You might have seen that a lot of changes have been happening to the Chromebooks that students use. This is due to security and safety concerns, along with the need to add certain AI that helps students learn in different ways.

Colter Christian, Chief Information Officer, explained that Google changes constantly, and there are hundreds of changes every month.  They have student groups and teacher groups, and each has different settings.   One new change Google made would have allowed emoji responses to emails.  It was discussed and decided that this feature would be disabled for students to eliminate a bunch of inappropriate emojis floating around everywhere. 

Christian talked about tags that they use to easily block websites. One of these tags, which was made recently, was an e-commerce tag that would go after places where you buy stuff.

Teachers sometimes might have a bad time with those tags, but he stated that teachers can always communicate with him via email or come to him directly, and they can work on a solution for those types of things. They have to be careful about some sites because although 90% of the site is ok, there is that 10% that is not, and it depends on who has tagged the site.  

 Christian talked about a change of computers that could come because of the current computers being too bulky and expensive to repair. You also see recent changes like two new AI tools: Gemini and Notebook LM. This is new technology, and rules are changing daily as to its use. 

Students want to know why they are not informed of changes when they occur.  Christian stated that he has to be very careful and not step on toes.  They do send out emails to the teachers and administrators to share; however, that doesn’t always happen.   

Christian stated that with some changes, he only has a short window of time to deal with new updates and changes, so sometimes there is no time to let people know.  All in all, everything they do that restricts is actually for safety purposes, like guard rails on a road.

Picture caption, This Chromebook and many others are falling apart and are in need of change