this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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I think it's very unlikely that they would pay for the IT department to install Firefox on every Chromebook. You're talking 14,000 students in this county and only the kindergartners don't get Chromebooks.
You might be surprised! This type of change is usually automated and centralized, so an administrator shouldn't ever have to even touch any of those Chromebooks. Might be worth having a chat with your school administrators.
My own daughter is in online school now (it's still a public school, it's just not in a physical location) so she can use her own computer... but I have to do the user agent switcher thing because the school's own website testing software isn't Firefox-compatible. And the school is run by evil Pierson who basically has a monopoly on American public schools, so I'm guessing that's true for all of those Chromebooks out there too.
Still, I might suggest it to them anyway just for the benefit of the other kids.
Yeah, they sign major contracts that have a lot of stipulations so they get the best deals since theyre govt funded. This backfires, ofc, by locking them into bad products.
Im not saying dont try, definitely do.
Should be able to do either remotely or by including it in the image
I imagine personal work is saved to a server not locally
But it doesn’t hurt to try
That's really wild to me. They give each grade school student a chromebook? That is honestly terrifying.
Why is it terrifying? A lot of kids don't have computers of their own and this gives them access to the internet. It's also, in my opinion, a far better way to give kids tests than filling in bubbles on a sheet of paper.
I mean I wish there were other good, cheap options, but there aren't.
I really hate to "back in my day" this but we had computer labs for that when I was younger. And that didn't require giving a monopoly company my name or any other information about me. And I wasn't being ad-tracked all day long going to websites.
Computer labs aren't going to help the kids going home at night to study and I don't really think shuffling kids into a computer lab every time there's a test in any class makes much sense.
I mean, both can be true if we're living in a cloud-based world.
Schools can provide workstations and households can either opt in to using their own computer at home or be assigned a laptop or laptop credit. Choice is the important part here, and limiting kids choices at the benefit of major oligarchy organizations sucks big floppy donkey dick.
Schools are not about choice, they're about an even playing field. You cannot give students the kind of education you can give them on a per-classroom basis if they don't all have access to the same technology. What if a parent chooses to not give the kid a laptop even though the kid doesn't have a computer at home?
You don't advocate for that for the same reason that you don't advocate for parents to choose whether or not their kids get taught about evolution.
Why would that happen? What weird strawman scenario is this?
Who knows? Maybe because they don't allow that demonic technology in their house. People are crazy. It doesn't matter why. Assuming parents, given the choice, will make the correct choice for their child has been shown to be wrong again and again.
But let's say all the kids with notebooks at home don't get them and all the kids without notebooks at home get them. Ok. Now, the software we're using for art class this year runs in Windows. Your kid has a Macbook.
Virtual environments exist and are the backbone of modern IT. Surely we can teach kids how to boot Docker?
Also your demonic line doesnt add up, the ye can still say the Chromebooks are demonic and make the kid leave it outside the house or something.
Except they have to use the Chromebook to do schoolwork. I’m not sure why you are acting like this is some weird rarity when it’s really standard.
And no, expecting a six-year-old to understand much more than clicking on the default home page is not something we can “surely teach.” Because they’re six.
What about 7 year olds?
Is it just 6 year olds we need to handhold docker image launching?
I understand Chromebooks are standard and I desire that to change, hence this entire thread you've been commenting on.
I seem to interact with you a lot, and sometimes it feels like you get lost in all the posts and comments you make and lose focus of the entire conversation at hand.
Expecting all, or even most, children in an elementary school to understand that is silly.
All I can think is you've never raised any children if you think most six or seven-year-olds could understand that.
School, again, is supposed to be about fairness, not catering to the smartest kids.