Chromebooks for Education Overview webinar

DANA NGUYEN: So I'd first like to introduce you to Jaime
Casap, who is on our Chromebooks
for Education team.
And he's going to go ahead and get started
with our agenda today.
JAIME CASAP: Good morning, everyone.
How's everyone doing?
I'm very excited to have you on here and joining us for
this first webinar that we're doing on Chromebooks.
So I want to quickly go over the agenda.
The first thing that we want to talk about is a little bit
about what we're seeing in technology in education from a
Google perspective.
We've been working with K-12 schools and universities for a
number of years now.
And so there's definitely some patterns that
we're starting to see.
There's definitely some things that we see technology making
an impact on.
So we're excited about this space.
The second thing we're going to talk about is what these
Chromebooks are.
You've heard a lot about them.
You've heard how they operate.
You've heard about the management features.
So we're really going to dive a little bit into what they're
about, what they can do, and how they can benefit the
school systems that you work in.
And we're going to go through some common questions.
Since we've launched or started talking about
Chromebooks, we've had a number of
questions or comments.
We want to address those and make sure that we answer those
up front so that we can dive into some other questions that
you might have. Then we'll spend some time answering
those questions later on.
And then finally, we'll have James Sanders with us from
KIPP, who's going to talk about his experience using
Chromebooks in the classroom in KIPP LA.
So let's get started.
As Dana mentioned, I am part of the Google education team,
one of the Google Apps for Education team now, which
includes Chromebooks for Education.
And before we even get started, I always like to
level the conversation and talk about why we need to talk
about technology in education.
And the most important thing that we need to start with is
that this generation that is growing up is growing up in a
digital technology environment.
They are simply born into technology that isn't
necessarily new to them.
They just experience the technology on
a day-to-day basis.
So for example here, we have this slide.
I took this picture of my 10-year-old
when we went to Borders.
We have a philosophy in our family that if a kid wants to
buy a book, we get them a book.
And so we go to the store and get a book.
So, here he is.
He's somebody who walks into the store, he passes by the
four people who are working in the Borders store.
He passes by the actual section of the children's
books and he goes straight to the terminal.
He goes straight to the technology.
Because his brain is thinking search.
He wants to search.
And so the first thing when he thinks about search is not
card catalogs, or not indexes, the first thing he thinks
about in search is a terminal, computer.
That's what he uses.
And so, this generation is growing up, not necessarily
the generation that can multi-task, because you hear a
lot about that.
That's not necessarily true.
Or the generation that is digital literate, which is
somewhat true.
But this is definitely the generation that's growing up
with a technology background already in place.
So, in the next slide, technology isn't new to this
generation.
They are growing up with technology.
They're growing up extreme, seeing it from
birth, if you will.
So, one of my favorite videos is from a blogger who posted a
video of him handing his child a new tablet.
And the child instantly knew how to use it, knew how to
integrate, knew how to play with it, knew how to use it in
all the different ways and open applications.
Another example that I always like to see is when I see
parents handing their smartphones to kids to keep
them busy, and they immediately go to Angry Birds,
or they immediately go into their Fruit Ninja or other
games, or even learning applications that they're
using to keep them busy. so this is a generation that's
absolutely growing up with technology.
It isn't new to them the way it's new to us.
Also--
next slide--
this generation is growing up in the cloud.
Cloud computing, for us, is new.
It's a new concept we've just been talking about
the last few years.
As a matter of fact, when I do presentations, I often talk
about what cloud computing is.
Well, this generation doesn't define cloud computing.
They're just born in it.
My 10-year-old doesn't know that the world
existed before Google.
My 10-year-old doesn't know that, just a couple years ago,
you couldn't watch videos online, or you couldn't
download or stream a movie on your computer.
And so, this generation is growing up with the
expectation that cloud computing is just the
environment that they're growing up with.
And most kids, if you watch them, when they open up a
computer, when they open up a laptop, and they wait for 10
minutes for the thing to boot up, the first thing that they
do, is they click on a browser and they visit the sites that
they're used to.
I don't know how my 10-year-old does it, but he's
got about 10 or 12 user names and passwords for all the
different websites that he visits.
So, the cloud isn't new to them.
Next slide.

And unfortunately, education hasn't kept up with this, the
way technology has grown.
Technology has impacted all industries.
And for some reason, we haven't been able to do a good
job with keeping technology updated in education.
And so, if you can see from this slide, the
classroom was 1950s.
For the most part, it's very similar to the classroom that
we have today.
And not a lot has changed.
And so, think about what I just talked about.
And you have my 10-year-old and you have all these other
kids who are growing up in this digital environment.
They're growing up with technology all around them.
And they're walking into a classroom that looks very
similar to the classroom that we went to.
And so, you can imagine the expectations that they have
when they start school, isn't being met with what the
education environment looks like.
And so, for the most part, education hasn't kept up with
this technology revolution in the last 10 or 12 years.
And so, we need to find ways to alleviate that.
But fortunately for us--
next slide--

we've seen a change in the last couple of years when it
comes to technology in education.
We've seen hundreds and thousands of schools and
millions of students and teachers start to use
technology in the classroom.
From a Google perspective, we're very proud of how
education is using Google Apps for
Education in the classroom.
We've seen schools use our tools in so
many different ways.
And for example, in the next slide, you can see all the
different ways.
And these are just some examples of how students and
teachers are using technology in the classroom.
They are doing everything from building--
teachers are building collaborative lesson plans
that they can share with each other and give each other
feedback on.
And they're using Google's Docs and Google Forms and
Google Spreadsheets to create science projects that they can
use in the classroom for their students.
And they're using Google Spreadsheets and other things
to create flash cards for their students.
Next slide.
There are ways that teachers and students are using Google
Apps in the classroom that we couldn't even come up with.
And so, our best examples and our best experiences with
these schools come from teachers.
And they're using Google Forms for everything, from creating
reading logs to assessments.
They're doing pre-assessments with reading logs, and they're
doing class lectures with Google Chat.
So for example, if you wanted me to come to visit one of
your classrooms and you had Google Chat available, I can
come in and do a guest lecture in your classroom in front of
your students, and I don't actually have to
physically be there.
And they're using Google Sites and Google Docs to create
student ePortfolios, where students are collecting all
their information and they're creating their portfolio of
what their education experience has
been in Google Sites.
And so, when you think about all of these different tools
that are being used in the classroom--
and again, teachers have been doing an amazing job coming up
with different ways to use this software in the
classroom-- you have to ask yourself, what's missing in
the classroom?
And one of the things that's missing is the equipment for
students to actually do these things.
Right?
So there's a lot of schools who are trying one-on-one
programs. There's a lot of schools that are
trying laptop carts.
There's lots of schools that are trying different ways,
bring your own device programs, to get technology
into the classroom.
Because teachers and administrators are starting to
see the benefit of using technology in the classroom to
build the skills that kids need, especially around
communication and collaboration and
problem-solving and team-building and all the
other things that kids need to survive and to thrive in their
next experience.
And so, what we see in the next evolution of technology
in education is the equipment.
So we have these cloud-based tools that teachers are using.
We have these cloud-based tools that administrators are
finding marvelous ways to use in the classroom.
Now we need to get equipment in the classroom.
So I see, and our team sees, unbelievable potential with
technology in using Chromebooks in the classroom.
Next slide.
And so, we want to be able to take this classroom that we
see here and turn it into-- next slide-- this classroom,
where we actually see the same things.
We still see teachers in the classroom, still see students
in the classroom, but what we see are students working and
using technology to communicate, to collaborate,
to problem-solve, to build new and innovative ways to manage
the information and the knowledge that
they need to grow.
So, we're really excited about the Chromebook.
We're really excited about what these devices can do.
And it's not just the laptop, it's not just another device.
We're excited for lots of different ways.
And so, what we want to be able to do now is talk a
little bit about what these Chromebooks can do and talk
about why they're different than what you
typically are used to.
And why, from a Google perspective, we wanted to look
at this solution from a different way.
And so, I want to introduce Jeff Keltner, who I've been
working with for lots and lots of years.
He's the business development manager for Chromebooks.
And he's going to talk a little bit about what these
Chromebooks can do in education.
Jeff, you're on.
JEFF KELTNER: All right.
Thanks for the introduction, Jaime.
And good morning and afternoon,
everybody out there.

So, I wanted to walk through a little bit today kind of where
we're coming from with the Chromebook solution, why we
think it's really well-suited to the education environment.
And what we see, when we look at the challenges facing
schools trying to deploy technology in a classroom, is
a lot of challenges.
And I've got this graphic on the left, but I really think
it only begins with the purchase of computers.
Right?
Like, a lot of people look at it and say, if I could just
get computers in the classroom, I would be able to
actually access more technology for my students and
more applications.
But computers in the classroom aren't the end of the journey.
They're actually, in many ways, the
beginning of the journey.
And so, we saw this set of challenges facing schools and,
indeed, businesses as well, that were really trying to
deploy technology more widely.
And a couple of those, I think, were really important,
where, really, the user frustration.
Technology is complex enough.
I hear teachers complaining all the time about long boot
times, and the amount of classroom time that is spent
diagnosing and dealing with technology, and updating, and
incompatibilities.
All this kind of stuff.
So I've got this world where I've got frustrated users and,
in our case, that means classroom time that's wasted
being spent trying to diagnose technology issues versus
imparting knowledge to students.
Second, almost every school I have talked to spends the
summer re-imaging the laptops that
they have in the classroom.
And they spend almost the entire summer doing this.
And this is a real challenge.
It means that the folks responsible for that effort
don't get to add additional value to the
school year to year.
In the summer, they're basically just spending their
time re-imaging machines.
It also means, for many schools, that the only time
that they can actually clean up a machine, diagnose issues,
put new software on a machine, update the operating system,
is in the summer.
And so, when things happen throughout the year, we're not
able to really respond to that.
Third, there's a lot of volume of support costs
that go into this.
As soon as you start putting technology in
the hands of users--
we know this.
Even Googlers who are users of technology produce a large
volume of support calls around the usage of that technology.
And we see a lot of this coming through.
And this really becomes a limiting factor in many ways
for how widely many districts can deploy technology.
Yeah, maybe I could afford more notebooks, but I can't
actually handle the support of those notebooks if I were to
put them in the classroom.
And so that's really what we see.
It's been too difficult to broaden the deployment to the
number of students we want because of the challenges
facing us with computers.
And it's not just the cost of purchasing them.
It's really this ongoing support maintenance and
ownership management that I have to deal with, and how I
can manage that at scale.
And we really think Chromebooks are uniquely
suited to address the challenges facing schools in
this world of trying to deploy more
technology into the classroom.
So, let me walk through real briefly what technology is
really behind Chromebooks at a very high level.
And then, if you guys have questions, we're happy to
answer those as well.
But Chromebooks are notebook computers that are built and
optimized to run the web.
It's essentially a very small Linux laptop running a Chrome
web browser on top of Linus and locking the user out of
doing anything that's not done through
the Chrome web browser.
You can't install software, you can't
install device drivers.
You access web applications.
And we believe that web applications have become
robust, such that that's really all you need to access.
When you put this kind of technology in place, you get a
couple of real key benefits that I want to talk to.
One, users get to be more productive.
People, universally, from the people we've talked to, they
love these devices because they boot quickly, users just
kind of get quickly to what they're doing.
Second, they're easy to manage.
And I'm going to walk through this in some more detail, but
we have integrated from the ground up the concept of
managing these devices from the cloud so that you can
very, very easily manage a large number of devices.
And we really hope that this means you can use the same IT
staff that might be able to manage 100 or 200 deployment
laptops today, and manage literally thousands with the
same support.
Third, we think they're going to be easy to support.
One of our commercial customers has actually told us
that, within a month's time span, they had a set of users
running Windows laptops and a set running Chromebooks.
They got 70 support tickets from the Windows group and
none from the Chromebook group.
And this ability to scale easily without massive support
costs, because of the ease of use for users, I think, is
really important.
And all of this put together, we really think means it's
going to be simpler to scale.
And we really hope that as you look at Chromebooks and start
working with them, you'll find that these help you put more
devices in front of more students in more schools
without substantially increasing your costs.
And that's really, at the end of the day, the vision we have
for where Chromebooks are going.
So, I want to talk in a little bit more detail about
specifically why I think these are great in the classroom
environment.
I talked about more productive users.
What does it mean in a classroom environment?
These devices boot cold in less than eight seconds.
They resume with network connectivity in less than two.
Which means, when you walk into a classroom, you pretty
much are at work in a lesson as soon as you get that laptop
open in front of a student's desk.
Versus in a traditional PC environment, you can wait
substantial amounts of time to get that device
actually ready to go.
They will last eight to eight and a half hours on a battery.
And so, in many cases, we're seeing schools not worry about
charging them through the day.
They figure the number of classroom experiences I have
in the day, I don't need to charge them.
I don't have to worry about putting them into a cart and
out of a cart between classes, which just eats up valuable
classroom time.
I can actually let this thing go all day on a
single battery life.
Same experience everywhere.
So a really unique thing about Chromebooks--
for all the Apps for Education customers, you may have seen
some of this already-- but when you log into a Chromebook
with a Google account, all of your bookmarks, all of your
applications, all of your personalized settings and
preferences, all of them follow you to
absolutely any device.
So a student who's using two, three, four different devices
throughout the day will find the exact same experience
facing them at every device they interact with, making it
much, much easier than in a traditional world to go
between multiple computers throughout your computing
experience throughout the day.
And related to that, these are very easy to share.
So in the world where we've got multiple users accessing
computers, whether it's a computer lab, or whether it's
just computers tied to a classroom versus tied to a
student, when a student logs in, it doesn't matter who's
been on this before.
Not only do I have my experience, but I have none of
the remnants of the last user to use this.
So, if I have five users using one Chromebook, I'm not
worried about files being left and found by other students.
I'm not worrying about challenges of that user
finding what they need.
As soon as they log in, they get their experience and only
their experience.
So these are very well-suited to environments where laptops
are being handed around.
In fact, our team has taken to calling them interchangeable.
I don't want to call them disposable.
You can't throw them away.
They do cost money.
But you can pick up any Chromebook and it's instantly
yours, and it doesn't matter who else's it was before.
And I think this is a really unique element
of what we're doing.
I think very, very well suited for use in many of the school
cases we've seen.
The second thing I talked about, really easy to manage
Chromebooks.
And so, I want to talk about this a little bit, and a
couple of the things we've done.
So number one, we've built a web-based management console
into here so you can configure and customize your Chromebooks
through the cloud.
This is integrated into the Google Apps management
console, and allows you to, with a couple of check boxes
and text menus, enter the setting you want.
And all of your users that are logging into Chromebooks are
going to see those settings applied.
And I've got another slide that will go through this in a
little bit more detail.
So you can really, from the web, customize and do a lot of
these things to really make this experience
custom to your users.
Security built in.
So I want to talk about these next two points in a little
bit of detail as well.
Security.
We have a very unique security profile on the Chromebooks,
which does a couple of things.
Number one, it makes the devices very resistant to
malware and viruses.
Because a user does not have permissions to install,
download, or run any application that's not a web
application, there's no real concern about a virus
infecting the computer.
In fact, every time the computer is booted, it checks
to see if the operating system has been modified, if a third
party application has been added.
And if so, it will actually remove that from the device
and reinstall the OS clean.
So you've got a world where you no longer need to worry
about what are my students downloading,
what are they doing.
I think this is really important for keeping a clean
environment in your classrooms for computers.
And they're also forever fresh.
Unlike traditional PC environments, where it takes
actually work on each individual machine to update
the operating system, Chromebooks update themselves
in the background and apply the updates every time the
device is rebooted.
We update the OS about every six weeks in small increments,
and there's literally no intervention from IT, and
nothing but a reboot at the classroom level needed to get
these devices up-to-date.
So you never again have to worry about what version of
the OS am I on, how do I get it to the next version, is
there compatibility with my applications?
These devices are intended to be forever fresh for all of
your use cases.
So I talked a little bit about the management.
And I want to talk a little bit about what's included in
that management so that you kind of understand where we're
coming from, and how it can make your lives better.
Number one, a customized experience for your users,
auto-configured with perhaps a school-specific theme, the
applications that you use, whether that's Gmail and Docs,
or other third-party applications, things like Khan
Academy, and extensions.
What this really means is, without imaging the machine
when it comes in, and without re-imaging it, you can put all
of these things onto every PC in your environment with a
couple of clicks of the mouse on a web-based console.
So all you do is you go to the web, you tell them what
applications you want, you click a button, and within
about a half an hour, every Chromebook in your environment
will see that application on their desktop without having
to go do anything to the machines.
So you should never have to go back and manually re-image
these machines after you've
deployed them to the classroom.
Again, because the OS auto-updates with no IT
intervention, you now never have to manually patch or
update or go in and install or anything, software or OS or
browser on any PC in your environment.
So these will just automatically
work all the time.
Virus resistance built in.
So with a verified boot, I don't have to think about, am
I installing antivirus software, do I have
anti-malware, is the virus definition file up-to-date?
All of that is taken care of automatically at the core
level by the OS.
And last thing we have here, when you configure these from
the cloud, one of the key things you can configure, from
an educational point of view is proxy setting.
And these are settings that no user on the device has
permission to change once you set them from the cloud.
And so, if you've got a web filtering based on a proxy, we
can enforce that, not only while the devices are at the
school, but anywhere this device happens to go.
We can push that through whatever web filtering proxy
you're using.
So this can be very, very important in helping make sure
that the mechanisms you put in place to keep your students
safe are being effective on the Chromebooks.

So, what is the package and what is the offering?
What we've got is all the things that Jaime and I have
talked about.
The familiar user interface, the great classroom use
experience, with long battery life, fast boot, instant
personalization.
It's just a browser, so people are used to it.
It's very easy to use and very easy to support.
And what we've done for schools is actually
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
as a kind of combined offering.
So it includes the Chromebook and the operating system.
It also includes a hardware warranty for the lifespan of
the device.
So if anything is, warranty-wise,
manufacturing-wise, wrong or defective about the device,
you can return it and Google will replace it during the
three-year lifespan.
It includes phone- and email-based support, so if
anything goes wrong, literally from the hardware through the
operating system to the browser, if you have any
issues, you just call us and we will help you
take care of them.
And then there's user and device configuration and
management capability I've talked about, where you can
really control the experience that your users are having and
customize and configure those devices
simply through the cloud.
We've wrapped that into a single monthly price.
So for $20 per month and $23 per month if you'd like a
Verizon and AT&T 3G card integrated into the devices,
you get all of these pieces, the device itself, the
warranty, the support, and the management.
And we think this is pretty much an entire computing
environment with all of the elements you need to manage
that environment across your classrooms, excepting, of
course, the software you want to use, for a
simple $20 a month fee.
And at the end of three years, you actually
get to keep the devices.
So you do own these devices from the day that you start
the subscription plan.
We will stop supporting them, but we'll send you a new one
if you keep paying the fee.
So for $20 a month, moving forward, you can essentially
always have the most recent laptop with the most recent OS
in a supported and managed environment.
We think this is a really compelling combined offering
that should make it very, very easy for you to get, from one
vendor, all of the pieces you need to manage laptops across
a wide number of classrooms.
So we wanted to also talk about some of the top
questions we get about Chromebooks for Education and
what's included in that.
Some of the kind of key FAQs that you get.
So I'm going to turn it back over to Jaime to talk about
some of the key questions we get asked by schools about,
specifically, the educational offering for Chromebooks.
JAIME CASAP: Yeah, and both Jeff and I can kind of cover
this to address some of the issues that we see here.
The key thing for us is we just released these
Chromebooks.
We absolutely understand some of the key questions that are
coming in and some of the key issues that some of our users
are going to be [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
Basically, we want to be able to address those.
And the irony for me, or the coincidence for me, is that
this is very similar to two years ago when we released
Google Apps for Education for K-12, and all the different
questions that we were getting.
So we absolutely understand that there's some key
questions out there.
So we want to address those.
So let's start with answering those up front.
So, first one.
The first big question that we get a lot from is, can I get
these Chromebooks from Amazon for my school?
And absolutely, you can buy them, but that's not what
we're talking about here.
We see the beauty of these machines in the things that
Jeff just talked about.
The management capability, the things that you can do at the
admin level with these machines, as Jeff mentioned.
You know, going out and buying five
machines is an easy solution.
Going out and getting 5,000 machines for a school system
is a little more complex.
And so, just as you deal with the issues of buying any
advice for your classroom, we see the beauty of these
machines in the actual management functionality that
you get with these Chromebooks.
So you can go buy them at Amazon, but we
don't recommend that.
We recommend that you look seriously at the management
capabilities that you're getting with these.
And even more so, right now it's not possible to enroll
these into the management program if you buy
them on your own.
So that answers the question about buying the machines
straight up.
Next slide.

All right.
So one of the cool things about these machines is that
they have 3G capability.
And what that means is, one of the limitations of one-on-one
programs, especially in areas where you don't have families
that have Wi-Fi connections at home, or don't have internet
access at home, you can look at the statistics, you can see
all the things that are involved with whether or not a
family has Wi-Fi or doesn't have Wi-Fi.
And absolutely poverty is one of the issues around the
ability to have Wi-Fi.
So these machines actually come with 3G.
And so, you will be able to get 100 megabytes per month
for two years, which is included with the 3G
Chromebooks.
But in addition to that, you can actually purchase
increments without a monthly plan.
We have a site here, and as Dana mentioned, these slides
will be available to you where you can get more information.
And I know lots of schools are looking lots
of different ways.
And we'd love to hear some of your ideas, some of your
feedback around the best way to take advantage of the 3G
capability on the 3G Chromebooks.
Next slide.

So this is always a big question.
So does Google insure my Chromebook in case a student
leaves one out in the rain, or drops it, or brings it to
lunch and spills their latte all over it, or any other of
the number of issues that can happen?
And the simple answer is that the Chromebooks have a
warranty, and they do cover hardware and
manufacturing defects.
Someone told me a great story about how there's
a school that had--
I'm not going to name the devices--
but they had these devices in their classroom.
And all the students had little plastic cups next to
their desks, because that's where they would put the keys
that would fall off the machines.

And we don't want that to happen.
So if these things aren't working, if the hardware's not
working and there's defects and the screen isn't working,
or the things [UNINTELLIGIBLE] down, or whatever issues you
have with these devices, we absolutely cover those under
the warranty.
But they're not an insurance plan.
And they're not going to protect these
machines from theft.
They're not going to protect the machines from a kid
throwing one across the yard.
So, we understand that that's an issue, and the schools that
I've been talking to, I've been trying to get some
information as to how they currently manage any computers
that they have in the classroom from an insurance
perspective.
But the warranty does not protect accidental damage.
Next slide.

Yeah.
We think about cloud and we think that we're in the cloud,
we can't print, and these devices can't print.
And these Chromebooks can absolutely print.
So you can print via the cloud to any printer that's set up
on a Google cloud print.
And again, there's a great illustration
here of how it works.
But the Google Print is cloud-based solution that
helps you print to any device that's part of this.
And again, there's a link there to google.com/cloudprint
that explains how to do this.
And it's great.
I, again, would love to see the education world get to the
point where they're not printing a lot of things.
I understand that it's a necessity, but again, some of
the things that we're seeing in education are great,
especially for paperless environments, where teachers
don't have to hand out quizzes on paper.
They don't have to make 100 copies of a quiz.
They do the quiz using Google Forms and the students
automatically use their device to log in, answer the
questions, and the answers go straight to a spread sheet.
And the teacher just reads the spreadsheet.
And so, there's great solutions inside these
Chromebooks, if you're using cloud-based applications, that
help you avoid having to print a lot.
But you can absolutely print from these.
Next slide.

All right.
I'm going to introduce Mr. Sanders here, who's a teacher
here at KIPP Academy.
He's been using these Chromebooks for a number of
months now.
And he has some great
experiences with these devices.
I want to turn it over to Mr. Sanders here, who's going to
talk about his Chromebook experience.

JAMES SANDERS: Hello.
So, Mr. Sanders here.
Before we get started, we have this short video that kind of
gives you some context of the Chromebook program that we've
used in our classroom for the past six months.
So I'm going play that for you right now.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-KIPP Academy is the LAUSD charter that
was founded in 2003.
It goes from fifth to eighth grade, and 350 students have
enrolled this year.

-Compared to other notebooks, there's no software to
install, there's no imaging that needs to be done.
Once they're set up and deployed, the updates are
really happening on their own.
The less administrative overhead and burden you have
to manage the computers, the more computers you can put out
in the classroom [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
over time.
-We walk into social studies class, we grab a computer, we
go to Mr. Sanders' blog that he created the day before.
We follow the tasks that are set.
-My class is entirely run online.
And so, my courses shifted from more of a direct
instruction model, and then the students do some type of
graphic organizer, some type of assignment to a more
interactive-based model where the students are actually
required to think independently to create and
collaborate, rather than just memorize and regurgitate.
I think it's definitely a better model for learning.
The learning becomes more authentic.
-There's So much information, so many different ways to
approach a topic.
In print form, I would have to give them
one, maybe two, articles.
Now I can say, here's a list of 15
articles and their summaries.
There's now an increase in personal investment because
there's more choice.
And when there's an increase in personal investment,
there's definitely an increase in what they produce, which
increases achievement.
-For you to have that one-on-one connection with
your teacher, rather than sitting in class and raising
your hand all day and never get called on, I think that's
just better.
-All my assignments in Google Docs are all stored and it's
not all unorganized and I can easily send to my teachers.
-It gives us open access to different applications and
programs, such as Google Moderator, where we can vote
on different ideas that are [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
-There are different ways you can make presentations using
the actual presentation mode on the
documents in your Gmail.
-I think our grades are going to go up using the Google
Chrome notebooks.
I think they're very unique.
They create the next generation of computers.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
Watching that video definitely makes me miss my students now,
a lot more than I was about an hour ago.
So I wanted to give you guys just kind of a background
about how the Chromebooks have changed the flow of my
classroom and definitely changed instruction.
Before the Chromebooks, I think the ideal computer for a
classroom was the base model MacBook for about $1,000.
And we did have a set of HPs in our classroom.
In order to use the computers, it would be an event.
We would check out the laptop cart, we would bring it into
our classroom, we'd lay out all the different power cords
and whatnot, and really try to make sure all the computers
are charged and, if not, they're close to the wall so
that they can be plugged in.
And I found it was so cumbersome to use computers
and technology in my classroom.
And even though I'm a big fan of technology, it just wasn't
worth my time and it wasn't worth the loss of
instructional time.
So now, in my classroom, what I have is a stack of
Chromebooks sitting next to my door.
And the students walk in, they grab a Chromebook, they go to
their seat, they open it up and log in with
their Google account.
And from that point, from walking into the door to being
in their seats, seated, ready to start class,
takes about a minute.
So that gives me about 72 minutes of instructional time,
sometimes 73.
Because to shut down the Chromebook, all my students
have to do is click and hold the power
button, it shuts down.
It logs them off completely, so all their
information is safe.
They walk back to the door on their way out and set the
computer down.
And that's such an advantage because, really, with the
Chromebooks, the technology gets out of the way.
And it enabled me to do a lot of the projects that I've
always wanted to do, but it was just so much time and
effort to use another device.
So my students walk in, they go to my website and this is
the first thing they see.
And then, depending on what activity they do, they can
either check their homework, check their grades, or click
on today's history lesson.
They get into their lesson.
And I decided to run my entire class through a Blogger blog.
I put the standard there.
As you can see, I have the aim of the day.
And then I give them a series of five tasks.
So the first task is to go in and submit their homework.
And that's a Google form, so I'm no longer walking around
the room, needing to collect homework, which gives me time
to be able to sit down next to a student, work with them,
give them feedback, figure out what they need in terms of
support from me.
The second thing is we do some type of quick question.
And I really enjoy using Google Moderator for this
because it enables a lot of discussion and
it's a lot of fun.
If you haven't checked it out, I really encourage you to
check it out.
So here is the me collecting work form.
I use the Google Forms, like I said.
And it really just simplifies my process.
If you look at my desk now, whereas last year you would
see piles and piles of papers, and assignments would
definitely go ungraded.
As they stack up, I'd have to just prioritize.
But now they're all sitting in my Google account.
I can go in from home, I can go on from anywhere, and it
just makes things a lot easier.

Here is a sample of the quick question I did on June 10
using Google Moderator.
59 of my students went in and submitted ideas.
Then they go in and they vote.
826 votes.
It just shows you how much thinking and processing went
on on behalf of my students.
Because of the technology, it gives them more time to spend
in programs like Google Moderator, rather than having
to sit in the back of the room, raise your hand, wait
for a teacher to call on you, getting that feedback.
It just takes so much time to do those things and you really
don't know if every student's participating through the
traditional hand-raising method.
Through the technology, they go in, I can see whether they
did the work or not, and it's right there in front of me.

So for me, I think the technology and the case of the
Chromebooks just makes using technology in the classroom so
much easier.
Because really, I think about stuff that I want to use in my
class and everything's on the web.
You have the full Chrome browser, you have all the
different Google Apps for Education, and you
have the web store.
So I want to give you guys a couple examples of projects
I've done in my classroom and how the
Chromebooks made that possible.
The first one is, I decided one morning that I wanted to
use some type of drawing software for my students to
create Japanese geography art.
And I was going through trying to figure out what
the best one was.
And I had decided on a solution.
I'd written up my lesson plan.
And in the last minute, I was like, oh no, this deviantART
in our program in the Chrome web store
would be a lot better.
If I was using any other type of computer, getting a piece
of software installed on every single computer would have
been at least a full-day process trying to pull out the
computers, log in, download the software, install the
disk, and get everything up and running.
With the web store, I was able to say, hey, guys, quickly go
into the web store, type in deviantART,
install that program.
And then in about 60 seconds to two minutes, all of my
students had the software that previously wasn't on the
computer ready to go.
So here's an example of Kyra and Kojo's
Japanese geography art.
And it was just so easy.
We could do the art.
The art took maybe 10, 15 minutes.
And then it enabled us to have time to do a bunch of the
writing afterwards, the processing and discussing the
art, and talking about how this type of art connects back
to medieval Japanese culture.

The other cool thing I found about using the web rather
than have stuff sit on the hard drive, was just being
able to access all their files, no matter where you are
and whenever you wanted to do it.
So one project that I did that lasted the course of the six
months that I was using the Chromebooks in my classroom,
was keeping track of the different social structures
within the different empires or civilizations
that we were studying.
So for example, here's a slide that one of my students made,
breaking down the Aztec social structure.
Later, when we were learning about the Mayan social
structure, he created another slide.
When we went into medieval Japan, he
created another slide.
Because it was all online, we are able to go back whenever
we wanted to and do those higher-level thinking tasks
where we compare and contrast the different social
societies, have discussions, because the technology got out
of the way.
We didn't have to carry around flash drives.
We didn't have to figure out where files were saved, figure
out whose computer was which.
All of that burden of using traditional computers in the
classroom was gone.
And I was able to just get at my content.
And that made things so much nicer.

Other things that we were able to do was just use the video
camera to create simple videos, get them straight up
to YouTube where my students were able to express
themselves creatively.
If we were going to do some type of video creation project
in the past using traditional cameras, using traditional
video editing software, it just takes so much time.
And the Chromebooks saved me time and I could do some of
these projects or project-based learning that
teachers really want to do, but we know, as teachers, we
don't have time to do them.
Also, I had all of my students create individual online
portfolios in Blogger.
And we're able to save our work using programs like
[? Presy ?], Google Presentation, Google Draw,
deviantART, anything, was able to just instantly publish
straight to their blog, link to it in their blog.
One of the cool projects that we did was we went around and
we found 10 examples of Renaissance art.
All the students created a presentation showcasing 10
pieces of Renaissance art.
And all of them had their blogs all up and running.
I played, I think on Pandora, some type of classical music
in my classroom.
And we just had this virtual art gallery walk where we
would go, click on people's different art galleries, go
through them, and then in the blog, we'd be able
to comment on them.
To do something like that, either on paper or another
type of offline device, would just be impossible.
And it just, I feel like, brought my classroom alive.

It was really easy for my students to understand.

Everything is automatically full screen.
Everything is automatically right there in front of them.
They click mail, it goes straight to mail.
So if they click on a mail link, it doesn't open up some
type of mail software, it doesn't open up some type of
third-party app that they don't understand.
Everything's simple, everything's right there.
And my students were able to pick it up, just as you
introduced anything else, maybe one or two days.
They were good to go.
Whereas, if we're using some type of other computer, it
would take a lot longer.
In my classroom, I wouldn't have to
really worry about charging.
I had one power strip behind my desk with six chargers
plugged in, and whenever I would think about it, I would
charge some computers.
But really, I used them about five and a half hours a day,
so I got about two full days of use out of them.
And the increase of instructional time, like I
talked about earlier.
It just really made things easier.
And the whole thing for me was humanizing my classroom, the
technology getting out of the way, and being able to spend
that time with my students.
That's really important.
So that was my experience in the classroom using the
Chromebooks.
I definitely think they've replaced all other computers
in terms of what a teacher would like
to use in the classroom.
And they definitely increased my instructional time.
So thank you so much.

JEFF KELTNER: All right.
Well, that reaches the end of the prepared portion of the
day, which makes for the more fun part of the day, which is
the live Q&A. So I think we're going to start pulling some
questions off of the WebEx Q&A and just answering kind of the
key questions.
We've been trying our best to keep up with Q&A, the team
here, as they've been coming in.
And I'm just going to actually turn and look at some of these
questions and figure out which ones we should answer.
I've got a question here from Cecilia for Mr. Sanders.
I love the teachers, everybody's mister.
We don't do any misters here at Google, so I kind of like
hearing that, Mr. Sanders.
Question for Mr. Sanders, the students only use the device
in the classroom?
What type of homework did he assign?
Would it require personal access at home?
And did you use traditional textbooks?
JAMES SANDERS: So the internet access in my school in south
central LA, I found that not all my students had access to
the web at home and the library access next door was
really limited.
So about 65% of my students could use
the internet at home.
So what I did that was kind of fun was, the only way I use my
textbook was for homework.
And so I would assign a page out of the textbook.
I would have an online equivalent going to the same
information, but I also had an assignment that the students
could do on paper at home.
So the first thing that they did, you saw
it said submit homework.
That was for my students who couldn't do the homework
assignment at home on a computer, and they would just
type in their responses.
And it was the same thing for my students
who did do it online.
I would just scan a PDF, upload it to Google Docs and
share it on my website, so that those that did have a
computer, we could save a little trees here and there.
It just made it a lot simpler.
So I did use a textbook, but only for homework.
And then in my classroom, it was more project-based
learning and some of those other type of interactive
activities around collaboration and whatnot.

JEFF KELTNER: All right.
One of the set of questions that has come up regularly
throughout, so I thought it would be worth addressing, is
the question of the monthly fee versus the upfront
payment, and if an upfront payment is
something we support.
And also, kind of the questions around, is this an
operating or a capital expense?
I know some of you have different budgets for capital
expenditures versus operating expenses.
Which does this fall into?
The program is not a lease.
It is actually, essentially, an installment payment plan,
and transfer of ownership of the devices happen in the very
beginning of the contract.
And so, our accounting team believes-- and this is up to
your accounting team how you account for the
expenses, not us--
but our accounting team does believe that it will often
count as a capital expense because it is a transfer of
ownership on day one.
So you probably can get access to capital dollars for this.
And if you want to pay up front, it's essentially just,
sum the payments, 36 times $20 is $720, so we just charge you
the full amount up front, and then that's
good for three years.
I know some of you also have pools of money that need to be
spent in certain defined time periods, and not necessarily
the ongoing regular budgeting that you'd like for that.
So it is certainly available to you to do an upfront
payment option instead.
Proxy question for Jaime or Ben.
I'm curious to know if the Chromebook is location aware
for a one-to-one laptop program.
I understand Chromebooks can be centrally managed with a
proxy server on campus but, what happens when a
student goes home?
So Jaime or Ben can answer this, but I can
answer this as well.
So a couple things.
One, configuration of which proxy you use, that is done
centrally through the cloud.
So as long as there's a connection to Google, that
policy will be applied to the device and will actually apply
anywhere the student goes.
It's not based on where the laptop is, as far as which
policy is applied.
It's based on the user that authenticates.
And so, I want to be clear about things.
Not today, but in the near future, you'll be able to
actually set different policies for
different user groups.
So potentially, having a certain web filter that your
students are required to go through on Chromebooks, but
perhaps your faculty don't have to go through.
That's something you'll be able to do.
So these are user-based policies, not
location-based policies.
And we are also working on things like location awareness
of the devices in the management console.
So the concept of who last authenticated to the device,
where is it, that kind of thing, is something we are
working towards in the management console as well.
But a little different than the question that was asked.

Question from Paul.
Who sets up the Google accounts that
the students use?
How are the accounts tied to a set of Chromebooks?
Paul, the accounts are set up by you, and this is through
something very, very similar to the Google Apps for
Education project.
And if you are a Google Apps for Education customer, it is
actually integrated.
So the accounts are simply Google Apps
for Education accounts.
The way you connect to them, what will happen when you get
the device, you hit a particular key sequence the
first time you load the device, and you type in,
essentially, any user within your domain.
And so, if it's google.com, if it's-- it's not going to be
google.com, I'm trying to think of a good school--
asu.edu, I'm going to go to my first Google Apps for
Education customer.
asu.edu becomes the owner.
And then, from within the management console, you can
start to dictate who can log into your Chromebooks.
If it's anybody in the world, including a Gmail account or
me as a google.com user.
Is it only the users within my asu.edu community?
Or is it just five users I'm piloting that I want to be
able to access?
That you can dictate once you've
authenticated into the device.
And you do that through the cloud management console.
And then, for the devices that have been connected to your
domain, those restrictions will apply.

So here we go.
Do you happen to know--
and I've got some issues with WebEx here-- if we can
purchase the Verizon 3G model and then use our own eligible
discount plan to purchase the data?
The answer is yes.
You'll need to work with Verizon on that.
Each 3G-capable device in the United States comes with a
CDMA chip, which will operate with Verizon 3G and an
unlocked GSM capability.
So you can put in, let's say, an AT&T SIM, and get 3G
connectivity from AT&T.
Now, for the Verizon plans, we have the kind of preconfigured
plans Jaime talked about.
If you call your Verizon rep, it is possible for them to
move the devices from the kind of prepaid, consumer-oriented,
individual plan to an existing post-pay plan that you may
have negotiated with them.
And that's something you'll have to work out with them.
We aren't in the middle of that transaction in any way.
We are working with Verizon very closely to make it as
easy as possible to do that.
I will not claim that we are at the point we would like in
terms of the ease of doing that.
Certainly, we always want to make it as simple as possible.
So you'll see us continue to try and find ways
to make that easier.
But it is possible to be done today.

A crass question from David.
OK.
I'm not offended by crass, David.
If we want to pilot a program for 30 days or less, does
Google have a return policy before we make the long-term
investment?
The unfortunate answer at this point is, no, we don't.
So you can order a small number of units if you'd like
to trial them for a period of time, but we do not have a
kind of return policy at this time if you
don't like the units.
David also asks, what is the state of the Citrix
integration?
It's a good question.
So Citrix is something we're working very closely on.
And at this point, it is a product that they are working
to deliver and we expect that to be done
sometime later this year.
I have seen demos.
We have some instances of that running
here internal to Google.
So it's worked, we've demoed it publicly.
But exactly when that will release is up
to Citrix, not Google.
And so I would ask you to, if you are a Citrix customer,
call your Citrix rep and ask them that question.
I don't feel comfortable committing to a timeline for
the release of a product by another company.
I barely feel comfortable committing to the release
timelines for products that Google is working on.
But for a third party is certainly even less
comfortable for me.
JAIME CASAP: Hey, Jeff.
I was scanning through some of the questions and trying to
summarize into big buckets.
And one of them's around the cloud print and paperless
environment and some examples of how that all works.
And you can absolutely get more information from that web
address that I mentioned there to get more information about
cloud print.
But I want to talk a little bit about what I'm seeing out
there, and I'm sure some of you are seeing this, too,
around how people are using the cloud, if you will, or
even Google Apps for Education, or other types of
cloud-based applications to minimize the number of things
that people print.
And I think part of it is just a cultural shift.
And a lot of it is just people getting used to a new way of
doing things.
And I'm old, and so I still print things.
I don't even know why sometimes I print things.
And this morning is a great example of
what I mean by that.
I ended up printing an email chain of stuff that I had for
a meeting that I'm going to at 11:30.
And as soon as I hit the print button, I said to myself, I'm
going to have my Chromebook, or I'm going to have my mobile
device, or I'm going to have my tablet, or whatever other
device that I have. I can easily just go into that at
the meeting and just scan through that email.
And I don't know why I printed it.
So a lot of this is mental resistance or cultural change.
And I like to use my kids a lot in my examples and what I
talk about.
And my daughter's 18, my son's 10.
I don't think they've ever printed anything.
And I don't even know if they know how to print.
And so the idea is that we're starting to see that shift
around teachers that are using it.
And Mr. Sanders there talked about how he doesn't have to
collect homework any more, that they have to do them
online, or doing assessments online.
Or teachers using the opportunity, not just to save
on printing, not just to not print, but it's a time-saving
opportunity.
And I'm starting to see lots of teachers use Google Docs
for meeting notes the way lots of other organizations use
them, so that they can go in and create notes for their
meetings ongoing, and keep that attached to their
calendar so that they're always adding notes to that
and they don't have to actually print notes or an
agenda or those types of things.
So I'm excited to see how the technology, how software, how
cloud-based applications, and now how these Chromebooks can
help reduce some of that printing experience that
teachers face right now.

JAMES SANDERS: One thing I wanted to add on top of that
is, going into the Chrome web store, there's hundreds of
different apps that you could use in the classroom.
I've used probably half a dozen of them, anywhere from
3D building tools, to graphing calculators, to really cool
alchemy apps where students can play around with different
elements, combining them, and see what the output is.
The web is becoming so rich.
Like I said about video editing earlier, programs like
JayCut, where my students would be able to take their
videos that they'd uploaded to YouTube, throw them into
JayCut, and create these really high-quality videos
really simply.
And it's just a lot of fun to watch the power of the cloud.
I think, five years ago, maybe this probably wouldn't have
been possible.
But right now, everything that I used to do either on my
desktop or on a Mac, I can also do on the cloud.
And that was a realization that I didn't expect to happen
when I started using the Chromebooks and I went in with
definitely some doubts.
But the web has proven everything that I needed to do
in my classroom.

JEFF KELTNER: All right.
So this Jeff.
And I think we've actually reached pretty close to the
end of our time.
And so, I wanted to be respectful of the time you
guys have. Hopefully, this has been a useful session for you
to understand a little more about Chromebooks in the
education context.
There will be a recording of this webinar available, along
with the chat Q&A. And we will actually take the questions we
have not gotten to today either verbally or in writing
and post those answers for you as well, so that you'll have a
place to go for those.
If you want more information or to contact our sales team,
you can do that at google.com/chromebook, and
there is a way to get in touch with our sales team.
So thank you very much for your time and attention.
We really appreciate you attending today.
And best of luck in the classroom.
We hope to sell you some Chromebooks.