The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
My first year teaching I was encouraged to do everything on the chromebooks, because the district wanted to save on printing costs.
If you have 100+ students, and are limited to 500 pages/month (I could print 500 more, but had to purchase my own paper…), you have to use the laptops.
Also, when parents and students increasingly treat attendance as a suggestion, keeping up with paper assignments is hellish. There were days I showed up with 1/3 or more of my class missing - with online class work, I at least could say “the work is available online.”
The technology is a problem, but it’s a problem that’s arisen because class sizes are out of control and admin has zero idea what is going on in the classroom. It’s a bandage that’s been left on so long the skin is starting to get infected around it.
Get Google out of our schools
Parents make some good points. AI chatbot integration is too much. Its something that can actively stall learning. You need to learn the skills at school yourself to better use tools like AI. We also should avoid over exposure from screens too. Useful skill for our world، but some pen and paper can help eye strain or over stimulation.
As a teacher, I already have to teach half the kids how to even use a computer because they only ever used phones and tablets. And I am not going to be able to teach them programming without laptops.
I’ve opted out of the school Chromebooks for my kids because they have computers running real GNU at home. We should all be outraged that schools are pushing a locked-down surveillance/content consumption-only platform, as opposed to something like a Raspberry Pi that actually empowers kids to have real computer literacy.
