Technology

Get Google out of our schools

We have a county near me that has just committed to doing away with Chromebook’s and going back to pen and paper. The reason being that literacy scores in that area have dropped rather significantly. I worry that whether it is literacy or technological competency students are doomed to fall in one direction or another.

My first year teaching I was encouraged to do everything on the chromebooks, because the district wanted to save on printing costs.

If you have 100+ students, and are limited to 500 pages/month (I could print 500 more, but had to purchase my own paper…), you have to use the laptops.

Also, when parents and students increasingly treat attendance as a suggestion, keeping up with paper assignments is hellish. There were days I showed up with 1/3 or more of my class missing - with online class work, I at least could say “the work is available online.”

The technology is a problem, but it’s a problem that’s arisen because class sizes are out of control and admin has zero idea what is going on in the classroom. It’s a bandage that’s been left on so long the skin is starting to get infected around it.

It's also a BIG privacy issue.

I think there was a Japanese study that shown that pen and paper is superior in terms of memorisation even to handwriting on a tablet (in addition to the well publicised fact that handwriting is far better than typing for that too)

I wish we had more info on the subject. Definitely got me to switch back to pen and paper from my iPad, and anecdotally I think it's worked out well for me.

As a teacher, I already have to teach half the kids how to even use a computer because they only ever used phones and tablets. And I am not going to be able to teach them programming without laptops.

I've opted out of the school Chromebooks for my kids because they have computers running real GNU at home. We should all be outraged that schools are pushing a locked-down surveillance/content consumption-only platform, as opposed to something like a Raspberry Pi that actually empowers kids to have real computer literacy.

This may be the millennial in me talking but I've generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.

During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.

They were never used in lessons.

Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren't yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

They're putting AI in children's school laptops? Not only teaching them to think less, but letting a corporation directly influence them?

Unfortunately even this will have to be another battle because there is a lot of monied interest in shoving all these shitty devices down schools throats.

If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it's because someone is making money off of it.

said she was only allowed under state law to opt the children out of standardized testing and sexual health lessons,

WTF? Why the fuck can someone opt kids out of EITHER of these things?

Public education either needs to be reclaimed and rebuilt from all the corrupting influences that have torn it apart. I'm not worried about the children of intelligent people, who can fall back on enrichment provided by their families, but so many kids are, at best, getting left behind or worse, being indoctrinated with all sorts of corpo-fascism now inherent in the system. Most kids seem to be coping pretty alright, so far, but I worry about the trends, and the future.

That's the one good side effect of AI, it makes people want to move away from technology where it's not really necessary

From the article:

She also started a parent group with 75 members that’s asking the district to allow students to keep Chromebooks at school rather than take them home.

Seems like such a good idea to leave that at the school. I had a relative who was a teacher, she rarely ever assigned homework. She always said it was her job to teach them in those 6 hours, and the rest of the day was theirs. She did have a weekend workshop for kids that needed tutoring, and after class hours, but in general, leave school at school and be a kid.

We all need to do this. I'd be raising hell if my kid were in school these days. He graduated in 2016, just before things got REALLY bad.

I read /r/teachers, and I'm shocked that kids are being passed up through the grades who can barely read, and can't focus on anything at all for more than one minute. They're allowed to eat in class? Look at their phones? They get up and wander around, and even leave the classroom? WTF?

"Sit down! Shut up! Put the damn phone away and pay attention!", is what I'd say right before I was fired from being a teacher, I suppose.

It's happening.

I think we all know what is wrong today...

Parents make some good points. AI chatbot integration is too much. Its something that can actively stall learning. You need to learn the skills at school yourself to better use tools like AI. We also should avoid over exposure from screens too. Useful skill for our world، but some pen and paper can help eye strain or over stimulation.