Add time tracking for time tracking with every other task.

There’s plenty to criticize Google over. It isn’t necessary to make stuff up or misinterpret or exaggerate.

I wouldn’t put a lot of stock into this video. It conflates different things that were deployed separately years apart and used differently. I’m not willing to waste more of my time, but just looking at the rest of the video titles and graphics, the source seems suspect and prone to sensationalizing for attention.

First, the mention of cost is deceptive because Google Suite for Education was free when initially released (as the fundamentals tier is today) for qualifying schools (and basically every public school qualified). Google Suite for Education wasn’t treated by every school as a competitor or replacement to the Microsoft Office Suite. It was complementary. The initial benefit wasn’t Google Docs or Sheets. It was the free student and instructor Gmail and Drive storage accounts, allowing students to save Word documents to the cloud and share them. That Google Docs was a decent alternative to Word was useful when not every student could afford a computer with Microsoft Office and any computer with a web browser could use it, so Macs and PCs were complementary, not competitive, devices.

Google Classroom is different than Google Suite for Education, so conflating them as the video did is odd. Google Classroom is the learning management software like Canvas, Blackboard, or Brightspace. But it’s not really marketed as an alternative to them with the same features because it wasn’t intended to disrupt their markets. Classroom is more appropriate for K12 and the expensive LMSs are more likely to be found in higher ed where institutions can afford the higher licensing fees.

I won’t defend Chromebooks for advanced uses, but they weren’t intended to be full replacements for laptops, so you don’t even have to. The video presents this realization of the limitations of Chromebooks on the part of the educators as a failure of Google rather than the technology needs advancing over time.

Like with anything else when it comes to technology, different needs and use cases will have different solutions. There isn’t one operating system, piece of hardware, cloud suite, or mobile device that is best for everyone’s needs.