Chromebooks in schools today are invaluable resources that both students and teachers use in order to make the classroom a place of knowledge and learning. However parents are now starting to have second thoughts about the prevalence of technology in the classroom.
In the classroom, chromebooks are more prevalent than ever and now parents are beginning to request a way to opt out of the chromebook based learning with many parents citing how students can bypass a school’s website restrictions and how many students are using AI on their assignments.
Schools argue however that chromebooks have become a necessity in classrooms with one district in California saying, “Our curriculum is delivered the way it’s delivered and part of that curriculum is done with electronic devices… We’ll limit as much as we can… but we can’t have a room for 20, 30 kids who want to opt out and the rest of the school is operating differently.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, schools across America started to turn to chromebooks in order to teach students remotely from their homes. However, after the pandemic ended, the chromebooks stuck around as a tool to enhance student learning. However, some parents say that students are relying on chromebooks a little too much.
Chromebooks are a vital part in classroom learning allowing students to do work that they could not have done with pencil and paper. The access to technology allows students to learn and solve problems more efficiently. Chromebooks are also an improvement for teachers as well. Sites like Google Classroom make it easy for teachers to organize and assign work to students, who in turn have an easy time completing the assignments.
Schools and technology are moving hand in hand, but there are still people who do not want their children to learn off of chromebooks. One parent in a NBC article related students using chromebooks to letting students smoke tobacco.
“Screen use feels like tobacco used to be,” said (include attribution after the first sentence to break up the quote). You know kids used to have rooms they smoke in at school before they realized how bad it was years ago. I feel like my kids are being forced to smoke cigarettes during the school day, but then they’re also sending a pack of cigarettes home with them too.”
However, this vastly overestimates what chromebooks are doing in the classroom. Right now, they are a tool to further learning not distract away from it. Taking chromebooks away will also interfere with things like state testing as they have all transferred to being online. Similarly, AP tests are also done on the chromebook now. If we were to take them away schools and states would need to rebuild their system from the ground up.
If parents are concerned about what their children are doing with the Chromebooks, they can always set at home limits for their children but taking this action is on the parents not schools.
An ABC article said, “Parents would be able to impose more filters, and students wouldn’t be able to go on Youtube when they walked in the house.”
Schooling is an ever changing process and we need to learn to accept technology in the classroom and not push it away. If students and teachers can adapt to learning the new system and use it to enhance their learning, then so can parents.
