"The First One Is Always Free" Google Chromebooks and Students Sreen Time

As schools debate the merits of smartphones during school hours, the ABSOLUTELY should be rethinking how they manage the near monopooly of Chromebooks being offered to kids - massively subsidized by Google as an onramp to kid using Google Docs, YouTube, etc ad-infinimtum. Like any good dealer, the first one is always free. It’s the biggest onramp to new Google customers ever, and shows all the same risks as other screens.

“In Cambridge, where debate over the merits of screens has been especially pitched this year, school officials have batted around the idea of at least until 3rd grade.

Now a new study offers a glimpse, however limited, at the role screen time is playing in a child’s life during the hours when they’re at school, be it 6-year-olds tapping away on math games during class, or teenagers hacking their Chromebooks to text their friends.

It is just a small portion of the life of a child, who may spend hours a day engaging with a screen of one kind or another. It did not, for example, address the use of cellphones, a primary way many kids absorb screen-based content. Nor did it assess the district’s decision last year to ban the use of the phones during school days — and what impact that might be having on how kids use, or misuse, school-issued devices.

For some caregivers and district leaders, the results released this month are assuaging concerns that school is succumbing to mesmerizing tech at the expense of learning. For others, it most definitely is not.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/28/metro/cambridge-screen-time-report/