In many cases, the alternative is no tech at all (or very limited tech), especially for schools located in lower socio-economic areas. This notion of tech companies essentially giving away their products to schools in order to influence future adopters has been going on for 30 years or more. With that said, educators should be made aware of this reality and should be upfront with their students that tech alternatives exist.
I think the challenge is that it’s hard to compete with the large vendors on a full stack, turn key solution. It’s one thing for a STEAM focused specialist to pull together a disparate set of open source apps into a workable model but your typical teacher doesn’t have the time to do that and still focus on their day job. Most teachers need technical solutions that are integrated, work 99% of the time, and have a very simple learning curve (not denigrating teachers’ technical abilities, this is more of a time thing - they need to be up and running quickly)
I totally agree! My partner is a 7th grade science teacher. She is more competent from a technical perspective than most of the other teachers at her school and she utilizes Chromebooks, and Google Classroom to its fullest. She is really pleased with them as tools, because the alternatives are of such poor quality. Maybe I should go in and give a mini lesson on the privacy implications of using Google/monopolies in tech.
