Yeah. My kid still has pragmatic language issues, which means he can’t describe a lot of the things he understands. This is most notable for vocabulary which is low average on tests. What he can understand and what he can articulate are vastly different.
We’re working on it.
What is it about using screens that has to be explicitly taught or else kids won’t know how to do it?
There’s a multiple choice section and a free response section. Work is irrelevant on the multiple choice; just bubbling in the right answer. On the free response section, the bulk of the points are for showing your work. You don’t need to show all of your work, but there’s no way of knowing in advance which work will and won’t be worth points, so best to show all of it.
Thanks for the clarification. This is going to be sooner rather than later for my kid. At the rate he’s going I’ll be surprised if he isn’t doing calculus by 7th grade.
Whereas I never got that far in high school. 
I said “learn”.
(I’ll look back, I might’ve said taught, too)
But, the kid needs access to said device to learn it.
Lots and lots of kids don’t have access anywhere but school.
I say you put a kid in a chair with a device and they’ll know more than you in a couple hours, how to physically work it. Not necessarily safely without some adult intervention.
I can see where a child with some disability could get great use of knowing how to use it and navigating the big wide world.
With my speech impediment, I could’ve used a good texting device in school. Alas, none available at the time.
How much of the teaching material now really requires a computer to backend it?
Textbooks are fine, but by now I would have thought there would be high quality replacements that are fully interactive.
I have zero idea of what school level teaching looks like nowadays. But I would have imagined that for a lot of the core common subjects there would be significant competition to provide high quality end to end book replacements.
At university level it seems (at least during my recent dipping back) that textbooks are still a thing but paper versions are very rare. Most students use a reader or laptop. I’m not convinced this is a net positive. Setting open book exams becomes impossible, for one. I like open book exams. Makes it really hard for students that just coast or memorise stuff. Which is a net positive.