Shalini Ramachandran

What blew me away was the scale of YouTube viewing.

Google has trained its eyes on children in American classrooms as a major entry point for a lot of their software.

And the number one thing I heard as I talked to people was, oh, my God, my kid is on YouTube during class.

His grades were falling.

Her grades were falling.

There's problems with just how much they're being shown.

And then as I just started looking through the documents, it was more clear to me just how vast this issue is.

They talked about how children under 13 were the world's fastest growing Internet audience.

And we saw documents where it said YouTube was trying to close what they described as an 80 million hours per day viewing gap between school days and weekends.

And they're saying there was a quote in this that said increasing usage in schools Monday through Friday could decrease this gap.

So the company clearly saw children in schools as a way to increase their use of their products.

So Chromebooks first came into the classroom early last decade and the states embraced it to do their standardized testing.

So instead of having bubble sheets, they could do your test and then immediately see your grade and then that's it.

There are some Google executives who kind of had espoused this utopian vision of personalized learning for children in the classroom.

So, you know, your teacher could be talking and then like there could be a group here learning on Chromebooks at like their level.

But then this other group learning on Chromebooks at another level.

And then it's not like the teacher has to make sure all 30 kids are teaching to them at the same time on the same level.

So like that was one of the things that they really talked about.

This could really personalize education.

And what was in the Chromebook, just to be clear?