Shalini Ramachandran

Like, what did it come with?

It's really optimized for Google software.

And what schools loved about it is its simplicity.

It's, you know, for your browsing the Internet, doing your research, writing your papers.

So students could use Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides.

The reason why some schools decided to allow for students to browse YouTube is that they saw this as sort of like a research tool.

Like, think of Britannica.

In a similar light, they thought that a student could go and, like, watch the I Have a Dream speech or find some historical material.

or be able to find some Khan Academy video that really easily explains an algebra problem.

So they thought that there was some utility to giving students that access.

Lots of schools spent their COVID aid on buying devices, many of those Chromebooks.

And curricula kind of changed to incorporate devices into the everyday lives of students after that.

Children were playing math video games.

YouTube became much more a part of technology.

brain breaks that they had from an early age.

Teachers would put on a reading of an author reading the book in a YouTube video rather than read the book physically to the class.

They would put on science experiments.

In talking to a lot of neuroscientists and people who study learning science, it's pretty clear in several scientific studies that learning analog is better than digital.

And there have been researchers who studied, you know, what is the difference between a child reading a physical book or being read to with an adult versus watching it on a screen, watching a book being read to them on the screen, which is kind of some of the use case for YouTube today in classrooms.

Some of the children I interviewed for the story talked to me about how they were just kind of entranced by watching these YouTube shorts on their devices.