My Google Chromecast arrived yesterday and, boy, am I impressed!
It took me — and Sue Waters and Alice Mercer know only full well of my technological incompetence — only two or three minutes to set it up, and it worked perfectly: Netflix on the big screen.
After consulting with my wife, I immediately reduced our cable package by half and am saving $50 per month. There hasn’t been a television show that I felt like I couldn’t wait for the DVD to watch since “Lost” went off the air, so now it’s time for streaming.
It’s hard for me to see how it could be useful in most school settings, though. I know we can stream off our teacher computers through a projector onto a screen, and I suspect that’s the case for a large majority of U.S. classrooms. I wonder how many classrooms are really going to even have televisions much longer — I know many at our school (including me) have gotten rid of them to save space.
So I don’t think I can even add Chromecast to The Best Good, Inexpensive & Simple Classroom Technology Tools.
Am I wrong? (Based on comments, I might very well be wrong)
Larry, what is it about America 1st? 🙂 Took me ages to buy a chromebook here in the backwoods called Canada. Half the good streaming sites don’t stream beyond America’s borders ….. I guess I’ll just have to wait ….
But love the openness of Google and good of ’em to make it something that isn’t brand specific. That will win at the end of the day, me thinks. My only regret is that google didn’t buy Skype and make it something open for all ….
David, Can’t you Canadians just keep your niceness and welfare state and leave us Americans alone? 🙂
Given that you could combine the Chrome cast with a 4G tablet, it could be a good way to get around system blocks on YouTube etc.
I work in a 1:1 school -all my 8th graders have macbook airs- I think this will be useful for students to project content from their chrome browser for the class without the need for them to bring their laptop up to unhook my laptop and hook up theirs – won’t interuppt the flow as much. What do you think?