Kids get ChromeOS and learn how to navigate their school's UI. They're not learning computing. They're given a math question which could have been on a piece of paper or in book.
This seems like a really narrow perspective on kids' use of computers in schools, but even if that's the case, it seems to me the solution might be to... teach them computing, not take it away. Or, we might recognize that there's lots of technology we don't learn the ins-and-outs of and yet that are fundamental to our lives, even if we could technically get by without it
Anyway, I would think that having a simple, locked-down OS at school is preferable than having a laptop on which they can do whatever they want, at least to the issue of being distracted in class.
Also, a related comment points out that not all is doom-and-gloom - surprisingly, schools can actually implement sane usage restrictions for laptops in class.
>Anyway, I would think that having a simple, locked-down OS at school is preferable than having a laptop on which they can do whatever they want, at least to the issue of being distracted in class.
This may be true, but even more preferable than this would be no laptop.
They still engage, possibly even more so, with the topic if it's setup and structured the right way. (It's all too easy for lazy teachers/schools to just shove work onto a laptop for the kids to do and then pay little attention, but this was also definitely true back in the days of work from books or sheets of paper.)
My 15 year old can touch type(*) at about 60wpm, knows how to browse the Internet and drive a search engine effectively, can create reasonable presentations using Powerpoint or equivalent, can create nicely formatted docs, is comfortable with spreadsheets, not be fazed by online forms or similar, has a basic understanding of cyber-security/safety, password security and password reuse, spotting scams, etc.
All of these are useful skills that my parents in their 70s struggle with.
Having a phone means they're able to keep in touch with their friends far more effectively than I was when I was that age. They can keep in touch with us (parents) much more easily. They can see how much money they have as they've got a banking app on their phone. They can check the weather themselves. They can check the train and bus times themselves.
I trust my kid to use the phone (and laptop) responsibly. In return they know that I will occasionally ask to check what they're doing just to make sure they're safe. I don't want to have to police it.
Back to the school bit, they could be doing Maths questions from a piece of paper or in a book, which they do do some or most of the time, but their engagement levels seem good when doing it on a laptop via Sparx or MyMaths or whatever. Plus things can be a lot more interactive on a laptop/tablet. Being able to tweak values/variables/functions/etc and see how things change in real time, that's laborious to do again and again with pencil and paper.
> They're not learning computing.
No, but most will have that option to if they want. My kid wasn't interested and so didn't choose Computer Science as an option despite being able to do various simple things in python. Their interests lay elsewhere (sport, music, etc).
* I remember watching when my kid sat down at my work computer and wasn't fazed at all by the entirely blank keyboard I use. There was just a "oh, that's cool" and off they went typing away.
