I work for a nonprofit charity that provides transitional housing to homeless families. We received a grant for educational services to the children in low-income and homeless families that we serve. Part of the money we will spend on Chromebooks because that's what the school superintendent recommended. The schools are attempting to provide Chromebooks to students in grades 7-12 and iPads to younger students due to all classes now being online. I know that only a fraction of students in our school district have received them so far.
So we are going to purchase Chromebooks for the middle school and high school students we work with. They will be on loan since the student will return it when he moves on, graduates or otherwise leaves the program. If the student needs it to continue his education or for work, we'll him or her keep it.
We are members of TechSoup and I can purchase MS Office or Office 365 very cheaply, but is that the best choice for a Chromebook? An IT person from the school system emailed me and suggested using Google Docs or WPS Office instead. I don't know much about the Chromebook other than that it is cloud-dependent and doesn't have much hard drive space and very little memory. I believe--and I could be wrong here--that the whole idea behind the Chromebook is to use it connected to the internet and store all files in your Google Drive. So using Google Docs would be the logical option. And does a Chromebook have enough horsepower to run MS Office? I am not familiar with WPS Office although I've used both OpenOffice and LibreOffice and I like them both. The advantage of these MS Office alternatives is that you can use them offline, and save files with Office extensions which can be opened from Office applications.
Any thoughts on these options? I have not purchased the Chromebooks yet, so I have some time to consider what is best. The school year will officially end in a week or so, but the Superintendent told me that there will be summer classes online beginning June 8th and we want all students in our program to take advantage of them. We'll use part of the grant money to hire tutors to work with the children so we'll want to know what we're doing before then.
Thanks in advance for any insights.
