We're starting the week off debunking myths and freezing in the cold weather! It's important to be knowledgeable about the technology that you use every day. Chromebooks are really interesting because they are both affordable and operate with a different philosophy that other devices. You can think of Chromebooks as portals to tools and services rather than the home of the tools and services themselves. What do I mean by this? The specifications for Chromebooks can get away with not being top of the line because they rely on internet-based tools which are not actually running on the device taking up resources. This can lead to folks formulating and perpetuating negative opinions about these devices. Lets dig into some!

1. PCs are better for getting work done than a Chromebook.

If the work that you're doing is writing a paper or report, making an organized spreadsheet, or preparing a presentation this is simply not true. You can do all of these things in Google Drive more conveniently than in a word processor like Microsoft Office because of the added support for collaboration. Additionally the most recent versions of your documents are available on any device. Beyond this, there are powerful web-based IDEs for programming and services for photo and video editing.

PS - If you really needed to make or edit something in Microsoft Office, you can access Office 365 in a web browser.

2. Chromebooks have no storage.

Why do you need to have a 1TB sized hard drive when Google Drive is free storage that you can access anywhere at any time? In addition to this, ChromeOS devices have recently been manufactured with larger hard drives, the starting options most commonly at 64GB. The impetus for this is the ability to download applications from the Google Play store. Although, this is turned off for devices managed through Mansfield Public Schools.

3. You need the internet to do anything on a Chromebook.

There are so many applications that you can use offline from the Chrome Web store. For example, Google Keep and Google Docs are editable in offline mode.

Just because Chromebooks work a little differently than what we may be used to using, doesn't mean that they are any less useful. They are being employed in school districts all across the country to provide students with an equitable education. I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty cool.

-Leo Bunyea, Technology Technician and Public Informant