I'm done with Chromebooks. Years ago I thought the small size laptop with a simplified OS was a good idea. And then I had to interact with one during the pandemic. The New York City Department of Education contracted with Google to provide accounts for all students and enable remote schooling.
So I bought one refurbished in 2020 and signed in with my kid's DOE account credentials. The strong password was auto-generated and impossible to remember, but it's used each time the computer starts or unlocked, so I set out to change it to something maybe less secure, but that would be usable.
This proved absolutely byzantine as I figured out I had to change the password in two separate places, in Google itself despite its insistance that the account was managed by the NYC DOE and in the NYC DOE despite its insistance that it's a Google account.
This worked great until the next school year when the account password was automatically reset to another strong one. I couldn't remember the exact process so I made a label with the password and stuck it to the screen frame.
Equally frustrating were the organization-set limits on the Google account. It wasn't possible for my kid to mail their work to me, GMail would refuse to send the email to my personal address "per organization policy".
Then my kid attended a writing workshop where they were given yet another Google account to write their stories on Google Docs and lo and behold, when I tried to sign in with this new account in the Chromebook, it was refused "per organization policy".
Fed up with the NYC DOE "policies", I reset the Chromebook and signed in with the writing workshop account. This went well, and my kid was able to access her work on the computer. But then when I tried to share her document with my personal Google account so that I could provide feedback as a commenter, it was refused "per organization policy".
We ended up having to create a document on my personal Google account and give authorship to my kid's account for this to work.
Hypolite Petovan /
npub1tx0…8xxx
2023-11-16 17:01:53
Author Public Key
npub1tx0flkxr6amckrkpzz92apurckfxgtcnzm4h747wlq72dakzmaqsea8xxxPublished at
2023-11-16 17:01:53Event JSON
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"content": "I'm done with Chromebooks. Years ago I thought the small size laptop with a simplified OS was a good idea. And then I had to interact with one during the pandemic. The New York City Department of Education contracted with Google to provide accounts for all students and enable remote schooling.\n\nSo I bought one refurbished in 2020 and signed in with my kid's DOE account credentials. The strong password was auto-generated and impossible to remember, but it's used each time the computer starts or unlocked, so I set out to change it to something maybe less secure, but that would be usable.\n\nThis proved absolutely byzantine as I figured out I had to change the password in two separate places, in Google itself despite its insistance that the account was managed by the NYC DOE and in the NYC DOE despite its insistance that it's a Google account.\n\nThis worked great until the next school year when the account password was automatically reset to another strong one. I couldn't remember the exact process so I made a label with the password and stuck it to the screen frame.\n\nEqually frustrating were the organization-set limits on the Google account. It wasn't possible for my kid to mail their work to me, GMail would refuse to send the email to my personal address \"per organization policy\".\n\nThen my kid attended a writing workshop where they were given yet another Google account to write their stories on Google Docs and lo and behold, when I tried to sign in with this new account in the Chromebook, it was refused \"per organization policy\".\n\nFed up with the NYC DOE \"policies\", I reset the Chromebook and signed in with the writing workshop account. This went well, and my kid was able to access her work on the computer. But then when I tried to share her document with my personal Google account so that I could provide feedback as a commenter, it was refused \"per organization policy\".\n\nWe ended up having to create a document on my personal Google account and give authorship to my kid's account for this to work.",
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