By Tech Powered Dad | July 25, 2013
UPDATE: My Chromecast Review for Teachers has now been posted.
Even in the midst of getting ready for the big book release today, something caught my eye yesterday that I couldn’t pass up doing a post about. If you missed it, the Google Chromecast was announced yesterday. The Chromecast is a device that should have existed a couple of years ago. It did, in fact. It was called the Apple TV, a device that let’s you beam content from your iPad, iPod, iPhone, or Mac to your television. I have an Apple TV and it works flawlessly, but I hate that it locks me into the Apple ecosystem. I want to be able to beam stuff from my PC to it, and I can’t, at least not without doing a lot of painful software workarounds that never seem to work very well.
I know many teachers are already using an Apple TV to present to their students from their iPads. The Chromecast should make that process substantially easier. The Chromecast will work with Android and Apple mobile devices, PC’s and Macs. My friends have heard me get on my high horse about the lack of a device like this on more than one occasion over the last year, and I’m pumped. The Chromecast is small and doesn’t require a separate power source. Teachers will be able to take it with them to any room in the building that has an HDTV or LCD projector with an HDMI port. And at $35, it is a fantastic deal, so fantastic that it’s already back ordered 4 weeks.
I’ve posted more of my thoughts in the video below. You can share yours in the comments below or over in the comments on YouTube. I’ve ordered a Chromecast and plan to review it when it arrives.