I don't get it. How is Company A offering better than company G here? Seems biased to me.
No, this is not what she says.
The biggest head-scratcher was the Missouri one: "My voice to text was being stored as well as any search my kids did, and I could say ‘sure my daughter was searching on Google,’ but my phone uses Safari. When I used my texting app on my iPhone, it recorded my voice, as well as typing out the words and saving it on my Google Drive,” said Brette Hay, the Ely’s daughter and a teacher at Pershing Middle School."
My son's in 2nd grade and just started using Chromebooks and iPads for enrichment activity in class. IMO, it's fantastic. It is incredibly powerful tool at this level for math practice, and some reading/english enrichment stuff. If a school is eliminating books or something wacky like that, that's another story.
People who think computers bring some great magical benefit for everyone to everything are delusional. In many cases iPads or Chromebooks are just a fancy (and often worse) substitutes for pen and paper.
Standardized testing has nothing to do with the medium used.
There is also no point in teaching an 8 year old the tools used in today's digital economy. Not only will today's tools be obsolete by the time they're 18, the kids would've picked up all the required tech skills by just playing video games and figuring out ways to watch movies for free and what not.
On the other hand, writing, sketching, craft works and sports will help develop motor skills as a child grows and hopefully lead to a healthier life that isn't addicted to a screen all the time.
If standardized testing had nothing to do with medium then how is the parent comment measuring performance of the medium?
Letting kids figure it out on their own sounds like digital abstinence education.
Most people will agree spending years learning cursive italics ultimately ended up being useless. Personally writing with pencil and paper as a child was painful due to hand cramps and no one could help teach me how to hold the pencil without causing these cramps. It turned me off of writing for much of my childhood. Plus we were poor so I'd use the pencils until they were a nub because I might not get more, and asking neighbors for pencils chronically was embarrassing.
Funny you say Chromebooks are a waste, but then want kids to do arts and sports at school. Those aren't free programs. Can't kids learn those motor skills outside of school? How do we judge performance gains of these extra-curricular activities? Also those sports should all be non-contact. Football and soccer have been shown to literally lead to brain damage.