This year, students returned to school and hearts dropped when Chromebooks were passed out instead of the treasured Macbook Airs. After a while, the complaining subsided as students got used to the new computers provided by Chatham County. Recently, however, the laptops have been slowing down and then, a couple of weeks ago, students became confused when computers logged the user out immediately after shutting the laptop.
There is a reason behind the new change with the computers, though.
“The setting change was based on best practices provided by Google for deployments of our size,” said Keith Medlin, Chatham County Schools Chief Information and Technology Officer.
While it is a nuisance and disliked by many students, it does benefit the efficiency of students’ work in the long run.
“The change, while unpopular, is necessary to ensure ChromeOS updates, policy changes, and security updates are applied in a timely fashion,” Medlin said.
Some may wonder why was this feature wasn’t added until the middle of the school year.
“All of a sudden our computers just stopped keeping us logged in when we shut our computers,” said junior Zoe Kolat. “Now even if we close them for five seconds between activities, we have to log back in and it takes a while for everything to load again. It’s just frustrating because we just got used to the Chromebooks and now there’s another change.”
Medlin explains that the county originally tried to avoid making this change. Eventually, however, the amount of students not receiving security and privacy updates became too large.
“We tried to avoid making this change, which is why this did not initially start out turned on,” Medlin said. “Unfortunately, it became problematic that student devices were not getting new policies…in a timely fashion.”
The students not receiving the updates were experiencing internet issues such as lagging, which obviously affected the amount of work they could get done in a class period.
It appears that even when students learn that the new update is beneficial in the long run, they would have prefered that their computers stay the way they were.
“I know it’s supposed to help us but it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Like I just don’t get the timing and purpose,” Kolat said.
Another issue some students are experiencing is losing some or all of their tabs when they reopen their computer.
“Sometimes I’ll get to my next class and half my tabs are gone,” said senior Kyra Wilcox. “I don’t want to lose an important source that I’m using for a paper or something.”
There is a fix to this, though.
“Students should install the OneTab extension,” Medlin said. “The nice thing about this extension is that it will work when students need to log back into the computer so tabs aren’t lost when the lid is closed. After logging back in, click the OneTab icon (a blue funnel) and then click ‘Restore all’ to reload all the tabs that were saved.”
It is important to keep in mind that this extension doesn’t guarantee that typed text will be saved.
Another solution to being logged out is keeping your computer slightly open when it’s not in use. The shutting of the laptop is what triggers the logging out, so keeping it open a slight angle will prevent this.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this change to the Chromebooks is a glitch, nor does it look like it’s going away any time soon. The good news is that the internet on these laptops should be working faster and all the changes sent out to all computers will be up-to-date without students having to do anything.
