Recently, more and more people have noticed they can no longer access their personal Gmail accounts on their Chromebooks, and when you try to add it back, Google is not allowing it. This has sparked confusion among the students who have been affected by this change.
This has made it so that you only have access to school accounts and are not able to put any account other than your own on the computers, even other school accounts. Note that the sign-in block happened after Google got blocked from some students’ Chromebooks resulting in them needing to be factory reset. While this might be a coincidence it caused the situation to be more apparent to people.
When students were asked about getting their accounts taken away, they had various reactions.
Some students had no idea that this change was happening in the first place. This indicates that this change is a more gradual process, and it has not yet happened to everyone.
Some didn’t care all that much about the change. When sophomore Kaya Kroehnke was asked if they thought this was an overstep, she said, “not really, I mean it’s not too drastic.”
On the other hand, some students don’t like the change at all and think it was unnecessary.
“I think that removing the personal accounts was a mistake because there wasn’t really any way for the kids to misuse their personal accounts because so much stuff is blocked, and some kids did need their personal accounts,” sophomore Alexa Kiepe said.
When asked about why personal accounts are disappearing, principal Mr. Nelson said, “Our central office makes all decisions regarding Chromebooks, technology, and app access. I didn’t know that they had made a change, but this is not alarming because our technology department frequently updates security protocols.”
An attempt to contact the director of technology operations and director of instructional technology was made, but neither responded.
An outcome of this situation is students wanting to buy their own computers to replace the one given to them by the school. This would allow them to have more online access, and they get their personal accounts back.
Without personal accounts, people have noticed that access to content has been limited even more than it was previously. Sites, YouTube videos, and more are now blocked from viewing. Even resources people have been using for school have been taken away.
“The other day, I was trying to watch a video on a topic related to a class and the video was restricted along with five or six others from my school account,” Kiepe said.
Even if this has affected you or not, the general opinion seems to be that this was an unnecessary move on the school’s part.
