Bibliographic record
Abstract
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For districts looking to get the most bang for their ed tech buck, devices that fall somewhere between tablets and traditional laptops can be just the right fit. The iPad buying frenzy may be over. The late 2013 introduction of the low-cost Chromebook has given school districts an affordable alternative that they're gravitating to with gusto. Official numbers from market research firm IDC confirmed the news last December when the company announced that while Apple hac shipped 702,000 iPads to educational buyers in the third quarter, partners had shipped 715,000 Chromebooks. While some observers might refer to this changing of the guard as a return of the or the tailing off of the tablet, to those doing the buying, that's not quite the case. Valerie Truesdale, chief of technology, personalization and engagement for North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, said of the device in use at her district, It's the size of a tablet; it's portable [like a laptop], but this Chromebook is another animal in between. Vendors, too, are using different approaches to classifying the Google-inspired device that includes a built-in keyboard, stores most of its files online and runs applications directly from the Internet. Acer and Samsung put Chromebooks into the computer menu on their website, and give tablets their own pages. Dell and include laptops, tablets and Chromebooks all together; while Lenovo includes various members of its Chromebooks on both the laptop and tablet pages. No matter how the Chromebook is classified, it's definitely filling a gap that addresses specific educational needs. The Price Is Right Charlotte-Mecklenburg began the evaluation for its latest device purchase (for 32,000 middle schoolers) by pulling together a dozen educators to test drive laptops, iPads and Chromebooks from a myriad of companies. The choices were ranked, and Chromebooks won. The district's middle schools were already using Samsung Chromebooks that it has purchased two years earlier to address a need in its science and social studies classes for supplementary digital materials to augment dated textbooks. For that purpose, the IT department had put at least two--and sometimes four--carts of 30 devices into each school. In the most recent buying round, teachers gravitated to HP-built Chromebooks for several reasons. First, they wanted to use Apps for Education, the free suite of online applications for word processing, spreadsheet work and presentations. Chromebooks are almost purpose-built for those programs. Second, North Carolina was initially a Smarter Balanced consortium member (it has since withdrawn), and computing specifications for the Smarter Balanced online assessment required a non-touch keyboard and the ability to lock down the browser, which the Chromebook handled masterfully. Third, it came down to price. HP came in with a bid that is about $220 per device, which is significant, said Truesdale. When you're trying to provision 32,000, price is key. Now 33 schools have received enough Chromebooks for a 1-to-1 ratio. Another 14 schools were scheduled to get their devices by mid-March. A Practical, Durable Form Factor Before New Caney Independent School District (TX) chose a device to lease for its 1-to-1 program, director of technology Dustin Hardin asked high school students what mattered to them. We met with each one of their leadership groups and I asked them, 'If we were to give you a device to improve your education, that would help the learning process, what features would you want to have?' Unanimously, he said, they wanted to have a keyboard, which was very surprising. The district considered Windows devices at $500 to $600 a pop, but since it was already heading down a Google route, Chromebooks were on its radar as well. The district brought some in, showed the students how Docs worked and, Hardin said, They all said, 'This is going to be perfect. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".