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.
As a math teacher I make booklets per unit. They’re almost entirely based on a textbook or two, but they’re all typed up by me in latex.
It works well — one small booklet to haul around at a time. There’s also room for them to write notes as well as work out practice problems. And an answer key, depending on the class.
I don’t know what the actual right answer is, but those frustrations you’re talking about are actually things that those kids are going to have to deal with moving forward into adulthood so operating in that context isn’t necessarily bad.
That doesn’t mean learning how to interface with textbooks shouldn’t also be a thing though.
Yeah, that’s the balance required. I think it’s important to learn how to operate in an analog world first and not until after appreciating how to navigate the world to use more modern techniques.
Calculators were not allowed in my math classes growing up and I think that allowed better understanding because I learned processes. I hated it and snuck my calculator at times regardless, but come test time I had to do maths by hand.
I see the same problem with control + f and now with generative AI. I fear a growing brain drain from not learning foundations properly. I believe the use of advanced tools should be earned.
That doesn’t mean learning how to interface with textbooks shouldn’t also be a thing though.
For sure they need to learn modern technology. But I don’t think they’re learning the actual source material as well this way. All of my childrens’ teachers feel the same.
I am not a kid anymore and all my books are ebooks.
I used to buy physical copies because I just love 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
They were briefly, but that was reversed on 2024-08-01
In my country we still use textbooks. Its true that carrying just one laptop its easier but kids must also learn how to write and read on a real paper. I personally think that Introducing too much screens and technology in schools is a mistake. It comes at the expanse of handwriting and it risks to cause addition problems. Then, companies like Google does not really respect privacy rights of their users and this is one reason more for me to not make my kids stay away from them.
This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t teach how to use technology at school. It must be done in a way to make kids aware of how a computer/smartphone really works.
You can still do homework on paper after you get the handful of questions on the chromebook. My teachers loved saying “your homework was only 5 questions”, yeah and I have to lug the whole textbook for that.
A lot less books. Some still do use books but not as much as the previous generation.
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.
I mentioned Raspberry Pi because they’re the best we’ve got in terms of being education-focused, but don’t get hung up on form-factor. The point is that schools should be using real Free Software, not proprietary corporate shit.
IDGAF if it’s a laptop like a Pinebook or old OLPC, or if they resort to putting Raspberry Pis in a computer lab and not taking them home. Any of those are infinitely preferable to fucking kids up with locked-down corpo propaganda devices.
The idea that public schools (i.e. the government) are essentially forcing kids to enter into contractual agreements with Google, conditioning them that that sort of thing is okay before they’re even old enough to understand what it means, is fundamentally wrong and unacceptable. And that’s on top of how the locked-down software stifles actual understanding of computers.
Yep, totally agree. But anything that isn’t subsidized by the company making it will be way too expensive for schools to buy in large enough numbers for their student body, so until someone is willing to foot the bill for the $220 Pinebooks over the $99 Chromebooks, I think we’re kind of stuck.
Make the monitor a part of the desk, have the kid bring a RaspPi with a keyboard+trackpad combo.
Done.
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