You talked. We listened.

Teachers Have Great Ideas!

We love hearing from our customers, and we use your suggestions whenever we can to improve our services. A suggestion came up recently that has made us look at our Chromebooks packages and decide to make some changes.

The story goes like this. The purchasing agent for a school district in Texas placed an order for several of the original Samsung Series-5 Chromebooks back in April 2012. During implementation, the technology instructors found them to be great devices for their students and in September, 2012 the purchasing agent called Newmind up again to order a bunch more Chromebooks as well as some charging carts.

The catch? During the lapse between these two orders, Google had announced the much faster and sleeker Samsung 550 Chromebook, and it was these that the purchasing agent requested for the second order. What the purchasing agent didn’t know was that the tech instructors in the school district were consistently using the VGA dongles, included with every Samsung Series-5 Chromebook, to connect to powerpoint machines, etc., which Samsung had decided to not include with the new Samsung 550 Chromebook.

So, when the second order of Chromebooks arrived in early October, Vicki, the head of technology instructors for the district, called us up wondering where her dongles were. I explained that Samsung had discovered that most Chromebooks users had found them to be of little value so they were not being added to the 550 Chromebooks.

Needless to say Vicki was bummed by the news. We talked about it for a while and she completely agreed that having a VGA dongle for every Chromebook wasn’t really that useful and understood their decision. She did have an idea for us though.

Vicki’s suggestion? For every charging cart we sell, include one VGA dongle so that each “mobile Chromebooks lab” has a way for teachers to connect to their power point machines. This way, no matter if purchasing agents, teachers, principals, or others are the ones actually placing the orders, the folks in the classroom who end up using the Chromebooks will have the tools they need to be successful.

All of us on the Chromebooks team here at Newmind talked about Vicki’s idea. We all love it and have decided to implement it. In those larger organizations that have different people making the purchases than who end up using the devices, we want to be that stop-gap to make sure that the end-users have what they need to be successful.

A big thank you goes out to Vicki in Texas for helping us identify this way for us to better help our customers. For all you other Newmind clients out there, we’d love to hear what you think are good ideas to make us better at meeting your technology needs, so don’t hold back.