What do I do about the laptop my kid's school handed them?

The thing that changed in August 2026

On August 10, 2026, Google began rolling out Gemini in Classroom to students of all ages, and according to Google, access to the Gemini tab in Classroom is on by default for teachers and students of all ages.

On by default – not offered, not opted into, not announced to you.

Access is controlled by whoever administers your school’s Google account. There is no teacher-level switch, so the teacher standing in front of your child may have had no say in it and may not know it happened. There is no parental notification in the announcement at all. If a school wants it off for under eighteens, an administrator has to build a separate organizational unit and turn it off there.

So a reasonable thing to assume is that your child has a conversational AI app inside their school account right now, and that nobody told either of you.

What to actually ask

Three questions, in an email, to whoever runs IT rather than to the class teacher, since the teacher probably cannot answer them:

Which AI tools are enabled on my child’s account? Who can see what my child types into them? Is there a way to opt my child out?

Ask in writing – not to be difficult, but because the answer tends to be more precise when somebody has to type it, and because you will want to know what you were told when it changes again.

If the answers leave you wanting more explanations, asking the school for reduced tech use is its own decision on this site, with the asks sorted by how far you want to go.

When the answer comes back, pass it on to your child instead of filing it. Kids need to understand what rules are for; this argument is addressed at more length under AI and schoolwork.

Where the evidence points

It is tempting to say these machines are bad for learning. The research does not support that, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise.

The best pooled evidence on giving every child a laptop found small positive effects on achievement in English, writing, math and science, in the region of 0.16 standard deviations. Small, and much smaller than things like tutoring, but positive. Only ten studies were solid enough to pool, so it is a thin base. It is still the opposite of the claim that the devices alone are making children worse at school.

But the more interesting finding is about what the device replaces. Across 54 studies and more than 170,000 readers, comprehension was reliably better on paper than on screen, and the gap widened over the years even as screens improved. It is worst for informational text and worst when the reader is working against the clock, which describes most reading a school sets.

Basically, the laptop is more or less fine as a laptop. But it’s a poor substitute for a book, and a school that moved its reading onto screens without saying so has traded away something measurable for something convenient.

That is a question you can ask, and it will likely be received better than a general objection to technology, because it is specific and there is evidence behind it.

Why these machines are everywhere

Chromebooks are in schools at the scale they are because they are cheap to buy and cheap to administer, which are procurement virtues rather than educational ones. It is worth being clear-eyed that this is a purchasing decision that happened to become a pedagogical one.

It has consequences beyond the classroom. Denmark’s data protection regulator examined how student data reached Google through these devices, concluded there was no legal basis for all of the purposes involved, and ordered 53 municipalities to change what they were doing. The order came from a regulator with enforcement powers, and its subject is data; learning was never the question. Both things can be true: the device is adequate for schoolwork, and the arrangement around it deserves more scrutiny than a purchase order gets.

What is still yours

Not much of the device. Quite a lot of the surroundings.

Where it charges is yours. Whether it goes into a bedroom is yours. Whether your child understands what the AI agent inside it actually is, and why it agrees with them so readily, is entirely yours, and is covered in why it acts like it likes you.

For the devices you do control, every lever is on the device settings page.

And the reading is more yours than it feels. A child who does the set reading on paper is still doing the schoolwork. Evidence shows this is a more effective way to learn.