Google offers new paradigm for access to the Internet

Photo by C Haglund

Earlier this year Google Wave got a lot of attention when it was introduced to the web.  There was quite a but of buzz and speculation about this being a “really big deal”, but after using it for a few months I understand why this excitement has cooled off as it is nothing more than a portal type dashboard to existing technologies.

While somewhat disappointed with Google Wave, I am very excited about the new paradigm that Google Chrome OS presents.  This is a operating system that allows someone to be on the Internet in 7 seconds from pressing the “on” button of a computer.  This OS goes right to the cloud and does not go through the laborious and lengthy start-up that Apples and PCs put their users through.  There is a good YouTube video on this OS

An important part of our visionary framework is to have technology that is web accessible.  This places an emphasis of putting our instructional resources in the cloud for students so that they can access their resources on any web accessible device.  Today it takes about 75 seconds for a student to turn on a computer and access the Internet.  Using Google Chrome OS students could shave 68 seconds off this time.  Assume a student does this 100 times in the year, that fress-up  6800 seconds for the student that other would have been spent staring at a screen waiting for the computer to startup.