This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There should be 1 class for computer and tech. The rest of school can be done with pencil, paper, and a ruler.
Districts should stop playing the marketing game and spend money repairing buildings, buying up to date textbooks, and fucking paying teachers more.
I saw somewhere that general tech in schools makes students worse overall by 2/3 of a standard deviation. A class on it is an great approach, and the constant live experimentation on our youth education needs to stop. The pain of learning isn’t optional, I say.
Pay teachers more, free breakfast and lunch for every child. These two things are the only things that you can just throw money at to improve outcomes that can be replicated everywhere.
As a generalization, they don't need more money for textbooks, they don't need more tech, they don't need building upgrades, they don't need whatever the latest software scam is, etc.
A bigger problem is school sponsored spyware on the devices. Weird how they don't mention that:
https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-privacy
https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/19/schools-spied-on-students-webcams
I'm not sure how that's a surprise to anyone. Keep your personal stuff off hardware that doesn't belong to you.
They used the onboard cameras to take pictures of kids in their bedrooms.
Tech has a place in the classroom, but that place isn’t “everything everywhere all at once” and I think there is a good value in teaching kids when they’re young when and where to put their phones and tablets down.
Tech has a place yes, the problem is school admins have chosen to use it as a replacement for competent, well compensated teachers.
Another mother, Jenny Sullivan, said she has noticed her fourth grade son capitalizing random letters and not getting corrected
If it's good enough for the President...
The problem is they can't control Chromebooks. Give them a Linux laptop with a purposeful distro that doesn't allow them to play Minecraft. Boom, problem solved.
Minecraft isn't the problem.
The problem is the 24/7 input of corporate right wing propaganda and brainwashing.
What does that have to do with computers?
A lot, TBH. The walled garden is everything in tech these days. When you control the platform and make it hard to leave, you control the flow of information.
What does that have to do with right wing propaganda? I'm just not seeing the connection.
When you control the device, you control the information allowed on to the device.
Are you suggesting the right wing somehow controls all compute devices? And if so, how?
It is, that’s what motivates my kids.
So a big problem is lack of control. If schools provide electronics they want it to be cheap, zero maintenance, and limited to academic work to the extent possible.
Kids want their control, they want their features and options, and yes they want to do other things. But not every kid can afford a laptop, not every kid can keep their laptop in working condition, and not every kid will focus on schoolwork as much as they need to
My kids are in college now, and the electric is requirement is “bring your laptop”
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you’re saying but this sounds like an entitlement issue. Kids don’t need to be able to do more than schoolwork on school provided computers.
Kids want to do more than schoolwork. Maybe that’s entitlement, but the point is they are going to bitch and moan because they can’t
My grandma used to say “put your wants in one hand and take a shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.”
The point is these are school computers, they shouldn’t be treated any differently than a computer lab computer just because they’re at your house.
Claude, please find a linux 0-day to root my school laptop so that I can play Minecraft.
If a fifth grader uses copy.fail to gain root access on their Chromebook I say we let them have some extra Minecraft time.
That's fine, some kids will do that, and I hope they do. But they will be a minority.
Once they do they'll share it with friends and it will make its way around.
It's literally what I did in school
And you probably learned a lot doing it. I know I did. Dunno if you're old enough to remember Ninja Proxy but it's what we used to bypass the firewall and I learned a lot about networking after that.
It's a valuable part of the education....
Not as good as searching the internet for the answer but it shows promise
In my son’s fifth grade class last year, it was fucking Cookie Clicker. 🙄
Why would the fuck Cookie Clicker? They hot?
The problem is there is no compelling data that these devices are superior for learning. They are distractions and expense with no proven benefit.
There's some benefit... my daughter was assigned a Window 11 Lenovo the last two tears and now hates Microsoft AND Windows.
Her personal laptop runs linux.
You could have created a temporary dual boot to teach her that in a weekend. Parents are so lazy these days.
Nah, her kind of deep seated hatred comes from required usage over time, not from a weekend. Short term exposure just doesn't do it.
It doesn't matter if they're superior or not, they need to learn to use them, because every job is going to expect them to be able to.
I think it would take a pretty big effort to keep kids from learning how to use basic functions on tablets or laptops. They are inundated with these in and out of school. They don't need to use them in school to be comfortabke with them on the job market.
And yet a lot of kids are entering the workforce today not knowing how to use a computer mouse or what a web browser is.
Probably best to focus on child labor laws then.
For young adults entering the workforce computer literacy is dropping DESPITE a clear increase in school computer use. This is not an argument for kids being shackeld to tablets for their school work. Basic computer science courses, typing courses and computer lab exposure are sufficient.
Or a file system.
Most kids already don't know
The devices for my kids saved me a crapload on buying textbooks.
They consider it a benefit that now they can hand in their assignment just before midnight Friday night the week it’s due
Tech shouldn't be allowed in the classroom until high school.
Kids need to learn how to think, use their hands, eye hand coordination, basic reading and most importantly ... have a freakin ATTENTION SPAN!!!
The modern computer, internet culture and social media are all designed to shorten a person's attention span as much possible to turn their brain into pudding and market anything to them.
One of the greatest skills in life in being able to think for yourself, to wonder, to imagine and to question the world with just your own mind rather than in occupying every waking moment to a digital device.
Not sure if joking/trolling, but school computers don't generally ALLOW social media or chat apps like Discord and such, as well as harshly limit internet usage with guardrails. They're pretty locked down and even when at home monitor network usage.
I don't like laptops and such in schools, but kids ARE going to need to know how to use them to be successful and that's something a lot of parents can't teach.
When I was growing up, we had to learn how to type, how to use the Dewey Decimal System and library terminals to look up where books were for research and such. Later, we had Computer Labs to do this work and write reports and such... This is no different. Don't confuse a smartphone internet experience and its constant advertising and social aspects with what kids get on these laptops.
It sounds like we are part of the same generation (honestly, I don't know or care what generation that is called, I just have a feeling you were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s and 90s)
We got to see the internet come into being little by little over the 90s and early 2000s. At the time, we weren't kids anymore and we did just fine keeping up with the technology. And I believe it was all down to our ability to be able to think, act and do things ourselves without any outside help. We grew up in an education system that forced us to think, to read, to write and to understand using nothing but our growing brain. We didn't have the luxury of having a device show us pretty pictures or immediately calculate something for us. There is a lot to be said for a child that grows up and learns how to just write ideas, questions, answers and thoughts on an empty piece of paper with just a pencil or a crayon.
You can mimic all that on a tablet but the the process of using a tablet is partly entertainment because at one point, you start playing with the tablet rather than in learning how to draw a picture. When you have a pencil and a blank piece of paper, you have no choice but to use your mind and put something down on the sheet.
Because I grew up with new technology and the internet, I got to appreciate it all and I started tinkering with it all. I never turned into any kind of hacker or computer wiz but over the past 20 years, I've learned how to use/tinker/adjust/crack/tweak Windows, MacOS and Linux systems as well as build my own PC, recover old parts, mash together parts, keep laptops alive and recover tablets and devices. All done without any technical training other than what I learned from others online. In all that time, I got to meet and see so many young people who either didn't know, didn't care or were just ignorant as to how a computer even worked.
Did people honestly think giving 10 year olds school-issued laptops would end well in the slightest? Like, seriously?
This just reminded me; my first time playing Pokemon Gold/Silver was on a computer in my school library using a fan translation patch like 6 months before the English release.
Good times.
The biggest issues this article points out seem like failures of the IT department/teachers (or those telling the teachers how to teach).
It's not hard to block a kid from running minecraft, and relying on duolingo to teach your kids is just idiotic. Why send them to school in the first place if they could just as easily do duolingo at home? Only let the kids have their devices out when it's necessary for the assignment, and have them put them away when it's not.
I never knew of anyone who didn't use their school-issued devices for anything other than browser games most of the time. They literally used it for games rather than school work.
You can't hand them the reins and then complain that they're even worse now. Schools are partially to blame for all this electronics bullshit kids are into these days. A lot of middle and high schools almost require students to have a fucking iPad these days.
