Pub. 9 2019-2020 Issue 1

10 BY JAROM ROMEY, CEO, H-WIRE TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS Planning for Technology Success ADVERTISEMENT M anaging technology is a huge part of keeping any and every charter school running smoothly. Whether your charter is focused on maximizing technology use or minimizing it, well-implemented technology is at the core of keeping your school running smoothly. Schools cannot afford network issues or inadequate devices when testing rolls around. By preparing and maintaining a technology plan for your school, you can avoid many of the issues that catch schools unaware. Chromebooks Based on the model of Chromebook and the degree of ... gentleness ... with which students treat them, you can expect a given Chromebook to have three to five years of useful life. By the end of that time, many will likely have sustained some damage, or just be slow running newer versions of ChromeOS. Further, each Chromebook model is only supported by Google for a period of six years from the date of the model’s release. For example, the Dell Chromebook 11 3180 was released in March 2017, with a Google Auto Update Expiration Date of May 2022. So, even if you buy a Dell Chromebook 11 3180 new in 2020, it will still only be supported through May 2022. Once a Chromebook model has expired, it will stop receiving updates from Google, which means that it will miss critical security updates, lose manageability within the Google Admin console, and be incompatible with apps that require the latest ChromeOS version. More often than not,