This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"The kids are so smart they figured out this computer stuff I could never" - 75 yo Deborah, School District Superintendent
No Deborah, the kids had a mandatory computer literacy class which helped them understand the fundamentals of computing.
Key word "had"
You know, it wasn't always like this
Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside's out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we'll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand
~ Bo Burnham
Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:
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Don't forget that Google made big bucks on that deal.
They are still making big bucks on that deal.
Vendor lock in, and brand recognition is bigly important.
We should be investing in teachers not technology.
Teachers are paid a pittance in the US. Shows our values as a society. They’re educating the next generations, but that doesn’t make number go up right this second, so they are compensated accordingly.
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
It's more than just lack of effort here though, it's systematic pollution they are allowing into our food and water with abandon.
into education too, into everything they can actually
I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper, and i hate having to do online tests too. I like my printed documents and physical books. Many students will say the same, and i also tend to dislike the trend to digitise every and each aspect of learning. The truth out there is that analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole, but many of you are not ready to hear that. Technology is also the problem.
The laptops should be a tool, in addition to other tools. Being well rounded is the best thing you can be.
Ideally they should allow and use both, physical media and notes and digital access to all media. And allow self management. That way they will learn the limits.
But currently they are just forcing digital interfaces on students who did not fully develop yet. Ironicaly, for how much tech they must use, the use of a computer is still sub optimal. Typing skills, for instance, are better trained on a word document with a spell check active. One of the many instances where old tech is still perfectly fit.
Yeah, my 8-year-old has the chrome book, but also gets physical homework, paper and pencil. Dunno how it'll be as she gets older, but I like how it is so far.
I was thinking about trying to find Mavis Beacon and somehow getting it to function on Windows 11. No idea if there's compatible versions. But I used Mavis Beacon all the time growing up and enjoyed the games, made learning to type (properly) fun.
I used a mavis beacon like program on my computer for english, really basic stuff but the little thing came in a cd-rom included in my school textbook, and the program covers everything up to b1 levels, and it's seriously impressive for how small it is. By far the worst software for that type of stuff is the kind of gamified environment we have today. Edutaiment was a trend between the late 90's and the 2000's. Gamification is the evil twin of edutainment.
Capable of what though? We have all the evidence we need that our parents and their parents are brain damaged. Maybe that kind of cognitive capability is bad and there's a goldilocks zone to go back to.
They weren't brain damaged by books. It was lead.
More public money syphoned off to the parasitic corporations and dumber, easier to exploit proles.
Seems like a massive win for capitalism, really.
Until it all blows up on our faces, obviously, but when has capitalism ever cared about anything beyond the next quarter?
Probubbly cuz you gave the tools and didn't begin the process of using it for schools, dumbasses.
Right? I've seen plenty of people who don't know how to swing a hammer.
Public money gets funneled to the tech bros and the population gets dumber. It's a conservative win-win.
The problem isn’t keyboards it’s the policies and reasoning.
It’s so sad that we love shitting in younger generations and we love making things harder for them. This isn’t a new concept btw. Americas been doing that for generations
I'm sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
The problem isn't the technology, but the implementation.
The USA should have had a national digital textbook initiative, where free textbooks are developed and digitally distributed to all schools of every educational level. Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
The biggest problem with such a program would be things like essays, culture, and history, since many bad actors would want to press their beliefs onto students. Still, things like dates, locations, and people involved with events can be standardized. Maybe teachers can rate educational modules, to help keep bad material from being adopted by most teachers?
Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
Having worked for three separate companies trying to do just that, it’s not that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s too expensive for individuals to purchase and school districts had a hard time getting contracts approved due to NCLB and constant budget cuts. Strange though that a company like Google could ink a huge deal with an entire state even though none of the shit did anything it promised.
Google got exactly what they wanted out of it though. Get 'em young using and feeling comfortable with Google hardware and software, and trapped in the walled garden early. Most are not likely to change to another brand/OS later in life.
Oh trust me I know. They make big promises, and sell these devices dirt cheap to state education systems, and frame it as an altruistic, benevolent act. Meanwhile you can’t install any other software on them and it’s entirely locked into using google’s “education” software
Also where are the “think of the children” folks that are putting in the age verification laws. Shouldn’t they be concerned that a marketing agency built to profile individuals is privy to everything your kids do at school?
Privacy is too woke
The biggest problem to getting open source textbooks,, is McGraw Hill and their ilk, the few companies that control the textbook Rackets.
I'm just not convinced that the technology isn't part of the problem. All of these machines are designed to give a you an instant dopamine rush when you use them. I think they have a real and detrimental effect on attention span.
As someone in the classrooms (student teaching in fifth grade in Illinois), I don’t disagree that the tech provides this. However, I also see how it benefits the students with workflow and access to a diverse form on texts which is needed for a multitude of diverse learners whether they are multilingual, have a disability of some kind, are special education, or have IEPs or 504s.
The access to parents at home with instant ability to the same videos or resources as well as translation tools can mean more parental help for the kids.
What I see as the problem is that the way we measure students and their cognitive knowledge/capabilities hasn’t changed with how we teach. Everything is to the test and set up without any national standards. I see kids able to make some amazing inferences and see patterns with small prompting and the ability to deep think is there even with tech being a huge part of the classroom.
Our government is useless
Our government is useless (for the poor)
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
It's a scam, y'all.
I completely blame ChromeOS.
Even on AD snafu'd windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.
Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.
I came here to say something similar. It's not merely tech that's to blame but the kind of tech we have today. Kids are being raised to be consumers of tech and tech services. They don't have basic fundamentals that millenials had to learn to access porn on dialup.
by design, and when you combine that with AI and generations of people with low attention spans, you get something bad I'm guessing
The US public school was always about training you how to behave in a post industrial world. When you disguise a lying machine as an equal or even a divine source of knowledge, nobody will question when it says "there is nothing more to learn about the civil rights movement" or anything else the ruling class doesn't want you to learn.
