Do kids these days even have textbooks, or is it all on Chromebooks?

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.
- The role of school is not (only) to prepare for a job, but to develop your knowledge, such that you can build further from there. In this context, a lot of online working environments are counterproductive: they break down tasks to minimal, destroy overarching meaning, erode concentration. They don’t sustain learning, they oppose it.
- 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#%E2%9C%85-course-hall-of-fame
Generally, open source ones have nicer interfaces. The proprietary ones do various things to limit access and squeeze out profit
I'm pretty sire that kids were always scanning for the keywords they needed. As the education system decays it's important to remember that it was always fundamentally flawed
- Scanning the page with your eyes and brain is still better than hitting ctrl-f and having it pointed out for you. You'll at least subconsciously pick up on other material on the page. And if they exact phrasing they're scanning for manually isn't found verbatim in the text, they'll still be able to find relevant parts of the reading.

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 germany its still textbooks

Yes, there are textbooks. They can't bring them home because they stay in the classroom and are shared between different classes.

The kids do have Chromebooks, though. They can access materials online.

On one hand, I like the material being online. As a kid, I would often forget a book at school or I would forget to bring a worksheet or not write down what problems I was supposed to do. So it's nice that my child can check all their online portals in case they forget something.

On the other hand, it's not always implemented great. Particularly with the math homework, submitting answers can be harder than just writing the answer. (At one point, they had the kids draw the answers with their cursors. Painful if you're using a track pad. It is better now at least.) Having to check so many places for assignments can be a bit of a chore. The integration between the Google applications and other platforms is a bit clunky and breaks occasionally.

If you ask me, if you gave me a choice between the old way and the new way, I would choose the new way every time. It mimics how I am assigned work at my job anyway, and it is easier to keep up with assignments I might have otherwise missed.

IPads at my kids' school. But they also get textbooks and paper sheets. So they get the worst of all worlds.

Former education IT contractor, it's majority chromebooks now, with physical books generally being either stationed inside classrooms or held in long-term storage "just in case". (USA west coast classrooms)

The main issue is that Chromebooks, especially ones used for public schools, are largely "built to cost", and are locked down with frustrating amounts of bloatware and software/network restrictions, and are usually beaten to shit by the previous year's student body (about 40% of the chromebooks I looked at had to be sent to "reclamation" because they were not worth repairing nor were usable for spare parts).

When I was going to high school, I bought a second hand chromebook off eBay and installed a Linux distro (forget which one now), and it was an amazing experience, with a much easier time accessing materials and completing assignments compared to my peers. These machines really can be great, but if left to the school's requirements for being "locked down", and handled by careless people, they're guaranteed to suck.

Backpack for me was a lot lighter in high school than middle school tho XD

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.
- Make the monitor a part of the desk, have the kid bring a RaspPi with a keyboard+trackpad combo.
  Done.

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.