Chromebook Abuse & How to Manage it

I cannot tell you how frustrated and actually, angry I have been over the past couple of years about students abusing an expensive resource that has been offered to them to use for their benefit for free (yes, parents pay taxes etc. etc. …).

Besides the everyday struggle to get the students to plug them in for the next class of students, there are other more serious issues regarding the care of the them. I’m talking about removing letters from the keyboard and flicking them at other students, taking chromebooks home without permission, leaving them in hallways, and once even hitting another student over the head with one, causing the screen to crack. I could never find out who was responsible for most of these incidents, but even if I did there were little to no consequences from the administration for similar occurrences in previous semesters.

My favorite shenanigan is the rearrangement of the letters on the keyboard. While this is quite clever and funny, the next student who has the misfortune to choose this particular chromebook has to spend part of the period putting the letters back in place. Now lets be honest, a student is probably more than willing to spend their time not doing work to mindlessly rearrange the letters while watching TikTok. There goes another period wasted. It just really sucks when there are no other chromebooks available and it is evaluation time. Even my signs for students to be courteous to their peers in the next class worked for about 2 days and then ignored.

Aside from the inconvenience to others, there is the blaring issue of public money and affordability. Currently our school cannot afford to get those chromebooks without keys on the keyboards fixed. There is a pile of them on a desk in our tech lead’s office, just sitting in purgatory.

So, with limited resources I had to turn to more Draconian ways, the “Chromebook Sign-out Sheet”. Once this was implemented, students couldn’t deny their culpability. They were not only called out by me, but also their peers. After all, we didn’t have enough chromebooks to begin with and students had to share. Now there could be one less.

This issue has reminded me of my own mishap several years ago with the public library. One summer I was lazing around the pool at my parent’s home, reading a book I had taken out from the library just a day earlier. I read for a while and then decided to take a snooze. As I was entering that euphoric hypno-jerk phase, a strong wind whipped the paperback into the pool. I was awakened by the splash. Once retrieved, I laid the book to dry for a couple of days, but knew I was going to have to do the walk of shame into the library later that week. A few days later when I pulled my wallet out to pay for the book, the librarian took a step back. She said, “You want to pay for it?”. I replied of course, it was ruined and the policy was to pay for it if ruined. She responded with a chuckle, “Nobody ever offers to pay. Patrons refuse and say ‘they took the book out that way’”! This is the perfect example of the Tragedy of the Commons. And to be honest, I was shocked by the librarian’s response. These patrons would have most likely all been adults- not teenagers! What has happened to personal responsibility and the understanding that public resources are not for just the betterment of the individual, but for the common good?

I suppose the topic of entitlement should be relegated for another time. In fact it should probably be a series!

Perhaps you have an even better idea on how to manage resources in your school. Please share in the comments if you do!

Happy Teaching!