New York City Approves Use Of Chromebooks In Public Schools

Education is one market segment where Chromebooks are increasingly becoming popular. There might be a couple of reasons behind this, one certainly can’t discount the relatively cheap prices of Chromebooks, and the fact that they’re powered by a cloud based OS. A seal of approval from the New York City further increases the reach of these notebooks into the education segment, as it opens up all public schools in New York City to Chromebooks.

Google made this announcement on its official blog and interviewed Hal Friedlander, the chief information officer at the New York City Department of Education. Friedlander and his team noticed that majority of the schools were already using services like Google Apps for Education and Google Drive, and that many schools actually wanted to shift students to Chromebooks.

The lower cost as opposed to traditional notebooks makes them cheaper to acquire and since there is no pesky setup required, Chromebooks are extremely manageable in this segment.

So the NYC Department of Education sat down with OEMs to ensure that Chromebooks offered to public schools met the department’s specifications. Those that did meet all of the specifications were then added to a list of approved Chromebooks for public schools, with schools have liberty over whether they want a laptop, a tablet or both. The blog doesn’t mention which OEMs have had their products added to this list, but one can guess some names rather easily.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Computers
Tags: Chromebooks