My random thoughts:
Our middle school has chrome books, and both of my dds use Google Drive to upload/save/etc classwork. One dd uses an iPad in class but her teacher has the students keep all their docs on Google Drive. I also use Google Drive myself on various projects. Our experience with Google *Drive* (not the chromebook itself, but with storing and using files on Google Drive) has *not* been all that great. It's an easy way to share, and files are auto-saved while working, which is nice, but my dd has had school files disappear - enough times that she now is careful to download everything she creates on Google Drive so she has an extra copy in case her teacher can't find her final copy when she is ready to grade it (several times the copy that is available to grade when the teacher is ready to grade isn't the same "final" copy my dd left on the drive). This has happened with other students in dd's class as well, and I've found that when working with other people where I'm trying to upload files to Google Drive to share, everything will look a-ok after I've uploaded, but when the other person logs on from their computer they can't always see the files I've uploaded even though they are shared into the files/folder. Sometimes I log back in to check and can't see my own files... so I reload them... log back in a few hours later and voila! Two sets of the same files
Soooo... for me, I like the comfort factor of saving work on an actual laptop or iPad.
Re spaghetti's notes about sharing files between MSOffice software and Chrome apps - I don't work on a Chrome so I can't speak directly to it, but our family uses Macs at home as well as iPads, Chrome and iPads at school, and I've been able to easily open up the Chrome-generated Word format files in Pages on my laptop and my kids transfer text docs between the Chrome/Google Drive and their iPads easily... so I'm guessing their must be a way to do this without too much pain. Not sure exactly how the Chrome-to-PC would work, but Google Drive (export to Word/Excel format) to Mac(Pages/Numbers) works a-ok both ways.
It's just making sure you don't lose anything on Google Drive that's been an issue for us
polarbear
