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Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

The immediate rebuttal I can think of is of course you need a Chromebook; your school is now vendor locked to Google's platform. They did this by offering deep discounts to their cloud offerings.

The point about writing is a good one that resonates with me. I grew up in the age where typewriters were dead, we would outline on paper, and then do drafts/final revisions in the computer lab. I can absolutely see why going straight to digital removes a lot of inefficiency... but I'm just still not convinced it couldn't be handled by shared machines. Having robust dedicated machines, even still in the form of a laptop, could be part of the classroom.

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I think the big issue is whether you give all the kids a laptop or not. If you don't, some of the kids won't have a computer at home. How are they working on, say, a writing project, then? Only at school?

The well-off, computer-savvy parents will buy their kids a laptop and make sure you can log into the school system so that they get the same working environment at home, whether it's Google Classroom or anything else. That paper you started in class, show it to your parents, and keep working on it at home. It seems like a huge advantage if some kids can't do that.

Once you're giving all the kids a laptop, it doesn't really matter whether it's a Chromebook, it's just the cheapest way to do it, and it's good enough.

I think that writing projects should be done in school while students have access to their educational resources, yes. This is purely my own experience so there's a huge grain of salt, but I have to believe that learning how to compose an essay should be iterative with the educator instead of being reactionary. The concept of writing a paper and handing it in for a grade only to be told you haven't met the criteria is wild to me. I can't remember any good paper I wrote that I actually wrote at home. Most of the time it was in class with the ability to ask the teacher questions.

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