I’ve been engaged in a lot of very interesting discussions on the benefits of using Chromebook in education. The Chromebook is by some including me seen as an alternative to notebooks/laptops and tablets (Android devices, iPads). In many cases Chromebook will be both better and way cheaper than other solutions for schools. (For the economy see the IDC white paper Quantifying the Economic Value of Chromebooks for K-12 Education.)
Chromebooks basically works as a laptop with the difference that it doesn’t run installed programs. Instead of running installed programs as does laptops and tablets Chromebook runs programs in the cloud: webapps. Webapps are applications as many people know from their smartphones or tablets. But again: on a Chromebook these apps are not installed on the computer, but is places in the cloud. This means that a Chromebook has to be connected to the net to run with full capacity. You can do basic work off-line. You can work with Googles of-line programs as GoogleDocs, Spreadsheet and Presentation.
The idea of working in the cloud is what places Chromebook within a totally different logically framework than laptops and tablets. The thinking attached to laptops and tablets is that the user should pull everything to the devices. It is not necessarily the way people use these devices, but the logic is that the device is personal and that you control your stuff - your world - by pulling it in: It is Centripetal.
Contrary the Chromebook is not personal. You log on with your Google Account which opens the computer to digital world of the owner of that account: your pictures, files, shortcuts, programs and what not. And you don’t pull stuff and store it on the device. You push your stuff out on the net - the cloud. Pushing stuff out is also a reaching out for other people who share your interests and who you potentially can/will collaborate with. The logic is Centrifugal. Andy Wolber in ‘Overcoming legacy thinking: Chromebooks in a Windows work world’ talks from a different perspective on thee differences between Acces centric thinking versus the old File Centric thinking “Chromebooks - and Google Apps - are built with an underlying mental model that is access centric, not file centric.”
The revolutionizing idea with the Chromebook is not the Chromebook - but the way to think about how to work and do stuff. It is a philosophy, a way of thinking.
But besides the high fly of ideas: How do you actually do this - what connections do you have to make between your Chromebook and progra... UPS sorry: apps?
There are basically three ways of working with apps - or web services - on a Chromebook: applications, extensions and shortcuts. As mentioned above the Googleverse gives access to a whole bunch of application that let you handle operations and procedures as constructing a document, a spreadsheet, a mindmap, a calculation etc. You go to Chrome Web Store (a shortcut from your Chromebook) and you add the desired application (its either free or you have to pay for it - as you know from your phone). Then the applications will be opened from you list of added apps and it will be run in the cloud.
Extensions are basically minor programs - and the work as applications. Some of them run automatically - you don’t notice them, they just operated in the background as an ad-blocker that blocks the ads on a homepage you open. Other extensions let you do something: store/curate a homepage automatically (Pinterrest, Scoop.it). The difference from application is that they are placed next to the search bar. So you use extensions for standard procedures you have to execute while you are doing something else. Grab a specified portion of the screen with Pixlr Grabber (actually that you can do with a built in operation CTRL SHIFT F5) or shorten an URL
Thirdly you can use shortcuts as you can with every web browser. The Chromebook runs the Chromebrowser and your shortcuts are placed just beneath the search bar. And basically shortcuts work the same way as application and extensions. A shortcut send you to a predefined address on the Internet. If that place is making you do automated operations its a program (program, application, extension, automated procedure etc). There are some technical differences between the way some of these are executed but that doesn’t interest me and the average user.
So what applications, extensions and shortcuts should you add to your Chromebook?
That depend of course on what you would like to do.
This blog post is, actually, an attempt to answer a request from a very good tweep of mine, Gregory Kulowiec, who asked what my favorite apps were. I’m not suggesting that the following list will do it for you - but its the apps, extensions and shortcuts I use the most or that I would recommend for a teacher.
Of course there is the whole Google suite - Docs, Spreadsheet, Presentation. Besides these necessary working tools one of my favorite extensions is Black Menu that let me access the Google Tools easily. Beside Black Menu my extensions include Scoop.it, which is a book marklet that lets me store homepages in my Scoop.it collection. One of my Scoop.it collections is resources on Chromebook for Education. Back to extensions: I use LastPass, Bit.ly (URL shortener), Pocket (for interesting stuff I want to read later), Evernote, Pixlr Grabber, Marker.to (yellow marker to home pages that you want to share), Google Pocket, AddThis (easy sharing of bookmarks, links)
For application proper I’d mention: DropBox, Evernote, Google Drawing, Camera, Kindle Cloud Reader, Lovely Charts, MindMeister, Pixl, Pixl Editor, PDFZen, Real Time Board, Padlet, Screencast-o-matic for screen casting, and Wevideo for video editing. I’m trying to work with SkyDrive webapp to better let me edit MS-files.
A hardly ever use the application TweetDeck because I prefer to access Tweetdeck directly from my shortcuts. I’ve way to many short cuts - and fortunately most of them disappear from the screen. The shortcuts I use include: Blogger, GMail, Twitter, Tweetdeck, Wikispaces, Weebly, JoliCloud (which lets me access all my cloud storage drives from one interface), Adobe Connect, Symbaloo, Google Academy, Cloud Convert.....
The usefulness of these programs, applications, services etc change over time. Some of them I only use when I’ve just discovered them and some hang on for a longer period of time.
