Parents Thought They Wanted Tech in Every Classroom, Now They’re Not So Sure
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My kids schools are 100% Chromebooks. This has been great for scheduling extracurricular activities and making their backpacks lighter. It really hasn't improved their ability to learn mathematics or English.
https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/why-bags-are-wrecking-...
(Also, if you're clever, you can do things like finding a web-app that lets you use them as a substitute for those vote-clickers that some university lecturers use to gauge pre-lesson knowledgeability.)
Unfortunately a lot of parents won't care, and the school system won't give them a choice either. However, it leads to shit like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
The ideal is BYOD. If all you really need is a web browser, then let parents and kids decide what to use together.
If you really give a shit about cheating use analog quizzes/tests. It's not perfect, but the old ways are easier to police.
These aren't the student's devices; they're enterprise-MDM workstations that the kids happen to carry around. Think of them as a computer lab that the kids don't have to go to; not as Personal Computers per se. They're probably logged into them with a school-issued GSuite email rather than their personal Google Account, too, and told to not use these computers for non-school activity. (I'm not intimately familiar with the Chromebook education initiative, but if it's anything like Apple's initiative with iPads, then that's how it's set up.)
And no, the school wouldn't ever be okay with not using Mobile Device Management; MDM is how they ensure that a classroom full of laptops all on a LAN together aren't spreading malware like the digital equivalent of a kindergarten in flu season; and how they ensure the devices don't get spyware installed onto them by someone else (some stranger; or someone's parents!) to steal kids' contact info and location details with the goal of kidnapping or worse.
I'd actually think that BYOD would be worse in such a case, as you'd have to contaminate your personal device with an enterprise MDM profile in order to get it on the network.
Better to just tell the kid that they can have a personal device, but they also have to have this school-managed device, and that they should think of them as separate things and not use one for the activities better suited to the other. (This also neatly solves the "school spy-ware" worry as well, because if the students are only doing school-work on their laptop and are just using their phones+ISP data plans to text/email/etc., then the school sees none of that.)
I was one of the kids who was a little disappointed when the first MacOS came out. Where was the command line? Where did I wrote code? The commodore64 did a lot more for kids who wanted to learn about computers, an affordable and highly hackable and programmable computer. I felt like the first Mac was a big step forward in terms of ease of use for the general consumer, but a step back from the AppleII in getting in there and really enjoying computing.
Chromebooks put more, not less distance, between a kid and what I consider to be the interesting things about a computer.
Think of it this way - google talks a lot about a critical skills shortage. Ok, so, would a kid who grows up using a Chromebook be more likely to develop these skills than a kid who uses a linux system, or Mac OS X? Or hell, even a windows system, at least it's relatively easy to get a bash shell working there.
Nah, let's face it, the future of google's workforce is not going to be found among the the kids using google's educational products. Bet you google execs and high up engineers most definitely have their kids learning on something else, and they probably avoid too much exposure to any kind of electronics for a longer period of childhood than google pushes out there in the classroom.
I, personally, see the value in those skills, but for students who are not interested in it, it is just an unnecessary hassle and a source of frustration. It's like saying that having an easily repairable, but not that reliable or user-friendly, car is a good opportunity to learn problem-solving and basic vehicle maintenance skills. As someone not interested in that, I just want a reliable device that will drive me in comfort and convenience from point A to point B without making me worry about having to fix anything.
Personally, I worry about having to fix something when I'm incapable of fixing it. That's why it stresses me out when my car or washing machine breaks. But true, that breaks all the time just because I can fix it with a trip to the hardware store.
The thing is... well, sure, easily repairable but not reliable isn't necessarily a trade off that needs to happen.
Google could have done what apple did with OsX, but at a realistic price point. An easy to use, affordable and reliable UI with astonishing power right beneath the surface, all based on Unix, in the hands of millions of school aged kids. This could have been the Commodore 64 or apple II times a thousand.
Instead, we have the Chromebook.
Note I deleted the last line which on reflection was excessive and not useful to the discussion.
I agree with you on the rest, however. I, personally, enjoy learning about computing by fixing stuff, hacking, etc. However, this won't hold true for everyone, and they shouldn't be subjected to this weird form of hazing with "we got through it, you gotta do it too, otherwise you won't learn all those computer skills (that you don't care about at all)!"
Reminds me a bit of some people in the US being almost religious about driving a car with a manual transmission. I get it, it is fun sometimes, and a pretty cool skill to have, but I am glad that most people in the US don't have to deal with that unless they want to. I had to learn it (because 99% of motorcycles still come in manual transmission only), but I do not think that manual is some life changing skill that needs to be learned by everyone. Those who need it will learn, those who don't will not, and it is a good thing we have this option. No need to force this on everyone.
That being said, no, I don't think we should give kids a terminal window and tell them to figure it out from there, but we should definitely be giving them computers that give them the opportunity to peel back the layers, and then we should encourage them to do so.
I agree with you on this one, but with one important caveat: it shouldn't be their primary driver/school work machine, it should be something provided by parents. I am all about letting kids figure stuff out and play around with the OS, but doing that on the machine that you use to submit homework, do your class scheduling, gradebook management, etc. is a recipe for disaster. Have you ever had cases where your machine became useless until you fixed it, because of some non-trivial symlinking or config screw up? Now imagine being a middle schooler who is already overstressed due to all the homework and other school stuff, but without enough technical and coping skills to deal with it.
In a similar vein, if I had a kid, and they were interested in learning things about cars, I would be absolutely glad to get them a shitty old beater car, appropriate tools, and look into working on that car with them. However, for their daily driver, I would heavily insist on getting them a less than 10 years old japanese economy car they can use on the daily basis or in case where something on their "learning car mechanics" beater went wrong. You make mistakes when you learn, and I wouldn't want their daily life to be handicapped due to making a mistake or two.
I.e., it isn't a programming-friendly OS vs. chromebooks, it is heavy backpacks filled with textbooks and notebooks vs. chromebooks. Don't mistake chromebooks for a computing tool, it is an everyday student things kind of tool that just happens to be served by a computing device.
As far as I am aware, chromebooks in education are provided by school districts, families aren't paying for it directly. You can always resort to "they are paying for it with taxes", but that would be the same for any non-chromebooks as well, except it would end up being more expensive (they won't be sold at as high of a loss as google can afford with chromebooks; count all that extra IT administration needed for non-chromebooks, adding a lot of costs as well).
>Was it really beyond google's capabilities to make this a more open, perhaps linux based environment?
It wasn't beyond their capabilities, it just wasn't a good idea for the purposes chromebooks were supposed to serve.
I installed GalliumOS, and I love it. It is a complete Linux environment (Ubuntu), and it easily meets my needs even if Firefox sometimes slows down a bit with Javascript-heavy web apps (I haven't installed Chrome.) My only complaint is the limited storage space.
Google may not ship Chromebooks with a customizable OS, but they and the OEMs don't interfere with end users' ability to install one (yet), and I really appreciate that the education market has created so much demand for machines with this sort of form factor.
Sandboxing this stuff away is in general a good idea for protecting "normal" users. People often want to install pirated games or whatever and that's abused as a vector to get malware onto those devices.
If that's not enough you can install entirely different operating systems and even bootloaders (if you want to).
Now for families that are voluntarily buying chromebooks for personal use, I don’t see them getting any value out of programmability regardless.
Or are you one of those people who think everyone should be forced to learn coding?
Perhaps beyond their better judgment. More open implies more ways to break.
I haven’t looked into it yet but it appears that my criticisms no longer apply to the current product. In blunter words, I had it wrong about chromebooks in 2019. It sounds like many of the tools I care about are still a little clunky, but now a possibility, and will likely get better over time.
https://alex.miller.im/posts/data-science-chromebook-pixelbo...
It was a definite plus. Kids could hop onto any machine that had a browser (even the older Win7 PCs) and continue to work. Does iOS even allow multiple logins or was that whole educational push a few years ago just FUD against Google? Doesn't matter, everyone has moved on anyway.
The whole "OMG Chromebooks!" cry was drowned out when the cost savings was figured out, because the alternatives are $500 keyboardless iPads that can't be shared and monitorless $500 Dell PCs that can't be transported.
The kids are now in secondary ed and use Docs/Slides/Classroom for their classwork. Remote collaboration is dead simple (again, more iCloud FUD from Apple), and nobody EVER forgets their classwork at school since it's always a login away.
Lightening backpack load and improved scheduling are pretty good outcomes, as long as learning hasn't gotten worse. Why would learning ability (for basics like the 3Rs) be significantly improved using tech? The students are still the same after all.
I think you are correct that the concepts these students are learning probably aren't improved too much by technology, but there are tons of ways in which students can learn and collaborate in real time which wouldn't be possible without devices like chromebooks.
She says that I'm not wrong per se but that it's still a good thing overall for the kids. I think they should just let the kids run around outside instead (7th and 8th grade have no recess in her district, and PE is only one or two days a week...)
Wait what? Is there some difference in notation since recess (in Finland it's 15 minutes between each class and usually 30min after lunch) is like absolute must for kids of any age. There's even recess in upper secondary school but the lessons are 75 minutes usually instead of 45 minutes as in comprehensive school.
Are you really saying that it's directly from class to another class? That's crazy!
I don't know what's wrong with Americans either, and I am one.
Do you really mean there are no breaks in between? Or you mean there's only 10 minutes to get to the next room? It cannot be 0 because people can't teleport and I assume not everything is in the same classroom.
'Gifted' students and those on the honor roll are often given a reprieve from this vicious cycle. But the majority are subjected to it.
I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad.
But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game).
But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.
In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.
We also biked to school ourselves unattended. And we had maybe two half-days a year spent on standardized tests, one test each. The insanity of American schools is a more recent phenomenon.
It can vary between school districts though. Generally the wealthier and whiter the neighborhood/city/school, the better the kids will be treated. Although it's pretty shitty even at most of the "good" ones.
What you are reading isn't much of an exagerration though. It is a good reminder of how insane it sounds to you, because IT IS INSANE.
And you say we seem to be "fine" in the US? Have you even been paying attention to what's going on in the US? I don't know how much of it can be blamed on the eductional system... but you know, probably a chunk of it. The schoolchildren and former schoolchildren of the US are decidedly not "fine" though. This place is fucked up.
In Hungary we only have standardized tests for school admissions, both high school an university. (so you write one test and can apply to many places with the score). Otherwise every two years there's the PISA international test, but that's only for statistics, it isn't graded. All our other tests are just prepared by the teacher. Of course this means different schools have different standards, mostly depending on the percentage of Roma students. Where they are the majority there is not much learning happening and then non Roma families rather make their kids take a 1-2 hour bus ride to the next town.
But it's not generally the parents that are pushing them. Except maybe to the extent that parents want to know "How do I know if a school is good or terrible?" and someone can give them a "score" built in part on standardized tests...
I think (and this may not be a popular theory), it is in large part a disfunctional reaction to the extreme social inequality in the U.S.. Going back to the days of legal segregation, some people had _terrible_ schools others had good schools. Even once we have legal equality, somehow some schools are still pretty terrible. If only we had an 'objective' way to determine which schools are effectively teaching, and reward those doing well and punish those doing poorly...
In fact, though, it's still the poor and not white who bear the brunt of all this terribleness. I know someone who is a teacher who was at a meeting where the principal was explaining why it was "only fair" to the poor students to have every minute of the day regimented and disciplined, because they too deserved the best education... while knowing the principal sent her OWN kids to a "sudbury school"!
Elementary school gets recess, don't remember how long. Middle school I don't remember very well; high school you just get lunch (but are perhaps not restricted to one room to have it, at least).
http://www.rockfordschools.org/high-schools/rockford-high/da...
The breaks in my district are 6 minutes long, with five 71-minute class periods. You can't socialize much in 6 minutes, you have to get from one class to the next, which might be a 400m walk if you want to stop at your locker - walking through a dense crowd of people, with a 15 lbs backpack. Or 200m if you bring a backpack of 40+ lbs of books and binders for all your morning or afternoon classes, stopping by your locker just at lunch. Lunch is 24 minutes long somewhere before/in the middle of/after 4th period. "Zero hour" at the top of the linked schedule is if you want to take an extra class, eg. to accomodate state requirements like civics and communications while also taking year-long AP classes, performing arts classes, or doubling up on science/math electives beyond the minimum.
If you have an average morning bus arrival at 6:50, and add a sport that goes until 5:30PM, and are quick enough to have get your homework done in just an hour each night, it ends up being about the equivalent of a 60-hour work week...pretty rough on a 14-year-old child. But we're a Blue Ribbon Exemplary School! Top 250 in the nation! In spite of the flaws obvious in the schedule above, if my family is going to be in an American school system, and especially if we want them near extended family, friends, and my job, we're not going to do too much better than this: I bought a house in this district so my kid could get the same great education I did.
But I guess it would appear in the school records if they didn't go to school. At least in Hungary the state takes away certain benefits if the kid regularly doesn't go to school and it can also have other consequences as well, like having to repeat the year.
But to some degree it should also be part of growing up. When we were 15-16 and all of us commuted by public transportation, a few times we skipped the first class and went to a pub instead. And I didn't become some lowlife gangster, I completed a CS degree with good results.
Parental attitudes changed more than anything else. Coddle kids longer, trust them less. That seems to be the current trend.
And no, there's no bussing for zero hour. You have to drive yourself to school, ride with a parent, or find a carpool setup for either of those.
Do you (parents in general) think this is normal and good for a child? I had thought homeschooling was lunatic, but if this is the alternative, I can see why people would choose it.
In Hungary in high school we had 45 min classes and 15 min breaks for the first 3 breaks, and then 10 min breaks. We had usually 7 classes per day, so school went from 8:00 to 14:30, usually. Then lunch if you want.
In primary school we had a break where it was mandatory to go down to the schoolyard to be outside in the fresh air (but then do whatever you want).
When I was in the same school district in the early 90's, we had a 42m recess period at least 3 days a week and either a 42m or 20-25m study hall every day.
For my kids, we bit the bullet for private school. There are some things I don't like about private school, but I'm unwilling to make my son a subject of whatever bullshit social experiment is being conducted. You're only young once, and we live in a world where you need to be top of your game.
In the US school is typically 8AM to 2PM. There is very little time between classes and the kids have to scramble for the next class. I also found out our son has been missing lunch because the cafeteria line queue is too long to accommodate all the students.
In the US schools attempt to do more with less they have stripped any joy out of the educational experience. No recess, fieldtrips, or extracurriculars. And arts and sciences are a pale comparison of what they used to be. Labs and lab equipment has been replaced by online videos and virtual learning.
Here's actually a somewhat recent news on the matter (in Finnish https://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/aivotutkija-valitunnit...) and here's https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g... a somewhat normal (though day length variation seems to not happen much in this schedule, it does happen all the time in that you can have shorter days by either going to school later or leaving earlier, too) timetable for an 8th grader.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UC_7A7Zpe-FEK__blB6g...
Students with wealthy parents will do well; tutoring, travel, summer camps, all help with education and growth.
The finest English teacher I know has taught for the vast majority of her career and her methods have a thoroughly proven record of improving writing and reading in students from every walk of life. She has a doctorate in education now, with a dissertation on improving learning methods and and numerous students over her 25 year career have contacted her and thanked her for specifically her methods and pressure that got those students to succeed, not just in her class, but in college and the future.
There are many, horrible teachers who would do better in a career where they are kept far from influencing the next generation, but this woman, with her majority-teaching-career, is not one of them, full stop.
My finest computer science teachers never did anything but teach, either. At the high school and collegiate levels. Same with my favorite college English teacher.
I think a more effective route is to regularly fire the bad teachers, so they can’t harm students with their poor guidance.
Let's try and break this extreme opinion down into some components.
What is "valuable" to you? Why would working outside of teaching help someone be better at teaching their subject matter? Is this statement for teachers across all levels, or just grade school? How is it that gross generalization opinions are constructive, but empirical personal experiences providing evidence that contradict that generalization aren't?
"empirical personal experiences" - this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical.
Was my statement a gross generalization, sure. But;
-most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees,
-there has been a steady devaluation of degrees,
-many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college,
-wealthy families pay for extra tutoring, and camps, (wealth has always been the best factor in determining academic success),
-in order to teach about something you need to know about something.
If eduction was supposed to be a meritocracy, its failed. It's a systemic failure, no one person is responsible, no one person can save the educational system. Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years. Realists and pessimists have long concluded that the purpose of the educational system is to work as a babysitter, it's cost effective.
>> this is wrong, personal experience are not empirical. All personal experience is, by definition, empirical. The definition of "empirical" is here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empirical. You're literally wrong.
>>most grade school teachers have graduated with very liberal arts degrees Citation Needed. Is "Elementary Education" a "very liberal art"? Who is more qualified to teach 6-10 year olds if not someone with a Masters in Elementary Education (generally the minimum requirement) in your opinion?
>>many are young when they get hired as teachers, out of college Your proposed solution doesn't address this. The 4/1 just means that teachers will now face an additional difficulty, finding a 2nd job to have "real world experience", in order to teach 7 year olds how to read and write.
>>in order to teach about something you need to know about something. Of course. But there's millions of students spread across tens of thousands of school districts. IDK where we're suddenly going to find all of these domain experts willing to take lower pay and miss out on career advancement in exchange for educating children.
>>Economy and class matter more than education, is the lesson of the last 30 years.
I'm sorry, are you only 30 years old and therefor unaware that this is the lesson of the course of human history? Social and economic factors are your majority factors for everything, but that feeds directly into education by allowing for school choice (either by sending to private schools or moving into well funded, higher performing public schools). The fact that you're lumping the "realists and pessimists" together on who has decided what school actually is, shows your contempt for the system. I get that, you feel it's broken (so do I actually, but not at all for the reasons you do). I just find your idea that "all elementary school teachers are bad at their job" to be founded on poor/lacking data and a complete misunderstanding of the specifics of primary education.
Admitting that economy and class determine educational attainment, negates any argument that any specific pedagogical techniques are helpful.
It took her a few years after getting her credential to see the dysfunction in the system. Old teachers were unable to cope with the young children who need young, able bodied teachers able to deal with their very normal behaviors. Principals would get upset that my mother would allow the kids to go outside, even when recess wasn't scheduled. She had the highest marks in the school when it came to testing, but was denied tenure, because her methods of getting the job done were at odds with her principal. There was a large parental showing at the board meeting, and she ended up being put on administrative leave. Some of her students -- who no longer had to take ritalin to deal with his 'excessive' movement while she was their teacher -- ended up back on the drug. This was all in a lower-income district with a history of terrible results.
From that point on, my entire family has shunned public schools. My brother and I were sent to private schools, and my mother always votes against every issue the teachers union supports. They enable the behavior. They encourage, ineffective, anti-competitive practices which harm students, and enable lazy teachers.
(1) - https://www.deere.com/en/gator-utility-vehicles/full-size-cr...
Local elected officials form a school board, which may then have various committees composed of board members, administrators, teachers, and parents.
The Congress gives away money with high-level strings attached. States set curriculum guidelines (or micro-manage the curriculum), set rules and standards, and provide lots of money. School boards make local budget and taxation decisions and exercise other management functions that vary by state and district.
The "administrators" are appointed management who are employees of the school. The superintendent (aka the CEO/commissioner) of the district usually has an individual contract with the board. The rest of management is usually civil service or appointed management/confidential employees. In some states they may be unionized to some degree.
In the rural school I went to in the 90s, there was a superintendent, CFO, elementary/middle/high school principals and assistants, and about a dozen clerks/secretaries. Today, the district has fewer students, but has added a compliance officer, CIO, special education deputy superintendent, and a bus superintendent.
"Administrators" is generally a generic term used to refer to non-teaching individuals involved in the running of the education.
Who those individuals are is highly varied though. Education is controlled at the state level in the United States, not the federal level[1]. So what you end up with are completely different ways of running/managing things. So state-level bureaucracy has it's say in things. Then there's a state-level department of education with a secretary or commissioner (possibly elected, possible appointed), which manages high level details like enforcing compliance with legislation and certification and whatnot. But they generally further cede control to a local entity which is in charge of the school system for that locality (could be as small as a special district inside of a single city or as large as multiple counties). This is the level that manages local infrastructure, school zoning, shared services like IT, etc. This can also be led by either an elected or appointed figure, depending on both local and state laws. As long as they're acting within the bounds of what the state level legislation and department of education has dictated, the local district can run things how they see fit.
All of these layers are purely administrative, and performs no actual teaching (but likely and hopefully is staffed with people that come from teaching or education backgrounds). Then you get to the actual school level, where you'll have a few administrators that handle the management of that individual school, but is predominantly staffed by actual teachers. Administrators at this level are generally always hired, rather than elected individuals.
[1] While the federal government has no direct control of education, it indirectly wields influence by dangling money in front of states[2]. Which is what it does with practically everything else it doesn't technically have any jurisdiction of. States are free to manage education however they want, but the federal government provides states with subsidies for education that are tied to particular regulations or policies. States that implement and meet the regulations get free federal money, states that don't implement or meet them give up the associated subsidy and have to make up the funding shortfall with more state or local taxes. This has a trickle down effect where teachers ultimately have very little say in what or how they teach, since they have so many different masters they have to please to ensure their school stays funded.
[2] https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/education/k-12-educatio...
After the principal there is a 'district'. The district is made up of completely ineffective administrative staff who are unable to manage even the most basic office tasks. My mother once was offered a contract to teach in our local district, and the secretary sent a piece of blank paper for her to sign -- twice.
And then, there is the superintendent, which is an employee (unelected in most places). The superintendent is like the principal of principals. Of course, like the principals, he or she too is conducting unapproved research on the children, without any kind of oversight. Above that is an elected school board made up of people pushing their own agenda.
Oh, and then there's the teacher's union, a quasi-governmental body, which demands a premium of the teacher's salary (thus inflating the cost of hiring a teacher). Rather than advocating on behalf of teachers (which is their nominal job), they spend most of the money lobbying for leftist causes meant to enrich the union representatives. Of course the union has no accountability to voters and has a shadow structure to the school district, all of which has to be paid for out of your tax dollars, because why not?
That's just at the local level. There are then even more layers at the regional, state, and national level.
> There is every evidence that this was driven by administrators and tech companies hoping to make money selling software and devices.
> There has never been any evidence that giving kids screens helps them learn
No offense, but you made three fairly bold claims there with little sources to back them up. It's not that I disbelief any of your assertions, but refuting someone else's claim because it has no evidence and providing counterpoints without evidence isn't really helpful...
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-...
All these issues were at the forefront of the "discussions". The strategy to upsell technological improvements to struggling schools, was a simple way to by pass skepticism. Might as well try something new?
I don't remember specific "Powerful Educators" looking to boost student scores, via a massive monetary investment, but someone had to sign off. There were a few newsworthy failures and no demonstrable good...although it's a little early to tell. I found that my early exposure to computers when I was six, led in to my current career. So there may not be any conclusions for decades.
Other proponents included vendors like Apple (iPads for everyone in a Los Angeles school, lol) and politicians, who were either bribed or philosophically sold (if there's a difference). Again, this wasn't a scientific decision and one-off school trials are VERY difficult to get past entrenched interests like regulators and unions via equivalence challenges (ie if it's good enough for 1 school it's good enough for all, right? Oh so you're experimenting on these kids but not these?).
What are you basing those claims on? In particular, the claim that all parents share a single viewpoint and especially how you know that the administrators aren't responding to interest from a subset of parents who are enthusiastic.
The way I've generally heard this characterized is that things like smartboards or tablets are popular with donors & a subset of affluent parents who like visible cool things but not the basic support / dealing with poverty which actually matter for a lot of students. Want to guess which group is disproportionately represented in communications with school administrators and local politicians?
My dyslexic/ADHD daughter did a trial day at a private school with a "no screens in classrooms" policy. It was awful for her, because she's grown comfortable using text to speech, dictation, and other tools to do cope with the friction in her brain. My other kids benefit in different ways, they've all learned to do independent research way earlier than I ever did and know how to find answers to pretty much anything they think about.
None of our kids have access to Candy Crush or other gamble-games, though, so they tend to have healthier screen habits than their friends. All the quotes from parents in the article make it sound like they're helpless. I think that's an indication of just how bad tooling and education for _parents_ is.
But even when we didn't have chromebooks in every class, everybody in my grade used to go to great lengths to figure out how to play flash games, runescape, minecraft etc. on the school computers. I'm sure current students are even more sophisticated in distracting themselves now that chromebooks are assigned to each student.
Most technology seems to be used to detract from learning: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... rather than enhancing it. Obviously there are exceptions, like spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes. But focus and concentration seem to be in short supply, relative to technology.
My general belief is that gadgets are great for kids with the right boundaries, and what we're lacking is (a) parent / teacher experience managing those boundaries and (b) tooling.
In the end, they all came through it fine. I won't rattle off metrics of their normality, but they are doing fine, along with all the others of their generation that we came to know over the years. Being human they proved impressively adaptable in the face of change, even high-velocity vertigo-inducing change. As for my wife and I, we still don't know how much technology and information is the right amount, at home or in schools. In fact the only thing I think we learned on that score is how much we didn't know, how much we still don't know, and how terribly weak our ability to predict how any of this will work out is. Probably parents felt similarly 30 or 40 years after the invention of printed material, or radio, or phones. Regardless, the genie is well out of the bottle.
Can you convince me that any of those assertions is wrong? Pointing out that "YA fiction is literature" doesn't come anywhere close to refuting any of the above assertions.
Even in a for-kids/for-youth book collection, where we used to have Jack London, Jules Vernes, James F. Cooper, Alexandre Dumas and so on mixed with more specific children's literature; I looked at the current catalogue the other day: such authors have been erased, and the whole offer is now made of novelisations of Star Wars, novelisations of cartoons and novelisations of comics... Oh you can still find them in other collections, but those are a bit more, how to put it, distinguished/smart collections (and aimed at a bit older age); so that was quite a shock to browse the catalogue of the 'standard' kids collection.
Well, as opposed to, say, watching TV (or the somehow even more mindless content that’s on YouTube), do you really disagree?
Perhaps a bit more fringe: I think a lot of light young adult fiction has the nutritional density of popcorn and any perceived inherent good in reading those books is likely a product of publishing industry propaganda campaigns. Scholastic Corporation, I am looking at you...
But later on it definitely matters. I had this same struggle with my daughter when she was in middle school -- she got so many kudos for "reading so much" but the books were all filler. I tried many times to point out that books are just a medium and the content is key.
Back in the 1980s, just giving kids a computer (without also giving them a bunch of game disks/tapes/carts) would certainly teach them something, in that the only thing you can really do with this "tech" is to fiddle around/tinker with it until you learn how to make it do something you came up with. Just sitting around "being bored on" these computers can—and did—gradually build up a skillset in many of us.
There are still computers that are like this, of course. The Arduino comes to mind. There are also environments you could lock a modern computer down into that do the same.
As well, there are apps and "games" that teach you a ton just by attempting to understand the model behind them, which bored children will stumble into and then learn from under the guise of "wasting time at recess." (The best thing you can preinstall on a computer that a middle-schooler is going to be using is an interactive kinematics sandbox program.)
It seems apparent to most classroom instructors that most tech is a distraction, not an enhancement. Obviously exceptions should be made for disabilities and there are some uses—spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes can use tech effectively. But in most classes it's detrimental rather than helpful.
I think this is a core part of the problem. Gamification, perceived usefulness, and enjoyment are being used in lieu of actual learning gains. I believe, however there is too much focus on "enjoyment" rather than learning.
As an example, my research is on rote practice of writing code. Literally retyping syntax, because I believe the technical literacy is the foundation to conceptual understanding. This is no different than a cook, musician, athlete, even doctors. However, retyping syntax is not "fun". It's not "interactive". It's not meta-cognitive. It's drilling. But the responses I get are near bimodal. Some people fully understand the logic and others outright argue against it.
However, rote practice is (in my opinion) the first step to high-level learning. Meta-cognitive skills like self-explanation are great but only if you have the prior knowledges to utilize them. They should not be given to a pure novice; however, no one wants to admit to being a novice. Somehow, that's for children, but I'm an adult / young-adult / "big boy"! True novices should be given the chance to learn these lower level skills without feeling like its beneath them or treated as "lesser" than higher level skills.
I've come to a general, porous, leaky set of guidelines. The closer you are to black text on a white background (or white text on a black background), you're more likely it is you're doing something interesting. That could mean reading a novel or analyzing data with python or R or unix on the command line or in a relatively lightweight IDE. If lots of distractingly flashy colors and sounds are going on around you, then odds are you're getting sucked into the screen vortex, even if you aren't actually looking at a screen.
And like I said, porous. There are, indisputably, phenomenal comic books (ok, graphic novels) with great depth. Videos and movies can have tremendous artistic value. Those flashy images on a screen could be watching Citizen Kane. That black and white text could be 101 fart jokes. What the hell do I know.
But overall, I feel like the equation holds, sort of. If you're looking at symbols on a background, odds are this isn't the wrong kind of screen time, and it could be very intellectually enriching.
* Only creative / educational games (including minecraft), and those for less than 2 hours per day. They don't get games that are heavily optimized for addiction.
* No screens in their bedrooms ever. As my oldest got more of a social life, we noticed the drama of friends kept following her around and she never naturally escaped from it. Once we stopped letting her have her phone in her room her ability to deal with drama bombs improved drastically.
* No video apps at all for the younger kids.
Screentime makes it reasonably easy to enforce this stuff on iPads, and the original Screen Time (https://screentimelabs.com/) is even better on Android.
Something about the school procurement process that knocks all the nuance or subtlety out of the goals.
This issue with technology goes way, way back decades. Always there are promising trials, it works here and there, under the right circumstances, and so some school wants to roll it out broadly and it doesn't work as well. Then there is a rollback.
[edit] And I could say the same about software development processes.
The people authorizing the deals, administrators and school boards, aren't incentivized to improve outcomes, they're incentivized to make the people who put them there seem like they're doing something valuable.
If parents could choose the schools they were sending their children to, instead of being saddled with whomever the state has appointed to run a particular school, they'd pick schools for which evidence has proven better outcomes. Sure, they might be swayed by flashy tech, but as other comments have said the push for tech didn't largely come from parents.
> To Dr. Boyd, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, it looks more like a video game than a math class. She isn’t sure if the lessons are sticking with Jane and worries about the hyper-stimulating screen time.
I think gamifying school is probably a good idea. How many kids don't know the parts of speech, but have memorized the Pokedex?
For the books in the program you could choose to take a quiz that would effectively test whether you read and comprehended the content. If you passed the quiz, you'd get points based on how well you did on the quiz and how long the book was. Those points would add up and you could use them for prizes at the end of the semester.
I vividly remember how in Elementary School they had workbooks after workbooks of multiple choice analogies with words used within occasionally unexplained. They insisted it was all very important when we asked why so overboard. The real answer became obvious when the SAT was changed to have a writing section instead of an analogies one and they promptly vanishes into the void only to appear on standardized tests four questions a year at very most.
They didn't even have the honesty to say "It is used a lot for in important test."
From my perspective, it seems like a pendulum. On the whole, baby boomers didn't adapt to the advent of computers very well. However, they generally recognized their value, and provided access to the devices in a mostly unstructured way. Thus, their Gen X/millennial children are overall more technically savvy than they.
Now, those children are becoming parents themselves, and reflecting on the potential negative aspects of unlimited screen access, social media, widespread gamification, etc. on their own children. Providing the same unrestricted access to their own children may seem unlikely to produce the same results that they themselves experienced. Thus, alternatives like reducing or restricting access at home/school become more common/popular.
Perhaps the next generation will resent their parents' restrictions, or feel left behind technically, and swing back the other way?
B) I think you are confusing CS with programming/software engineering. They are related, but the "CS" class the post you are responding to suggested with nothing but a chalkboard would not have it's students ready for a job getting paid programming. (I don't mean this as an insult to you). On the other hand, the class in which you were learning MS Office probably wasn't CS at all. A class involving Python and Java might get someone more ready for a job getting paid programming, but may or may not be a CS class, depending on... if it includes any CS.
I wonder if these just correlate with political party or there's a more interesting pattern.
Before we had kids, I thought that was the most ridiculous opinion I'd ever heard. The closer our kids get to school age, the more reluctant I am to entrust them to the school system.
Probably just paranoia, I guess. But it seems like the majority of what I hear about schools anymore is how they have the same issue as the corporate world: being too focused on showing short-term gains instead of actually doing what is best over the long-term.
As someone who thinks that children should absolutely be learning programming as soon as possible, I don't really think that means they need brand new whatever every year (not implying that's what is currently happening). When I was growing up, we had incredibly old machines (in a computer lab, or sometimes a couple shared computers pre classroom), and I think this actually worked fine (perhaps better in some respects now -- since a "benefit" of an old Apple II is that its pretty focused on the one task at hand, and can't load up other things).
1. Replaces teachers / supervision.
2. Distracts students.
It seems like administrators are particularly interested in 1 for cost savings reasons, and are unable to solve 2.
We have two "model" teachers.
The old guard teacher who started their career before computers were in classrooms, those teachers utilize our technology to accomplish a task (block websites, etc)
The other model teacher is someone who welcomes technology into the classroom, they utilize the deeper functionality of our program, and normally have more than one technology of some kind running in the classroom.
Both are great teachers, they just use our product differently.
Adding technology cannot make up for a parent who doesn't teach their child study skills, good learning habits and places an importance on the value of education.
Parents should look at themselves if their child is not performing rather than put the blame on some tool like technology.
They are heavy, expensive, take up space, you can't search them etc.
However, I find it almost impossible to learn hard subjects from a PDF. Printed book is so much better. I wonder why.
I see no reason why school books cannot be made cheaply...
There's lots of cool things you can do to enhance learning with computers, like daily quizzes, discussion boards, etc. But replacing books is not one of them IMO
On the other hand, my kids are learning from PDF’s now, and once the lesson is over, they delete the PDF’s, so they have nothing to reference - and even if they were saving them, it’d be a challenge to try to organize them in any meaningful way.