It’s not screens that are the problem, per se, but how they are used, and how schools and teachers were rely upon them to do every single little thing rather than using an appropriate methodology which integrates traditional teaching techniques which use technology to assist.
And they wouldn’t have to have the screen do everything if they were paid the appropriate amount given the importance of their station
This is a problem even in places where teachers are adequately paid.
Honestly, I think that’s just one of the many problems with today’s education system.
Screen use should be relegated to a smart board/overhead projector and computer lab. Make kids use real books/pencil & paper and every test score will improve as long as a zero smartphone policy is enforced.
Advice that was both a textbook and a notetaking system would be helpful too. But limited to just those tasks.
Smart boards are FUCKING useless. The only partially effective use I’ve seen for one was software training. They’re moderately okay I guess for teaching a room full of students how to use Photoshop or AutoCAD. They’re a pointless gimmick that some CEOs should have their balls hammered flat for bilking the public as hard over.
Being able to write on them is about as useful as a white board, but I think being able to project video in a classroom is extremely useful. Also, the switch to lessons being mostly PowerPoint style presentations is great compared to just a lecture with a chalkboard. I grew up having them in classrooms since third grade, and it’s honestly hard to imagine a class that isn’t structured around them.
You can have a projector without a smart board.
Or you can have a smart board? It’s hard to tell what your point is here.
A smart board is a pointless accessory that adds no value. If you want to project computer images for the class, a normal screen will do and you don’t fund low life hucksters.
I also used them since 3rd grade too! I was the first 3rd grade class in my school system to use them as well. It was really neat in the mid 00s at the time.
How do you stop the politicization of technology in the classroom when the policies of schools are so heavily influenced by politicians?
We have this problem in Canada too.
I grew up in a society where the truth and data were what drove our learning. That got thrown out the window in Ontario about 10 years ago.
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likely they used the laptops like parents did, to babysit students, instead of using it only for assignments.
No. Shit.
Giving every student a distraction to take with them everywhere typically is a bad idea.
If it so much as has a button to change text size I know kids would rather mash that button and watch the screen go crazy than to pay attention to the lesson.
This is a problem for adults too, which is why they make dedicated distraction free writing devices and software. It’s not the screens, it’s how they are being used.
I’m sure there are right and wrong ways to apply digital learning but I also think adoption has been driven by tech companies and anyone that is starstruck by the “potential” of these devices. I can almost guarantee there were no long-term studies performed prior to sticking all kinds of screens in front of kids faces. Humans have been learning and teaching for millennia using physical mediums. It’s very foolish to think we, as a species, can suddenly shift to a new medium in a single generation with no ill effects.
I knew the school laptops were fucked up when my kids started choosing to spend their limited screentime on them instead of iPads or the Switch or the TV.
youtube, tiktok are addicting. plus games like roblox.
This has been a major problem for my kid. They don’t even lock down the iPads they issue so they just do whatever. So when my kid is failing classes because he’s not doing assignments in class and it turns out he’s just on YouTube all day, it’s like why the fuck are they even able to get on that in the first place? Doesn’t matter how tightly I restrict technology at home when his school just says fuck it.
The issue here is that the technology itself, instruction, and implementation was incredibly poor this century. Schools weren’t doing basic things like typing classes for primary school, there was no instruction on how to program or use the operating systems, and kids weren’t given PCs; they were given tablets and chrome books which favored internet access based learning platforms over products stored locally on machines.
I grew up during the 1980s, and my primary schools had 1 apple pc in the classroom. We took turns learning typing. We learned how to operate the machines by inserting floppies and typing commands. Things we were given access to were all instructional. I have vivid memories of learning math via computer with a program called number muncher.
Access to the tech was limited and supervised. This is what created an environment that taught me how to use computers as I transitioned to secondary education. This century, all of the implemented controls were related to limiting access to pornography rather than teaching students anything about the actual tech. Now we have a generation of people entering the workforce that don’t know how to use PCs just like the boomer demographic.
When I first started working on computers in 1994, I thought that by 2010 every kid/teen/adult would be able to repair their computers themselves. How wrong I was. They know how to use computers and tablets but the hardware is a mystery to them.
I worked at a STEM university and was helping a Computer Science student with his laptop. It had a SSD and a platter HD in it for storage. The platter HD was failing and needed replacing. I wrote to the student stating he “needed a new HD”. He had no clue what I meant. He didn’t even know it was possible to replace. He was going to buy a new laptop.
Capital is trying to corral all the tech into “the cloud” so they can control it all and rent it out forever.
They do not want anyone to know anything about hardware.
This most recent hubris with AI is because they think it can be used to create new tech and instruct installers so they no longer need ANY human capacity with knowledge.
Of course that was not and never will be true but isn’t it interesting how the billionaire class will pounce on any opportunity to cement their power without reliance on society hmmm it’s almost like they’re the fucking bad guys
I was born in 1996, but the older generation (it’s Russia) that remembers Soviet schools sometimes remembers Soviet educational PCs. Those were a few series, I don’t remember names, the point is there were Apple II clones and there were PDP-11 clones (but in PC form factor, even with networking ability in the sense of there being one master machine and slave machines booting from it ; but those were not terminals).
So, that older generation remembers as if something normal being taught to program in BASIC, FORTRAN, later C or Pascal and operate machines. Soviet life was quite a lot poorer than even 90s despite all the retroactive disdain for that decade, still informatics classes were apparently at least educationally useful and had at least one operable machine usually.
The 90s generations at least got some computer instruction of general use.
And my generation got Windows machines and no real understanding by anyone what informatics classes are even for. Unless it’s some special school or at least with math focus.
Things people were taught in the 80s and which somehow don’t transition at all to their operation of modern PCs, that contrast still terrifies me.
So - it’s the same everywhere, it seems, because of the idea prevalent in the 00s that my generation is going to just wing it because of being exposed to electronics since childhood. An absolutely nutcase and absolutely winning (in the sense of popularity) idea.
I even have a pre-school brochure somewhere, if I’m not mistaken, with algorithmic problems and solutions. The earlier the better.
One can think in paranoid/cynical ways - “fools are easier to rule” or “so that’s why they were pushing hacker movies in the 90s to scare everyone”. I honestly think it was just fear of some day being less than capable of understanding the technology we rely upon to keep breathing. And that fear is unsubstantiated, because similarly to that most people don’t understand city planning, logistics, oil refineries, electrical engineering and one can go on. But due to that fear of singularity it was easier to start imagining that somehow new generations will gain hard knowledge naturally.
But even that wouldn’t be much of a problem if not for Microsoft. Hate them with passion. EDIT: For managing to sell, coerce and impose their monopoly upon the world and upon education most of all
I feel this is just a tangent though. The main issue is kids test scores in math and reading not improving/dropping since switching to utilizing more technology. Whether they know how to use the OS properly or type faster was supposed to be a bonus to PCs in the classroom.
This article shows a lot of examples of teaching failures, but we need an actual study showing tech isn’t helping, or the correct way to teach with tech.
I grew up in the 90’s, there were Apple //es orMacs with edutainment software on them that we’d be taken to once a week, and by high school there were several computer labs full of Windows XP machines scattered around, a couple “public” ones that teachers would occasionally schedule to take the class to to do some research or type up an essay, and a few that were computer focused, I took a class on MS Office in one of those, and that’s where I was when I first heard the planes hit the towers.
About that time is when it felt like the manager and politician class latched on. That putting computers in schools made them look good, it was a bragging point, “Look how modern and up to date we are” so they’d start to cram computers in where they didn’t need to be. My junior year in college I took a calculus class that was in a CAD workstation classroom. We were told not to touch the large, loud computers on our desks and had to try to see the board around the monitors. That was probably the most egregious case but it happened a lot. “Don’t touch the computers, this isn’t a computer class.” Like all the fresh shiny equipment colleges will walk tour groups into, turn on the lights, show off that they have it, turn the lights back off because no classes take place in there, that equipment is for owning not teaching.
Now the shift is, kids get issued a chromebook and use that instead of pencil, paper and textbook. “We’ll use these because that’s what it’s like these days.”
I’m in tech and a connoisseur of modern stuff, but even I wouldn’t want my non existing kids to be screen only. Have an IT class to get them to know how to use those devices, then back to books and paper. A friend struggles like hell keeping her son from spending his whole day on digital devices, if the school pulled that off, he’d be toast.
“TEchMoLoGy iS tHe fUTuRe anD wE mUSt PrEpArE tHE stUdEnTs!”
Yeah, no. You can stick to teaching them core curriculum. Speaking on behalf of GenX, we never needed school to tell us how to use technology.
Flashbacks to being in elementary school in like 2004 and they had to teach us how to use calculators. “Had” is a strong word. They literally spent an entire day of math one day telling us how to use a normal non-graphing calculator. I distinctly remember hearing “don’t hold it like a Gameboy, don’t use your pencil to press the buttons,” and even then thinking how useless of a day that was. They wanted it to still seem so important. Remember, you won’t have one of these in your pocket every day.
I think I got reasonable tech training in high school in the early 2000s. I was taught how to use Word and Excel, and made to type up some of my assignments. Years later I’d watch my Gen X boss doing the company books by doing the math on a calculator and then typing the results into an Excel spreadsheet.
That said, I didn’t learn to type in keyboarding class, I learned to type hitting on girls on MSN messenger.
Agreed, also encouraging curiosity probably is more beneficial IMO
You’re kidding right? Most of Gen X hated tech when it came out. You were a fucking nerd if you were into computers when the PC first came about. Only a small subset of Gen X really grasped tech.
LOL and just like that we’re back in the 80s with you calling me a fucking nerd. Some of us never grew up.
Some of us also don’t read and think well. GenX grew up and spawned the whole tech industry with nothing but the sparse, shitty computer education you speak of. Therefore, exactly like I said: we clearly didn’t need school to teach us how to use technology. I never said we were all amazing at it in the 80s. Now fuck off.
Clearly you’ve forgotten about those typing classes that everyone had to take, and how many people couldn’t even figure out the right way to load a floppy into a drive without a teacher showing them.
Also, Gen X isn’t the tech generation. Xennials, the microgen between X and Millenials was the first computing generation. PCs weren’t even widely available until most of gen X was already out of k12.
And frankly, most of gen X absolutely sucks at tech. Also, I didn’t call you a nerd, I called anyone who was into computers at the time a nerd, because they were literally considered nerds. You probably were a nerd. I was a nerd. Thus WHY I remember how it was back then, and tech was absolutely not largely adopted by gen X.
They were way too busy getting drunk or stoned and calling anyone who could type a pussy.
But after these funds dried up, schools have struggled to replace broken or outdated devices, which last on average less than a decade despite Google’s efforts to extend device life spans.
HA
Even disregarding the google planned obsolescence stuff, they expect to get 10 years out of a computer that is used daily for 3/4 of the year AND being given to teens/kids who are on the go from class to class and then home. It’s not a reasonable expectation. Even treating a laptop perfectly, its just too much of a dangerous environment for a piece of tech to reasonably expect it’s going to make it to the 10th year.
This. Chromebooks weren’t built with repair/refurbishment in mind. Moreover tech has moved fast enough that 10 years lifetime makes it really difficult to maintain supply chain (hw,sw both), specially with Google itself dropping support for older OS (Chrome OS was treated slightly better than Android)
Right?
“What’s that Google? When you design things from the ground up with planned obsolescence in mind, it’s suddenly hard to UNDO the mess you made of the hardware? Who would have thunk it.”
I preferred pen and paper for note taking, didn’t take notes on laptop for CS uni even. But having instruction material in digital form wins imo. Bulky exercise books are not worth it imo. I suspect publishers prefer those for beefy books for other reasons…but I would not be surprised if for lower elementary school exercise books with lots of images and fun exercises have positive impact.
Maybe I have bad digital attention span but whether it’s educational books or documents at work, I’m much better at retaining and locating information in paper. The physical register of the document location, location of information within the document, and location on the page gives me a fuller memory of the info.
Absolutely, i keep my desktop amd documents pretty clear but for a project or presentation I willprint everything and have them mapped out as required. Its more tactile and less stressful
same, laptop is too distracting anyways.
But the tech companies told me that everyone should learn to code in grade school!
And if they did, all the tech in schools probably wouldn’t be as big a problem. Who tf learns coding from scratch on a tablet?
Toss the chromebooks and let kids mess with the inner workings of the computer. Teach them to make their own backups and have restore drives available.
Media lab and AV clubs, like the old days. Love it.
How is it that it took until 2026, nearly 100 years after the advent of the nuclear bomb, for school administrators to realize that not all technology is inherently good in every application?
It is going to be far before the reverse course.
My child’s only school supply list is a pair of headphones for the tablet they are allowed to use in school. She will be in kindergarten…
Wonder when they’ll admit that AI existing at all makes students much, much worse off?
Most teachers I’ve seen already do and are terrified of what they’re seeing it do to their students
The teacher I’m seeing are using AI
TL;DR: it’s not the screens or tech’s fault. It’s the overall pressure to lower standards and people that for whatever reason can’t work with tech.
After seeing my kids go through school I’d say the chief issues with performance are external. Tech and screens are like any tool, they’re only as good as the user.
Parents and society place less importance on education and critical thinking, in fact they often insult it. Parents teach their kids that they’re not responsible for their failings, it’s the teacher’s or the school’s fault. Parent’s don’t have the knowledge to help with the tech, nor will they police the kid’s use of the tech, either because they dgaf or can’t understand it. Teaching standards keep moving the goalposts to help the least common denominator. Teachers also aren’t allowed to teach in a way, there’s always some “do-gooder” latest study that’s supposed to teach kids better, but it’s bullshit management worried more about studies and metrics than just teaching. Teachers spend more time jumping through hoops than teaching.
Only way I have ever learned, in school, is by writing notes by hand into my own notebooks. Rewriting text book chapters, taking notes from teacher, writing answers down. It takes time, longer than taking notes on a laptop. But writing on laptop just doesn’t “stick” the information into my head. Back in high school, I was the last student to still hand-in my essays etc in paper and my teachers were very happy to grade them, one told me it brought her good memories from the times there were less screens and teaching was easier. No wonder…
When I had laptop in glass, it was very easy to play games, watch Netflix or scroll Reddit. I had no self-control, I was not able to force myself to focus in learning. They started using laptops and tablets in glasses when we were 13 and most of us found ways to play games etc on them, bypassed the restrictions. And we shared the knowledge on that. Oh, also I dropped out eventually.
Yeah I couldn’t learn if I took a laptop out in class. I only got it out when the class time was spent on a project. Honestly switching to a desktop my final year was probably better for me, it led to me spending my computer time in labs or home instead of having every distraction every time
Using laptops to replace books and writing is not a tech first approach in the first place. It’s just that you replace a book with a computer, that’s not tech education. The letters and words are still the same, except now you have a distracting screen in front of a kid on a machine that can do other things to satisfy the impulses of a bored kid. There is nothing wrong with laptops in class just use it to teach the kids to use the tech for things those machines were build for. And not as a book and a teaching assistant substitute. Teach kids how to operate a real OS, teach them basic cyber security and cyber hygiene, let them install a printer and wifi. Anything that is useful for when they will use a PC as adults.
May I add in the “opensource astronomic simulation software” like KStars that can’t be replicated by books?
