Admin repairs Chromebook hiccup

Lost tabs irked LMCS students

By Osei Helper | Manor Ink

Livingston Manor, NY – If you’re a Livingston Manor Central School middle or high school student, you probably have a good understanding of the one-to-one policy with the the school’s Chromebooks. To those unaware of the policy the school has put in place this year, it’s a system where each student has their own school-assigned Chromebook to use throughout the school day, one that they can also bring home. These chromebooks are used for school work every day and are a fallback just in case the school ever goes back to full remote learning. But after a few weeks with the Chromebooks, an issue arose.

For the first couple of weeks of school, there weren’t too many restrictions with the Chromebooks. Students could access a decent amount of sites and even play some games. Over time, game sites were getting blocked for obvious reasons, but so too were important sites that students needed to access for school assignments, including news outlets. But this wasn’t even the worst aspect for most students.

When students first got the Chromebooks, they found that closing them simply timed out the screen. When reopened, whatever students were previously working on was still there. But for security reasons, a logout feature was implemented.

The problem with this feature was that any time a student was inactive on their Chromebook for too long, or closed it, they would be logged out and all of the tabs they were working on would be closed. The student would then be forced to recreate everything that they were working on.

For a while, this issue persisted, to the general annoyance of student body. When Manor Ink brought the issue up with Superintendent John Evans, right then and there he suggested having a meeting about the issue so it could be solved. After sitting down with Evans and laying out the issue with the Chromebooks, the administration resolved the problem later that day. The logout feature was switched with a “lockout” feature, where open tabs would be saved and students just had to put their password in to restore their tabs.

While there are still some other issues with LMCS’s Chromebooks, such as allowing teachers to bypass website blocks, the fix showed the responsiveness of the administration, the power of student intervention and the press.