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New York Times
How Google Took Over the Classroom
Debate… Knowledgeable Citizens or Skilled Workers
By Natasha Singer
The tech giant is transforming public education with
low-cost laptops and free apps. But schools may be giving Google more
than they are getting.... CHICAGO
— The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here
with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill.
In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a
Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where
teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing
program, and began composing essays.
Looking up from her laptop, Masuma Khan, then 11 years old, said her
essay explored how schooling in ancient Athens differed from her own.
“Back then, they had wooden tablets and they had to take all of their
notes on it,” she said. “Nowadays, we can just do it in Google Docs.”
Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest school district in the United
States, with about 381,000 students, is at the forefront of a profound
shift in American education: the Googlification of the classroom.
In the space of just five years, Google has helped upend the sales
methods companies use to place their products in classrooms. It has
enlisted teachers and administrators to promote Google’s products to
other schools. It has directly reached out to educators to test its
products — effectively bypassing senior district officials. And it has
outmaneuvered Apple and Microsoft with a powerful combination of
low-cost laptops, called Chromebooks, and free classroom apps.
Today, more than half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school
students — more than 30 million children — use Google education apps
like Gmail and Docs, the company said. And Chromebooks, Google-powered
laptops that initially struggled to find a purpose, are now a
powerhouse in America’s schools. Today they account for more than half
the mobile devices shipped to schools.
“Between the fall of 2012 and now, Google went from an interesting
possibility to the dominant way that schools around the country” teach
students to find information, create documents and turn them in, said
Hal Friedlander, former chief information officer for the New York City
Department of Education, the nation’s largest school district. “Google
established itself as a fact in schools...
Read the rest of the article at The New York Times
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