At my institution, all students are required to buy laptops. We face the same situation you describe: “so their students, who have no direction, use them for all the wrong purposes”. I must comment, though, that social activities are an important element of any online learning, especially since the face-to-face element is missing if some activities are done in distance mode.

I agree that the spreadsheet is a useful tool across all grades. Further to that, did you catch my Browsing Visualizations post? The key is to get students to manipulate and visualise data, so that they can extract some meaning from it.

It’s great that you are getting your students to do outliers and quadratic functions!

I’ve been compiling some websites about one-to-one programs and their advantages/disadvantages. It seems like people are on one side or the other with this issue. What the folks who don’t like laptops for all kids seem to have in common is a complete misunderstanding of the technology: they have no idea how to use these tools effectively so their students, who have no direction, use them for all the wrong purposes, namely social activities. Then these teachers speak out against them.

Although as a math teacher I can find myriad uses for computers in my classroom, I’m sure there are many others who can’t. There is one tool though that is appropriate for all grade levels: the spreadsheet. On many occasions, I have had my students investigate topics from means and outliers all the way to quadratic functions.