, just like in your case, on the grounds that they do not condone piracy!
Sounds like a good reason to switch schools...
@@jnharton Given that, apparently, ALL schools are in the dark about FOSS or actively don't promote it due to financial kickbacks, that wouldn't really be an option.
Lots of people running and controlling education are unfortunately below average intelligence. They all say "I don't know much about computers" (useless education degree at your service), yet it's everywhere and more than ever. They happily regurgitate corporate claptrap as they cannot possibly think by themselves.
My team just completed the migration of thousands of mailboxes and drive data for a whole state and it's agencies from GSuite to O365. Even got a write up in the state paper. Users miss some things but the pros outweigh the cons.
In elementary school I used windows, then after moving to a different state I used Mac for three terms in 6th grade, then used Chromebooks for grades 7-12. In all honesty I liked windows the best in the classroom, but when I buy for myself I choose Apple.
I sang praises about my Chromebook until it locked me out of my account permanently. I had to create a new one just to use the damn thing and now everything that wasn't backed up on it is just gone.
So yeah, don't blame anyone for ditching Chromebooks.
Office 365 isn't the only option but as it was the 2010s so Office 2014 or Office 2016 would be out. It is a pain to find them on the Microsoft site as they want to promote their subscription software more than sell you the buy once own the license forever version. Microsoft Office still has all the normal versions: Home & Student, Pro, and Enterprise. Microsoft just made it harder to find the non-subscription version of Office they never stopped offering it and making newer versions every 3 or 4 years. and right now we are on Office 2021 which is a pain to find on the Microsoft store site.
School should be going to LINUX
And they can easily ditch MS Office for Libre Office for the students right now. The people who actually need the features exclusive to MS Office are a tiny minority of professionals, not students.
@@Roxor128LibreOffice does have a much more clunky UI, though.
And most schools already own a bunch of MS Office copies, so there's no reason to switch.
Growing up, our schools had Macs, which during that time, Windows was the defacto standard in business. Macs in classrooms were a sickening market strategy to build life long consumers. Ideally, in public spaces, Operating Systems and software should be unbiased and not proprietary unlike slapping an Apple or Windows logo on the computer and the opening screen of software. Sure, Linux has Tux but Tux is agnostic and doesn't have anything to sell you unlike Microsoft or Windows or Google or Amazon who want you forever trapped in their ecosystems to extract your money and data out of you.
Plus, getting kids to understand 'there is an alternative' to Microsoft, Windows, Amazon and Google and that there is this thing called 'open source' will stop this proprietary insanity and turning end users into nothing more than profitable data extraction points.
My Chromebook stopped receiving updates after 5 years. The hardware was still good but it became trash. Unacceptable, I will never buy another Chromebook.
I have iPads older than that and STILL receives OS updates
You get what you pay for. Google Chromebooks may be cheap, but they are also horribly limited from both a software and hardware standpoint.
Schools only needed "dumbed down" computers when teachers were drowning trying to keep up with technology. Today's teachers grew up with computers from a very young age. 💁🏻♂️💻🧑🏫
Fairly recently my school county ditched Google for Microsoft and supposedly its not because Google was cumbersome to use, but rather Google refused to enter into an agreement that would protect student data, so they say.
My school district is beginning the process of sunsetting Google. Last year we moved staff email from Gmail to Outlook (though both accounts are kept active) and began using Teams for virtual meetings. We use a district shared drive rather than Google Drive, and we began using Outlook Calendar for school events and parent interviews rather than Google Calendar. I still use Google Drive for my own teaching files, since Dropbox has more limited storage and only lets me access files from three devices, but I may have to migrate to OneDrive if they decide to cut that too.
The main reason we keep Google accounts for all our students is that we still use Chromebooks in our classrooms, and our students don’t have Microsoft Office licences. Also, as limited and featureless as Google Classroom is, it does have the advantage of being able to share Google Docs with teachers, which is tougher to do without Classroom or using local file storage.
I'm a high school teacher and I LOVE the Google Office Suite. It also seems like most of my colleagues do too. Google Classroom is easy and intuitive as well, the only alternative I've used was Microsoft Teams which I absolutely despise. This video provided a very interesting perspective.
i have been in 3 universities and everyone uses canvas for LMS and microsoft for mail
Canvas has its own limitations, but it's pros significantly make up any cons
Please enlighten me. I am being forced to switch to it from Classroom and to me it seems the developers decided: "we'll make the teachers code their own damn LMS, bwahahahahahah!!!"
I don't know how stuff works in the states, but in Canada, IT for schoolboards is managed centrally at the board level, for hundreds of schools. That means you're *definitely* running Active Directory for group policy stuff. And with the moves to Azure AD/Intune.... start throwing in some E1 licences for students and...
It's one vendor instead of two, you're getting better discounts with volume, and Google doesn't have an Active Directory replacement.
Chromebooks always sucked. I never understood the kind of mentality that tried to justify them.
I'm not anti-google, but those things were dreadful. None had good keyboards. Heck, the keyboards didn't have a DELETE key, you had to use (I kid you not) an ALT BACKSPACE.
That's fisher-price level design there.
And to right-click, you have to use ALT+Click.
It's insane.
@@me-myself-i787I mean, right-click on a Macbook is Control+Click. I will never understand why pressing on a trackpad counts as a left-click even on laptops with a proper left and right button for the trackpad.
@@me-myself-i787 I'd completely forgotten about that. thanks.
@@me-myself-i787 you can just two finger click the touchpad lol
That's nuts
I'm glad when I went to elementary school the only computers used were Apple II's and playing the occasional educational game like Number Munchers, Oregon Trial, Cross-
Country Canada. That was the extent of computers in education in 1986 :-)
Even when I was in elementary school (late 90s and early 2000s) we mostly used the school computers for writing assignments. I think maybe we had to make a presentation once or twice?
My school had the early generation of iMac G3s.
These kids got it easy. I went through school during a HORRENDOUS time for computing. The schools were filled with Macs, everyone that had a computer at home had windows. You couldn't even save a text file at the computer lab at school on a floppy disk to take home because Windows won't recognize that floppy disk and require you to reformat it.
chromebooks are much worse
Bro ur schools were filled with MACS DAM WHAT DID U GO TO A PRIVATE SCHOOL
@@LifeMadeEasiest public school in Bothell, WA you would think being so close to Microsoft HQ In Redmond that we would have been set with windows but nope. All the student use computers were the colorful iMac all in ones
our schools always used windows and office, xd.
My school switched to microsoft, but had such a big ass firewall that basically nothing worked. You couldn’t rename a file or make a folder without it throwing some sort of cryptic error. Not to mention the usual website block, as well as full, live access to every student’s screen output, and the ability to lock all the pc’s in one click.
Maybe the admin is still in his learning phase? Where I live, actual administration often gets outsourced to external contractors because the school's IT staff is so inexperienced and uneducated they can't do anything well, and they are all underpaid anyway.
0:54 Can confirm. I did chromebook repair to fulfill my community service hours requirement for graduation, and I ran into so many damaged Chromebooks. They obviously looked to be from normal wear and tear rather than irresponsible use. Plus, so many of them were damaged in general.
Thankfully I rescued a bunch of older gens (with permission from the school) which I use as on the go laptops. I love my gen 1s that I jailbroke and put Linux on, which I ofc named Larry, Moe, and Curly. (following my naming system of using commedians for my devices. I nicknamed my optiplex "Fluffy" and my Thinkpad "Carlin". I also have 2 gen 2 chromebooks named Laurel and Hardy, which was a suggestion from the IT guy at the school lol)
i had a circle charger chromebook that could go up to 8 hours of continuous usage
it stopped connecting to the wifi and instead of fixing it, they replaced it, so the battery can only last 3 hours on half charge, because it takes so long to charge
they never even gave me a charger
I was an exchange student in the US last year, in Europe we use Microsoft office for most things. While I still dislike Chromebooks just as much as I disliked them on day 1, G Suite kinda grew on me.
Microsofts offerings do have a LOT of options which is great if you are doing something serious, like writing a resume, study, corporate report, but as a student I never needed 90% of the tools, and the 10% I did need were scattered all over in different menus. G suite threw that clutter out and just let me focus on my work. Add to that the convenience of the web application and instant saving to the cloud, and I was happy, especially because I often, but not always, used my MacBook in class instead of the Chromebooks. I didn't miss Microsoft for a second.
I might be the only one to say this but G suite will be missed.
My school got chromebooks for 1 class when I was in 5th grade. Now, my sister is in kindergarten and every class including hers has one.
I hope that schools can try open-source software instead of just switching between proprietary ones (especially those provided by large companies such as Google, Microsoft, etc.) For example, LibreOffice instead of MS Office or GSuite (Markdown and LaTeX are also widely used nowadays, though not strictly Office replacements), Linux instead of Windows/MacOS, Jitsi instead of Zoom/Microsoft Teams, etc.
While open source should be taught as an option, FOSS distributions still have a ways to go before they are intuitive and compatible enough to replace the proprietary programs that paid for inputs from graphic artists and UX professionals. I say this as someone who uses FOSS applications as much as practical, and had installed and used LibreOffice for a couple months while waiting for a replacement to a stolen laptop.
As someone who has helped maintain an open source language for the better part of 20 years... no. Open source is a wonderful idea. But it's an idea. Schools need implementations. They need support. They need a repeatable experience. They need tools that are easy enough for a child to use.
Mainstream Linux distributions are a viable option for the most part, as long as you can find the needed IT people to support them.
But LibreOffice is no replacement for MS Office in an education or enterprise environment.
@@jnhartonWhy it is not a suitable replacement? Which features are you missing? What are those "advanced features" used in education only available in MS Office?
My college switched just as I was finishing, and it caused a lot of people problems due to compatibility and performance problems.
My college campus was the creative stuff, so people had Adobe, Unreal Engine, other fairly powerful and intensive software. We had to install Teams and Outlook and log into a college given ID, that was fine until it started eating up resources on our devices. I know people joke about Chrome hogging memory, but Teams would often kick you out of software to read a message, force you to tab into it, mute the rest of your Windows device to hear people in a call or just to make sure you heard a ping.
It also locked my friend out of her Xbox account and hijacked her home PC, locking her out of Discord and other apps that the college blocked.
I do game design and use UE4 to make prototypes, and Teams and Outlook often made the engine crash, lag or just drop inputs. We also have a trans friend who had their old name shown to everyone because Teams refused to do what admins told it to, even removing their old name kept it showing up in Outlook and Teams, and caused them a lot of distress.
Gods yes. Teams has no right being so heavy on resources for what it is. Like, I'm sure it's because it has excel and such built-in, but why are those built in? Open in it a new window, fuck's sake.
It not having its own volume control and instead hijacking the system's global volume is horrible design.
Honestly, microsoft needs to stop hijacking personal PCs. I noticed that on windows 11, signing into a school account will encrypt your entire device without your consent and store the backup keys with said school account. Not fun.
When will they learn to just switch to Linux? There are certain distros easier for users and certain distros easier for the I.T. workers to the point of just making a config file and copying it to every computer on their network.
I remember my district having Office 365 in 2013 when I entered middle school, and we all had to make accounts for it. Then, in either 2014 or 2015 they switched everything to Google and used that pretty much exclusively at least until 2020 when I graduated. Doubtful that they're still using GSuite now though lol. Went from using Dell Dimensions with XP and Office 2003 in the Elementary school computer labs, to Dell laptops with Windows 7 all throughout middle school, then chromebooks all throughout high school except for tech classes where they had Windows PCs. Went through all the eras xD
At my school, I’m pretty sure one of the chromebooks actually caught fire in the middle of a test. Quite a short lifespan.
Crazy how much tech in education has changed. I graduated high school in 2014 and giving us all individual computers or tablets wasn’t even thought of. I never had tests, quizzes or assignments online until I went to university
When I was in middle school in 2013-2014 (7th grade at the time), the district had extra money to buy iPads for all the 8th grade students.
I was stoked about next year, since moving on to being an 8th grader meant having my own iPad for the whole year.
But my mom, being a substitute teacher at the time, said that the school would no longer give out iPads to students, because nearly 80% of them were either "lost", had cracked screens, or just flat-out broke.
Way to ruin it for everyone.
@@salaniorgaan2296 That's unfortunate, but not really surprising. There was one school in my area that was giving students iPads, I believe it was a STEM-focused school. Not sure how that ended up working out. I wonder if they held the students (or really the parents) financially responsible for the damaged/lost iPads? They used to tell us if we lost our textbooks, we'd have to pay for them.
Thankfully, my school has always been a microsoft 365 school and it is so nice. Happy that it is this way
Unfortunately, my school was (and still is) on the Google bandwagon.
@@pabblo1 A shame, we can only hope for the best
365 is nice but very expensive. To me, it makes sense for corporations to stick to Microsoft but schools should probably be using G suite but not Google classroom. My high school gave all students iPads, and we used G Suite and Canvas (plus Google Meet during the pandemic). Worked pretty well.
Google searches are also shit now. choosing to show paid searches over more specific keyword websites.
My school uses both, along with Schoology 🤯
The students use ChromeOS, and prefer Docs (but I use Word sometimes), and the teachers (windows) mostly use Word, aside from Schoology (docs). Email is Outlook. Find it funny that Google sign in is through Microsoft though. This results in redundant services, which I all use.
During virtual learning, they used Google Meet, but for chatting between staff, Teams seems to be used.
Students used Windows until 2019-20, when they started replacing elementary, middle, and high school devices with ChromeOS. This year, replacement devices are a newer model, which are ALREADY discontinued. smh
Things move fast haha
To add, Schoology manages Docs/Slides files a lot like Classroom lol, except they keep suggestion perms
@@sudormrfnopreserveroot I
feel like google classroom is great and works well but googles work space is mid
Discontinue doesn't mean dead, ChromeOS currently has 8 years LTS:?
i transfered from a school where they used microsoft, outlook, schoology, windows laptops to a school that used everything in google. i instantly felt the difference and pefered my previous schools ways because it was faster, used microsoft office, windows in general just so much better than chromeOS.
Google doesn't give the freedom to their employees to develop a reliable product
Microsoft is the king of unreliable products. Google is the king of killing half-baked products.
That's new..
@@ShoniNemavhidi not really new google has the biggest cemetery of failures of any big tech by a long shot.
@@lucaskp16 Tho to be fair if Google should wait much longer before killing something since some of them are good its just a lot of them get paid for making new ideas and google doesn't care to continue the lifespan
@@lucaskp16 There's even a whole website, which details everything that Google has killed off. Search up "Killed by Google".
I remember back in 2013 when I worked at Best Buy a google rep came in and sold so many of us on chromebooks with "why have a powerful PC yourself when you can use a cloud computer?".
I suggested the consumer wants to own their own stuff. He laughed.
Now im laughing.
As am I. Chromebooks are a JOKE compared to Windows machines or even MacBooks!
I hate the chromebooks so much.
Google classroom is just a genius scheme to have kids watch TH-cam all day, while being at school.
Personally, I miss the pre-rona days in school where learnging was less computery and more hands on. It's now almost 100% on the computer. I'm more of a hands-on learning, so I guess there is that to go off of.
One day, my Web Design teacher was absent, so my class had to sit in another classroom with another teacher. However, we couldn't do our work (coding html files) because this teacher only had Chromebooks. Also, the school blocked the Google Play Store servers, so we couldn't even use apps like Sublime Text. Our only choice was to type code onto a Google Doc & hope it worked, but we couldn't test that out since we had no programs to export html files, & Chrome OS couldn't open html files anyway.
TL;DR:
My whole school, including our admins, thought google was superior than everything else they tried.
I do agree that google isn't the best feature wise, but oh my god it has a nice interface. I've dug through the code of websites like schoology and some of microsofts products, and it's honestly a mess. Schoology looks like it hasn't been updated since 2007 because it still uses shitty CSS tactics and has a VERY old HTML header. It's slow, it's chunky, and when my high school was using it, it had not even half the usefulness and features that google classroom had. I hated it so much.
Also, many of the tools that google drive has are more than enough for kids, especially with all the restrictions and rules we had for writing docs or making presentations, or even making spreadsheets. We couldn't format the docs any other way than MLA format, slideshows were laughed at if they had transitions or were formatted with anything but the normal dark or light theme, and we couldn't use the equations in spreadsheets, we would do the math ourselves. It made no sense to use microsoft when it has a complicated UI and too many features we would never be able to use. Gmail was fast and effective, with basically no data caps or file sending restrictions. It hadn't mantener built in safety protocols that worked just fine for everyone. My peers and Teachers hated using anything but google products, and even our admins and tech guy said anything non-google related was a hassle to work with. Plus, chromebooks were totally able to be restricted, and so they became less of a distraction, which I actually liked. I wasn't able to play games in class, which made my grades skyrocket from middle school. Google was overall way better for schools than anything else we used. Including for the admins and the teachers. If someone had a Mac, they just looked entitled and they still used google things because they genuinely thought google was better, they just wanted to play games and not deal with slow chromebooks.
I couldn't agree with you more, I feel like such a minority rn because I completely disagree with this video. I feel like this whole thing is wrong entirely.
@@Therealbrez Exactly! A sane person on the internet for once! I was raging at the guy for a bit while watching.
GOOGLERS, ASSEMBLE!
I hate Google classroom with a passion. It's okay for multiple choice questions, but with any other type of question, it is bad. Even warning students ahead of time about how short and long-answer responses will initially show as incorrect until I manually grade it, students complained about how it marked them wrong.
I preferred Google Classroom as someone who is primarily paper-pencil and requires simplicity. I am being forced to switch to Canvas next year, and my general impression is the UI is a mess that is incredibly rigid, and anything that can be edited requires a lot of bizarre coding knowledge that while I can figure it out eventually, is wastefully time consuming compared to the functions that Classroom already has built in.
@aurenkleige My other gripe was any time chromebooks were used, getting students to put them away when it was time to put them away was an absolute pain. Then they would get them back out and start playing games thinking they were being sneaky.
@@karlrovey That's hilarious in a way that they thought they could be sneaky with chromebooks. Which grade level are we talking? I teach High School, and the students are smart enough to try and use their phones to play games or message friends during class. Always a pain to deal with that.
@@aurenkleige Jr High. That would also argue about needing to "turn it off correctly to save battery" even through it was either their last class of the day or they were going to PE or art for their final class of the day.
They had to turn in their phones at the beginning of the day.
@@aurenkleige The other obvious thing was chewing gum, pretending to spit it out, and then getting caught chewing gum before even getting back to their seats. If it were something other than music, I wouldn't care about the gum.
My school use Apple as the device but still use google and its services
My current school uses Chromebook and all the google stuff on there. It’s pretty limited. I used windows at one of my previous schools and there’s definitely a lot more to work with in terms of learning. Not only do you have access to google softwares, but you also have programs like PowerPoint, Word, and Excel (idk if it comes pre-installed or not). There’s also a lot of downloadable programs to choose from.
1:54 at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, my district was forced to spend the last month or so online. Having nowhere else to go, they turned to Google Meet. That one month was enough for them to realize how bad GM is. The 2020-2021 school year was spent on Zoom (although they continued to use GSuite and still do to this day).
Here in Extremadura, Spain, we've worked with Linux for ages. I don't remember when we started, but when I did my first work experience as a teacher, back in 2005, it was already a fact of school life. Back then it was a spin of Debian, now a it's a custom config of Xubuntu LTS.
The systems are tied down, each school has its admin, and taking into account the paleolithic hardware, things work very, very well. Plus, not a Euro needs to be spent on licenses and stuff. And, of course, unlike Microsoft products, there is zero spyware.
Still, the Google Suite for Education thing became big some years ago, and the regional government made a deal with Google. It's almost exclusively web services, though, very few Chromebooks.
huge W, didn't know Spain is so based
When do we get a good version though? Even canvas and every other solution I have seen, has at least a few hundred issues of varying sizes.
Google still acts like a start up despite being so big and established. Google docs make me laugh compared to Microsoft Word.
I only use it because it’s free, but MS Office is superior in everywhere.
@@Dave102693 same here. I did pay around with it at the start. Initially when Google docs was launched I thought there was potential. However years later Google docs look like a kids word processor and is far from a professional tool. It's the word processor you jump on when you're on your phone. And that is the same for the rest. Google sheets has some redeeming qualities but far from a product coming from an advertising behemoth like Google
@@TiagrajI exactly. It’s only good mobile, since the mobile apps are left to be desired in features
as a student myself, I loved the chromebooks. the teachers assumed nothing special was going on but little do they know im playing pokemon emerald
I cheap laptop/desktop running tailored Linux distro is better than a Chromebook with an expiration date. And Microsoft Office 365 works just fine in a browser, so it works well with Linux.
Broo the schools can apply to get office free for lifetime .Least my school got it like that
I currently have a crapbook😂😂 and my flip phone still has more capabilities seriously tho it’s like the whole computer is literally locked bc you can’t do shiii on it 😂. I MEAN NOTHING it literally does nothing. Even their own apps struggle on the pos 😭😭
After making it a little more into the video Chromebook’s are PERFECT for toddlers and senior citizens and that’s a serious take too😂
College student here, specifically in a ptogram that teaches network engineering, the Chromebooks in highschools are absolutely awful for tech literacy.
For context, we're in a BYOD environment, but we mainly use Office 365 and Blackboard.
Fellow students coming in from a Chromebook school district often have to be pulled aside in programming classes to have the bare basics of a file system explained to them.
Most of them wind up dropping out.
In my school we use everything from google. I find Classroom and Gmail to work very well, but I don't like Google Docs/Slides/Sheets (although they get the job done) and absolutely hate chromebooks.
We also use canvas in conjunction with classroom for some classes. It's not as simple as Classroom, but it also works really well.
This is not the case with any of our local school districts. As an employee in my kids school district I can say that we have found the Google suite of products and Chromebooks have worked quite well.
I largely have had the same experience, Brad. And I notice that the video did not provide any numbers to support it's claim that Google is being ditched. I'm sure some have, but is the number significant? Are there others switching *to* Google?
7:00 Why would you want students to be able to edit work that they've turned in? When you hand in a physical copy of the work, you can't still make changes. The teacher can return a submitted work to a student to edit in real life and in Google Classroom.