7 ms·

My kids are in middle and high school, and they all have school-issued 13 in chromebooks. None of them have print text books, they are all online. I HATE studyi

My kids are in middle and high school, and they all have school-issued 13 in chromebooks. None of them have print text books, they are all online. I HATE studying with them, because of this. It is a nightmare to try to read a physics or math textbook; there is so much space taken by chrome, the book UI, etc, and the book usually displays full screen. Or, you zoom in, you can see 1 paragraph and half a figure, and can't turn the page. Then, you switch tabs back to your homework, also digital, and can't view the book. God forbid I show them how to tile the windows side by side, but even if you did, the book would be even smaller, and the hw questions run off the side and don't wrap. It is unbearable. I resort to digging out my 20+ year old college engineering and math textbooks for physical references. The kids don't seem to mind it too much, but it is all they have ever known.

manishsharan 2y ago
Glad to know I am not the only parent who feels this way. On a personal note, I am one of those people who highlights sections of text books using different coloured markers and scribbled notes on the margins. During my final exam time, my revision of materials was very efficient. I am not sure how to teach my kids these skills.
- lugu 2y ago
  You can try to teach them to use a good pdf reader. At work there are a lot of Google doc to review. I always convert them to PDF so that I can have private annotations, named bookmarks and highlights of different colors (I can even diff between two versions). This way I am building a collection of PDF I can locally search. On this topic, computers are great to make flashcards. Instead of the paragrahed notes, when learning material, I am taking note in the form of short Q&A using markdown flashcards. Works great for me. Easy to review efficiently, easy to extend. This said, I am not sure this is adapted to kids. Hope you share your skills to your kids.
  - reflexco 2y ago
    What's your good pdf reader of choice? And do you use any software to organize your collection, or just the filesystem?
    - elashri 2y ago
      Not the same person but I would suggest using zotero for this purpose. This is one of the best use case of zotero (try zotero 7 beta). Combined with its iPad app you will find it can tick all your requirements.
      - halgir 2y ago
        Massive +1 to Zotero. And 7 is out of beta now! I recently went back to school and started using Zotero again. Reading and annotating books and papers on iPad, and then having access to all of my notes when writing on desktop is such a simple but amazing feature.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      On Linux, I use zathura (but I rarely annotate my PDFs and I use my iPad for that). On macOS, I used Preview (it was good enough) and PDF Expert (Not the subscription version) for editing pages and outline. On the iPad, I begrudgingly use Documents (by readdle). My PDF are managed by Calibre, but I export various subsets to the file system, so I can find them easily (on the network).
      - umbra07 2y ago
        I highly recommend trying out sioyek (as a zathura replacement). it has a bunch of features that make it even more suitable for consuming technical papers/textbooks - such as a significantly faster search & index, an auto generated table of contents, highlights, and portals.
    - umbra07 2y ago
      sioyek. its featureset is specifically focused on digesting textbook/academic articles/technical papers.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    > use a good pdf reader.. markdown flash cards Ever had the experience that your favorite shoes or watch is discontinued by the manufacturer? It sucks because you’re back on the consumer treadmill again, wasting time and money on things that aren’t as good and struggling with an annoying distraction that previously did not exist while you try to find something that works for you again. Software churn is just like this, only much worse. It should/could have been different, but it’s not. So no, I don’t really think we should take away all books, buttons, and knobs that offer a reasonably consistent user experience and replace everything we can with software and tablets. At least not until software learns to behave. Reading is as basic as tying your shoes. Would you really want SV PMs in charge of revolutionizing the shoe-tying experience every quarter, or dropping updates on you that change the place you’ve always stored your shoes?
    - chrisandchris 2y ago
      Exactly. It was perfectly fine, I loved it. It worked very well. They took it away, now I have to re-learn how to do it what I already knew with somethibg that I also have to pay for. Sometimes we should just keep things as they are and stop looking for the next thing.
      - photonthug 2y ago
        Relearning is fine if that’s on the way to a new stable state, but I just don’t see that happening. The fact that people are discussing the best pdf reader after like 2+ decades of widespread usage, or the fact that signing a pdf often means rebooting into a different OS or using a cloud service that just wants a look at what kind of stuff you’re signing just totally destroys the idea that this tech is working for us. Further, does anyone believe that pdfs are going to fix something like textbook costs? You will still pay too much for something that you don’t really own now and cannot share or loan out, etc. Savings for the publisher or distributor cabals are not going to find their way to end users, or if they do then this will certainly be a temporary situation. They already know how much they can charge and get away with it, so… I’m far from a Luddite, but just know that tech is great to the extent that it gets out of the way and lets us focus on things we care about. Corporate tech is the opposite though, because it always wants engagement, feeding, maintenance. PDFs and chrome books that empty out your backpack might look like a convenience for students but who really benefits? The people that push Chromebooks get a captive audience of tax payers and children who are future android fans, the distributors that can empty their warehouses and fire a forklift driver, etc. Business as usual.. everyone should think critically about it when someone is telling them “these changes are for your own good”.
trueismywork 2y ago
I have this problem right since i got my first tab during ny bachelors. Given how expensive books are, I have had temptation to just buy 3-4 10inch kindles and wing it. Also, it's very important that kids use their hands to write even if they don't actually turn in handwritten work. The act of even just doodling while thinking has been shown to be extremely beneficial
- r2_pilot 2y ago
  Just out of curiosity, have you heard of the Remarkable Paper Pro? I just got one and it's decent at the writing experience. Probably even good. But currently it's basically only for writing, you can export PDF or png to an email or their cloud. You can write on imported pdfs as well.
  - delusional 2y ago
    You'd have to be pretty well off to afford it as a student. I'd consider just using the campus printer to print whatever material you need. Or borrow the books from the library.
    - r2_pilot 2y ago
      I know; I was fortunate as a student to have a Gateway convertible(yay complicated hinge mechanism) laptop with a 4 year warranty. It was okay with notes (I did really love OneNote but portability of those notes was not good), and right before the end of the warranty period the hinge failed so they replaced it entirely. It was actually more expensive than the rm paper pro and I would relish the opportunity to have it back then. Granted, it was also a full Windows laptop too, which the paper pro is decidedly not.
jajko 2y ago
You describe cheaping out for vastly inferior solution compared to what we had for centuries. Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on. Every one of us has slightly different memorization / comprehension techniques to grok foreign text and concepts within, and this crappy cheap new tech diminishes most of them. For quick overview why not, but for deeper studies this is bad, very bad. Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently and even here on HN many celebrated is as some sort of progress, so manufacturers aligned and are happy to save on better quality controls to keep their margins fat and juicy. Who cares about some focus or safety or long term reliability studies, look at that shiny glaring screen!
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently Do they? Why are physical controls back? It seems like car manufacturers just mindlessly jumped on what they thought was a fad, without ever bothering to test out their own cars.
  - mannykannot 2y ago
    I think you are right, together with the opportunities for cost-saving and cheaply-implemented upselling. And it is not as if physical controls are ipso facto better. I have driven a number of cars with physical controls that are hard to find and distinguish between, and which function modally.
    - groby_b 2y ago
      Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that. Especially in situations where you need to use touch to maintain visual focus elsewhere.
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
Anyone here know how it is in the UK? My kid will be starting school soon, and this terrifies me.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  There have been reports on the BBC about some schools going completely screen-free, occasionally from parents' pressure. Good luck!
kiloshib 2y ago
I recently took a CS101 class that used ZyBooks for the textbook and absolutely hated it for this very reason [1]. The "reading" was basically a bunch of mandatory checkbox exercises that turn into a slog through a bunch of slow-loading prompts that were just "Click Next" to receive confirmation that I had read the info in the prompts. Absolutely miserable experience all around. [1] https://www.zybooks.com/ https://www.zybooks.com/
Sakos 2y ago
Books are better in book form for one simple reason: Spatiality and tactility. Skimming, skipping pages, marking and jumping between different parts of the book. These actions are all extremely easy, intuitive and convenient with a paper book. There's no replacement for digital books. Using a mouse means you're no longer interacting directly with the medium and even if you do use a touchscreen, digital books aren't designed to be used or interacted with in any sane way.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Paper books have excellent UI, far better than ebooks in most respects. I wish ebooks at least came close to matching them, because the damn things are bulky and heavy.
andyjohnson0 2y ago
One of my children is a maths undergrad (UK) and all their texts are on-line too. He's in a minority in that he uses the library and borrows books. Many of his cohort don't. On one hand, I remember how costly textbooks were and I'm glad he doesn't have that. But I still have some of my student textbooks and its interesting to flip through them and see old margin notes, and consider what has and hasn't changed over thirty years.
Sunspark 2y ago
Your old textbooks are probably better too. I remember when I was taking high school chemistry, the then-current textbooks were awful with garish boxes of blocks of colour taking up half the page, font changes, screaming blurbs, etc. I went to a store and bought the previous older edition of the textbook which was still the same material but without the fad of making everything visually distracting. It is very refreshing to just be able to read a normal flat white page with normal black, blue and red ink.
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  Yeah. I haven't seen much in the way of modern textbooks but what I have seen tends to be full of garbage. Back when I was in school I couldn't stand used textbooks because they would contain someone else's highlighting and I found that very disruptive. I hate predigested garbage! We are not alone in that. My wife has some reference books in Chinese that I believe date from the 80s. They are printed on some rather cheap materials. She was trying to find some new ones--and has failed completely. I can't read them, let alone evaluate the usefulness, but she was appalled at what she found and continues to use her taped-together stuff.
wslh 2y ago
I've found that printing can help a lot in these situations. While you can't always print everything, math notes and scratch work are still much easier on paper, no digital solution has fully replaced that yet! The article is focused on reading, but I recall previous discussions on the neurological aspects of writing and motor control, where much of our brain is linked to muscle control and dexterity [1]. [1] "Effects of Physical Activity on Motor Skills and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: A Systematic Review" (2017) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2017/2760716 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2017/2760716
analog31 2y ago
Out of curiosity, does the Chromebook have a connector for an external display? But yes, trying to help someone with anything computer related when they're on a crappy laptop display is... trying.

manishsharan 2y ago

Glad to know I am not the only parent who feels this way. On a personal note, I am one of those people who highlights sections of text books using different coloured markers and scribbled notes on the margins. During my final exam time, my revision of materials was very efficient. I am not sure how to teach my kids these skills.

lugu 2y ago
You can try to teach them to use a good pdf reader. At work there are a lot of Google doc to review. I always convert them to PDF so that I can have private annotations, named bookmarks and highlights of different colors (I can even diff between two versions). This way I am building a collection of PDF I can locally search. On this topic, computers are great to make flashcards. Instead of the paragrahed notes, when learning material, I am taking note in the form of short Q&A using markdown flashcards. Works great for me. Easy to review efficiently, easy to extend. This said, I am not sure this is adapted to kids. Hope you share your skills to your kids.
- reflexco 2y ago
  What's your good pdf reader of choice? And do you use any software to organize your collection, or just the filesystem?
  - elashri 2y ago
    Not the same person but I would suggest using zotero for this purpose. This is one of the best use case of zotero (try zotero 7 beta). Combined with its iPad app you will find it can tick all your requirements.
    - halgir 2y ago
      Massive +1 to Zotero. And 7 is out of beta now! I recently went back to school and started using Zotero again. Reading and annotating books and papers on iPad, and then having access to all of my notes when writing on desktop is such a simple but amazing feature.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    On Linux, I use zathura (but I rarely annotate my PDFs and I use my iPad for that). On macOS, I used Preview (it was good enough) and PDF Expert (Not the subscription version) for editing pages and outline. On the iPad, I begrudgingly use Documents (by readdle). My PDF are managed by Calibre, but I export various subsets to the file system, so I can find them easily (on the network).
    - umbra07 2y ago
      I highly recommend trying out sioyek (as a zathura replacement). it has a bunch of features that make it even more suitable for consuming technical papers/textbooks - such as a significantly faster search & index, an auto generated table of contents, highlights, and portals.
  - umbra07 2y ago
    sioyek. its featureset is specifically focused on digesting textbook/academic articles/technical papers.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > use a good pdf reader.. markdown flash cards Ever had the experience that your favorite shoes or watch is discontinued by the manufacturer? It sucks because you’re back on the consumer treadmill again, wasting time and money on things that aren’t as good and struggling with an annoying distraction that previously did not exist while you try to find something that works for you again. Software churn is just like this, only much worse. It should/could have been different, but it’s not. So no, I don’t really think we should take away all books, buttons, and knobs that offer a reasonably consistent user experience and replace everything we can with software and tablets. At least not until software learns to behave. Reading is as basic as tying your shoes. Would you really want SV PMs in charge of revolutionizing the shoe-tying experience every quarter, or dropping updates on you that change the place you’ve always stored your shoes?
  - chrisandchris 2y ago
    Exactly. It was perfectly fine, I loved it. It worked very well. They took it away, now I have to re-learn how to do it what I already knew with somethibg that I also have to pay for. Sometimes we should just keep things as they are and stop looking for the next thing.
    - photonthug 2y ago
      Relearning is fine if that’s on the way to a new stable state, but I just don’t see that happening. The fact that people are discussing the best pdf reader after like 2+ decades of widespread usage, or the fact that signing a pdf often means rebooting into a different OS or using a cloud service that just wants a look at what kind of stuff you’re signing just totally destroys the idea that this tech is working for us. Further, does anyone believe that pdfs are going to fix something like textbook costs? You will still pay too much for something that you don’t really own now and cannot share or loan out, etc. Savings for the publisher or distributor cabals are not going to find their way to end users, or if they do then this will certainly be a temporary situation. They already know how much they can charge and get away with it, so… I’m far from a Luddite, but just know that tech is great to the extent that it gets out of the way and lets us focus on things we care about. Corporate tech is the opposite though, because it always wants engagement, feeding, maintenance. PDFs and chrome books that empty out your backpack might look like a convenience for students but who really benefits? The people that push Chromebooks get a captive audience of tax payers and children who are future android fans, the distributors that can empty their warehouses and fire a forklift driver, etc. Business as usual.. everyone should think critically about it when someone is telling them “these changes are for your own good”.

trueismywork 2y ago

I have this problem right since i got my first tab during ny bachelors. Given how expensive books are, I have had temptation to just buy 3-4 10inch kindles and wing it. Also, it's very important that kids use their hands to write even if they don't actually turn in handwritten work. The act of even just doodling while thinking has been shown to be extremely beneficial

r2_pilot 2y ago
Just out of curiosity, have you heard of the Remarkable Paper Pro? I just got one and it's decent at the writing experience. Probably even good. But currently it's basically only for writing, you can export PDF or png to an email or their cloud. You can write on imported pdfs as well.
- delusional 2y ago
  You'd have to be pretty well off to afford it as a student. I'd consider just using the campus printer to print whatever material you need. Or borrow the books from the library.
  - r2_pilot 2y ago
    I know; I was fortunate as a student to have a Gateway convertible(yay complicated hinge mechanism) laptop with a 4 year warranty. It was okay with notes (I did really love OneNote but portability of those notes was not good), and right before the end of the warranty period the hinge failed so they replaced it entirely. It was actually more expensive than the rm paper pro and I would relish the opportunity to have it back then. Granted, it was also a full Windows laptop too, which the paper pro is decidedly not.

jajko 2y ago

You describe cheaping out for vastly inferior solution compared to what we had for centuries. Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on. Every one of us has slightly different memorization / comprehension techniques to grok foreign text and concepts within, and this crappy cheap new tech diminishes most of them. For quick overview why not, but for deeper studies this is bad, very bad. Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently and even here on HN many celebrated is as some sort of progress, so manufacturers aligned and are happy to save on better quality controls to keep their margins fat and juicy. Who cares about some focus or safety or long term reliability studies, look at that shiny glaring screen!

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently Do they? Why are physical controls back? It seems like car manufacturers just mindlessly jumped on what they thought was a fad, without ever bothering to test out their own cars.
- mannykannot 2y ago
  I think you are right, together with the opportunities for cost-saving and cheaply-implemented upselling. And it is not as if physical controls are ipso facto better. I have driven a number of cars with physical controls that are hard to find and distinguish between, and which function modally.
  - groby_b 2y ago
    Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that. Especially in situations where you need to use touch to maintain visual focus elsewhere.

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

Anyone here know how it is in the UK? My kid will be starting school soon, and this terrifies me.

red_admiral 2y ago
There have been reports on the BBC about some schools going completely screen-free, occasionally from parents' pressure. Good luck!

kiloshib 2y ago

I recently took a CS101 class that used ZyBooks for the textbook and absolutely hated it for this very reason [1]. The "reading" was basically a bunch of mandatory checkbox exercises that turn into a slog through a bunch of slow-loading prompts that were just "Click Next" to receive confirmation that I had read the info in the prompts. Absolutely miserable experience all around. [1] https://www.zybooks.com/ https://www.zybooks.com/

Sakos 2y ago

Books are better in book form for one simple reason: Spatiality and tactility. Skimming, skipping pages, marking and jumping between different parts of the book. These actions are all extremely easy, intuitive and convenient with a paper book. There's no replacement for digital books. Using a mouse means you're no longer interacting directly with the medium and even if you do use a touchscreen, digital books aren't designed to be used or interacted with in any sane way.

vundercind 2y ago
Paper books have excellent UI, far better than ebooks in most respects. I wish ebooks at least came close to matching them, because the damn things are bulky and heavy.

andyjohnson0 2y ago

One of my children is a maths undergrad (UK) and all their texts are on-line too. He's in a minority in that he uses the library and borrows books. Many of his cohort don't. On one hand, I remember how costly textbooks were and I'm glad he doesn't have that. But I still have some of my student textbooks and its interesting to flip through them and see old margin notes, and consider what has and hasn't changed over thirty years.

Sunspark 2y ago

Your old textbooks are probably better too. I remember when I was taking high school chemistry, the then-current textbooks were awful with garish boxes of blocks of colour taking up half the page, font changes, screaming blurbs, etc. I went to a store and bought the previous older edition of the textbook which was still the same material but without the fad of making everything visually distracting. It is very refreshing to just be able to read a normal flat white page with normal black, blue and red ink.

LorenPechtel 2y ago
Yeah. I haven't seen much in the way of modern textbooks but what I have seen tends to be full of garbage. Back when I was in school I couldn't stand used textbooks because they would contain someone else's highlighting and I found that very disruptive. I hate predigested garbage! We are not alone in that. My wife has some reference books in Chinese that I believe date from the 80s. They are printed on some rather cheap materials. She was trying to find some new ones--and has failed completely. I can't read them, let alone evaluate the usefulness, but she was appalled at what she found and continues to use her taped-together stuff.

wslh 2y ago

I've found that printing can help a lot in these situations. While you can't always print everything, math notes and scratch work are still much easier on paper, no digital solution has fully replaced that yet! The article is focused on reading, but I recall previous discussions on the neurological aspects of writing and motor control, where much of our brain is linked to muscle control and dexterity [1]. [1] "Effects of Physical Activity on Motor Skills and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: A Systematic Review" (2017) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2017/2760716 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2017/2760716

analog31 2y ago

Out of curiosity, does the Chromebook have a connector for an external display? But yes, trying to help someone with anything computer related when they're on a crappy laptop display is... trying.