Best practices for developing classroom tools with Chrome OS

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi my name is andy i work on the chromebook edu team at google and today i'd like to talk about the remarkable evolution of computing in the classroom and how we can help you build for 50 million chromebooks in schools i grew up in a small town in rural pennsylvania surrounded by a whole lot of kids who kind of looked like me and ate the same things i ate and read the same local newspaper and when i got my first computer first with a cd-rom encyclopedia and then eventually a modem that computer just blasted a hole through my little bubble and introduced me to people and ideas and perspectives so far afield of anything that i had seen before it rewired my brain overnight i'm here today because i believe that every kid deserves access to these great learning experiences i'm here today because we want to put computers in the hands of every student and we believe that the best way to do that is to be relentlessly pragmatic to make computers easy to use and affordable and scalable and then once you've done that to make those computers just the best learning and teaching tools possible computers give kids superpowers with a computer you can ask any question get the best answer you can film and edit and broadcast your own movies you can design and model your own toys and then print them out to play with them you can hop in the delorean travel anytime anywhere on the planet to walk in the shoes of others and build a broader perspective on the world around us now the first chromebooks went into classrooms about 10 years ago and at first they were used mostly for testing and then some folks got the really bright idea to put them on a cart and wheel them around the classroom for research projects and writing papers and then websites turned into web apps and cloud computing turned into cloud collaboration and then schools started buying dedicated computers for students and what do you know now over the last two years we've seen more edtech investment than ever before in history and the numbers are just astounding here's what those last 10 years have looked like today we have 50 million monthly active chromebooks remote learning fundamentally changed how computers are used for schools since returning to the classroom this fall usage of school chromebooks has increased 35 percent since pre-pandemic not just in school but at home too i talked earlier about how chromebooks started as testing machines and then when google classroom and docs and slides took off as shared computers for writing reports and creating presentations but that doesn't even begin to explain what's happened this past year again 35 percent more usage than just two years ago and that's because many many schools are going one to one one chromebook for one student and students are using them to create and collaborate on way more than just docs and slides they're using really powerful apps to publish books with book creator to take notes with squid to build 3d models with tinkercad design graphics with sigma code in 50 different programming languages with replit create videos with canva and so much more it really is just the beginning please check out the chromebook out pub for more now just like web apps chromebooks themselves have evolved to keep up with all these great tools 95 of active devices today have four gigs of ram or more and a third of active devices are convertibles with a touchscreen many of these convertibles have front and rear cameras for filming science projects and movies and they support not just touch but stylist too for note-taking and creating art with free and unlimited art supplies and that's just for the students let's talk about the teachers a couple years ago most teachers use computers to email and create worksheets and great assignments but that changed pretty abruptly a couple years ago teachers had to start teaching with their computers using a growing suite of digital tools and keep up with the generation of kids that basically grew up on the internet and the genie is not going back in the bottle when teachers returned to the classroom this fall they kept teaching with their computers and guess what having a lightweight convertible with a touchscreen and a stylus an all-day battery life it's pretty helpful for teachers who are walking around the classroom with a wireless whiteboard in their arm now what does this look like in the real world let me show you what a modern classroom looks like one that's designed from the ground up for one-to-one chromebooks here are a couple of photos i took recently at west park high school in roseville california at roseville every student is assigned their own chromebook when they start as a freshman and so when you go into a classroom every class reminds you there's a chromebook out in front of every student there are no paper-bound textbooks and very few notebooks the desks are all whiteboards for students to scratch notes as they work on device the walls are whiteboards too so teachers can project from their chromebooks onto the board and annotate their screens in real time with whiteboard markers this is a school hallway notice that there are no lockers just backpacks because students don't have any books to stash in between classes they just pop their chromebooks into their backpacks and go from classroom to classroom and as the result of all this chromebooks aren't just for typing and testing anymore they're for creating and sharing ideas across all forms of media they're fun they're helpful they're creative tools and they give kids superpowers now let's talk about how we got here the 50 million chromebooks in classrooms today a lot of people think schools buy chromebooks because they're inexpensive but that's kind of a misperception chromebooks do tend to cost less than other computers because chrome os is a lighter weight operating system doesn't require as much ram or cpu but that's not really why they're loved by schools schools love chromebooks because they scale to the moon let me show you what that looks like this is google admin console it's a remote control for school admins to manage google accounts and workspace apps android devices and of course chromebooks when a school admin wants students to use your app this is what they do they open up admin console they select the school or the classroom they want to push the app to they find the app in the chrome web store or the play store where they paste in a url to your website and then they click install and this is what a student sees they log into their device the icon is magically in the shelf the app opens up in a window or in the browser and they're automatically signed into the app all their creations saved to google drive that's it if you're the it admin for the chicago public schools and you want to push an app to your 400 000 students it takes you about 30 seconds to flip a switch and every single chromebook updates instantly with that app now you're probably wondering what can i do to make my app work well in these environments well we have good news we just rolled out a new section on chromeos.dev for education it's got lots of pro tips one of the most common questions we get is what platform should i use for my app and the answer to that is it depends pwas are the most performant and easiest to deploy apps to students they offer offline caching to improve performance on low bandwidth school networks and at-home access for students that don't have wi-fi at home if you're not building a stand-alone experience and instead want to adapt in-browser content then extensions are probably your best bet extensions are the most popular app type on chromebooks today chrome os allows you to go beyond browser capabilities in web apps using powerful apis available to chrome extensions you can develop chrome extensions that interact with web content and build tools to identify spelling and grammatical errors collect snippets of notes or insert mathematical symbols and documents if you want to build a test or some other focused experience school chromebooks have a kiosk mode and you can learn about special kiosk apis and launching custom extensions for kiosks on chromeos.dev also very relevant to our testing providers we've recently launched a long-term support channel specifically for education and enterprise users on chrome os lts releases get frequent security updates but get feature releases every six months visit chromeos.dev to learn about how you can test and adapt your app for chrome os lts versions finally if you're an android app developer you can also update your app to work on landscape screens and add keyboard and mouse support so that school admins can remotely install your optic chromebooks just like a website an extension or a pwa minecraft education edition is a great example it runs beautifully on chromebooks and is widely used in schools today now many of you are probably thinking okay i think my app would be great for schools and i understand the technical implementation but how do i test this in schools how do i figure out if there are other things that are specific to schools that i need to update and good news again we're here to help with so many schools using chromebooks and with demand for teacher tools and homework helpers going through the roof we started working this winter with app developers to pilot their tools on chromebooks and classrooms and help them optimize for education if you're interested in participating in future school pilots and testing your product in chromebook classrooms please check back in on chromeos.dev we'll be posting more information in the months to come thanks so much for watching we can't wait to see what you build for chromebooks [Music] you