I hated lugging textbooks home, taking a chromebook home would’ve been much easier.
I agree about hating carrying textbooks around. But now as a parent (whose career is in software development and automation) with my kids having everything digitized … I hate it. Crappy platforms. Logins not working. Having to click back and forth all over the place to go between the assignments and the source material. Kids are just learning to ctrl-f for a keyword to find the answer instead of reading the surrounding context and memorize little fragments from a study guide to scan for in multiple choice online quizzes and tests. It absolutely sucks. Go back to pencil and paper please.
I am not a kid anymore and all my books are ebooks.
I used to buy physical copies because I just live the way how they feel in my hands and the new paper smell until I ran out of space.
Reality sucks.
. This is the future. Some people hate it when I point it out but it is the truth. This is a digital age. Time moves forward with or with you. I encourage my nieces to get used to ebooks
Instead of chromebook, get a big, hig res tablet with a stylus. It is a saver!
I’m not lamenting technology being a thing. I’m lamenting how its adoption is hindering learning basic stuff like writing out all your work in pencil for math class. If everything is multiple choice quiz, they learn to work through the problem step by step or have the chance for partial credit by showing they understand the overall process even though they made a minor arithmetic mistake.
Sure, a tablet and stylus for free-hand writing can solve that. But why add that additional cost of providing that to every student in primary school instead of just using pencil and paper for it?
A while back some people compiled a list of good/bad textbooks at our university:
https://ubcwiki.ca/academics/textbooks#✅-course-hall-of-fame
Generally, open source ones have nicer interfaces. The proprietary ones do various things to limit access and squeeze out profit
BTW chromebooks have been deemed illegal in school use in Denmark because of privacy concerns
A lot less books. Some still do use books but not as much as the previous generation.
Yes, there are textbooks. They can’t bring them home because they stay in the classroom and are shared between different classes.
The kids do have Chromebooks, though. They can access materials online.
On one hand, I like the material being online. As a kid, I would often forget a book at school or I would forget to bring a worksheet or not write down what problems I was supposed to do. So it’s nice that my child can check all their online portals in case they forget something.
On the other hand, it’s not always implemented great. Particularly with the math homework, submitting answers can be harder than just writing the answer. (At one point, they had the kids draw the answers with their cursors. Painful if you’re using a track pad. It is better now at least.) Having to check so many places for assignments can be a bit of a chore. The integration between the Google applications and other platforms is a bit clunky and breaks occasionally.
If you ask me, if you gave me a choice between the old way and the new way, I would choose the new way every time. It mimics how I am assigned work at my job anyway, and it is easier to keep up with assignments I might have otherwise missed.
Former education IT contractor, it’s majority chromebooks now, with physical books generally being either stationed inside classrooms or held in long-term storage “just in case”. (USA west coast classrooms)
The main issue is that Chromebooks, especially ones used for public schools, are largely “built to cost”, and are locked down with frustrating amounts of bloatware and software/network restrictions, and are usually beaten to shit by the previous year’s student body (about 40% of the chromebooks I looked at had to be sent to “reclamation” because they were not worth repairing nor were usable for spare parts).
When I was going to high school, I bought a second hand chromebook off eBay and installed a Linux distro (forget which one now), and it was an amazing experience, with a much easier time accessing materials and completing assignments compared to my peers. These machines really can be great, but if left to the school’s requirements for being “locked down”, and handled by careless people, they’re guaranteed to suck.
Backpack for me was a lot lighter in high school than middle school tho XD
In germany its still textbooks
I hate that we’re indoctrinating kids into Google with Chromebooks instead of giving them Raspberry Pis.
“We” aren’t. Google made durable Chromebooks available to schools super cheap, and schools (being famously underfunded) bought them. This is happening the way Google wants it to.
How exactly would RasPis work for kids in schools, though? It’s hard enough to make sure kids have their chargers, let alone needing to pack a monitor and keyboard.
Make the monitor a part of the desk, have the kid bring a RaspPi with a keyboard+trackpad combo.
Done.
