Prepare Chromebooks for distance learning at home

Many schools limit Chromebook sign-in to accounts within their domain to prevent personal usage during the school day. When sending Chromebooks home for distance learning, consider letting students use their personal accounts on their own time - either by using Device off-hours to let users sign-in with their own account after school and on weekends or by removing sign-in restrictions entirely.

For details, see the Device off hours and Sign-in restrictionsettings.

When you set account restrictions, consider whether to allow guest browsing on managed ChromeOS devices. Guest mode lets anyone use a Chromebook without an account. When the guest mode session is finished, all data from the session is automatically deleted.

For details, see Guest mode.

Many schools using Chromebooks as shared devices choose to erase all local user data after sign-out to maximize disk space. If you’re sending devices home with students, you might consider maintaining local data to provide a more efficient 1:1 experience for students that are using the device exclusively.

For details, see User data.

Many school devices are restricted to school networks only. If you’re sending devices home, be sure to remove restrictions so that students can connect to their home network.

For details, see Restrict networks and network interfaces.

Many school devices are restricted to school printers. When sending devices home, you can remove printer restrictions so that students can connect to their home printer.

For details, see Native printers management.

In addition to bookmarks, you can pre-load startup pages in the browser to ensure that high-priority content, such as a student’s class page or Learning Management system (LMS) homepage, is front and center when they sign in.

For details, see Pages to load on startup.

Students at home might not have access to many of the resources and tools that are typically available in the classroom. You might be able to fill some of those gaps with apps, including graphing calculators, digital notebooks, drawing tools, and publishing tools.

The Chromebook App Hub is a great resource for educators to find high-quality classroom apps (and supplemental resources) that are optimized for Chromebooks in schools. All of these can be provisioned to student devices using the Admin console. Some even use Google’s new app licensing system for easy purchase and deployment of seat licenses.

For details, see Automatically install apps and extensions.

If you want to enable Android apps on devices, see Guidelines for deploying Android apps on Chromebooks.

The most common way for students to try to bypass school restrictions is to powerwash devices and sign in with their consumer account - especially if they’re away from school and direct supervision. You can easily prevent this by enabling Forced re-enrollment. Devices are automatically re-enrolled in your domain and adopt your device settings if students powerwash them at home.

For details, see Force wiped ChromeOS devices to re-enroll.

Many schools post a digital code of conduct in their classrooms as a regular reminder to students of rules and expectations for device usage. For e-distance learning days, you can set a custom wallpaper for student accounts displaying their code of conduct as a regular reminder at home.

For details, see Device wallpaper image.