Supervised Users in Chrome Beta

Google Chrome (Beta) released a great new feature to supervise other chrome users. Once you sign into Google chrome, you have the option to become a manager of other users who might use Chrome on that workstation. This option has potential for educational purposes. A classroom that has computers available for student use, can be set up with a generic chrome user, or Chromebooks that are used in education can be set up to provide better management of user sessions.

Google provides a great How-To tutorial. There are a few nice things about using supervised users in education:
1) You have better control over monitoring which sites students visit.

2) Managed users are defaulted in a "safe" Google search. Which means that most of the inappropriate content is filter out.

3) Managed users provides you with the opportunity, at the classroom level, to easily adjust what internet sites students can access.

Again, this tutorial from Google is a great resource.

As I explored using this setting, I plan to create one supervised user on my local classroom machine for students. This user will have limited access to some internet sites. There is an option to only allow users to navigate to approved sites. In my science classroom I would tailor these machines to be "Science" machines only, for that user. In other words, the would have access to the Google Apps Domain, and select other sites we use frequently. The other tweak I would make is to change the chrome shortcut will to open the supervised profile by default. To set up the shortcut. Follow these steps.

1) Right click the shortcut icon
2) click properties
3) in the Target box add this to the end of the command
--profile-directory="Profile 1"

(this image is from a linux machine, but the same switch works for mac and windows) 

The text in quotes is the profile you want to open. Usually "Default" is the first user's profile, which will probably be yours. Profile 1 would be the second user added, Profile 2 would be the third...and so on. For my own machines my personal account is Default, and the student supervised account is "Profile 1."