This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Correlation
Causation
Hey, Computer, what's been happening to
Had it been?
But sure, also, they've replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.
Don't forget the negative effects of Social media on developing minds.
It reads like one of those boomer comics complaining about young people experiencing the consequences of boomer actions.
"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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Corporate bullshit like that used to just be mildly amusing, now it's actively enraging.
I meana, sure. There's a cognitive decline when they get gunned down in their classrooms, or even just the perpetual stress of having to live with that threat on a daily basis.
Don't forget that Google made big bucks on that deal.
Selling Apples ?
Correction: 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 a cost-center
Technology is a profit-center
What are you, some kind of socialist? Your system will never work. We'll all run out of money!
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.
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
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
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.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
Public money gets funneled to the tech bros and the population gets dumber. It's a conservative win-win.
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.
I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper
It's weird that we don't consider the mass production of cheap paper and quality pens/pencils a technology.
analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole
I'm not going to become an Evangelical for Ctrl+F because I don't think it's worth the fight.
But I will say an analog classroom with 8 students taught by a professional teacher five days a week is vastly superior to an analog classroom with 40 students taught by a TA three days a week.
Do with that what you will.
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.
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.
The biggest problem to getting open source textbooks,, is McGraw Hill and their ilk, the few companies that control the textbook Rackets.
<By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools.>
There's your problem right there, you bought computers which basically have no programs written for them.
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.
Lead is innocent it was Fox News
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
The problem isn’t keyboards it’s the policies and reasoning.
Probubbly cuz you gave the tools and didn't begin the process of using it for schools, dumbasses.
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.
As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It'd be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don't believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it's not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.
I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don't benefit big US corporations.
And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn't be going to Apple or Microsoft. You'd save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.
My kids are given Chromebooks. The schools are getting them registered with Google as early as possible.
So Google can begin tracking and advertising to them
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.
Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it's just US thing
