I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back
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I think a key component to the problem here is the very clear gap between computing enthusiasts/application developer and your typical K-12 teacher. Which is really not meant to be a knock on our teachers, but I don't think your typical school has the people with the right skill sets to teach "true" computing.
They don't realistically have any choice but to rely on the watered-down end user version experienced through the walled-garden of one vendor or another. Which makes most "technology in the classroom" initiatives to me look more like solutions in search of a problem (ie. not a very effective use of district resources).
Which probably seems tempting for budget-strapped schools which can't afford replacing equipment every year nor have the staff to build something themselves around RasPis.
I still think they're awful for other reasons, but their lack of hackability is a feature, not a bug.
When all the media is yakking about is iPads, all the world knows exist are iPads...
The tablet is a tool, alongside pencil, ruler, scissors, etc. NOT the primary device for delivering content. The kids use them (K-2) to make movies, make sketches of the things they are engineering, and math drills.
It seems a good lesson was lost on the author: teaching the kids how to appropriately use this type of tool. At my daughter's school, we get it. Starting next year, Grades 3-5 will have an admin account on their take-home MacBook Airs. Yep, sounds totally crazy. The value here is teaching the children not just how to use their computer but how to take responsibility for keeping it running. Hopefully El Capitan rootless mode will provide a robust defense against those pesky Flash 0-day bugs.
This leads to an important side issue that people outside the .edu system don't understand, that you release a product for kids that is web based, my daughter's teacher can roll it out to the kids in about 10 minutes using a laser printer to make a QR code of the URL for the kids to scan and then do math drills or whatever, literally during a single recess period. In comparison, if you wrap the same exact content in an app, its going to take at least a year to get the app approved by the technology council and possibly installed, or possibly not if another teacher makes a stronger argument for using the limited storage space for video recording kid presentations of learning or their pet app or who knows, assuming you have the political clout, time, and motivation to ram the new app thru the system.
Educational apps are dead. Educational websites are where its at.
Win a decent MDM, the apps work and work well.
What I'm getting at is if I were the tech admin for that school, I'd be less concerned about what 0-days exist in flash or java and more concerned about what people are willingly installing on their computer, and though this is obviously anecdotal, seeing what my younger cousin would end up installing despite our warnings, I'm inclined to think kids aren't up to the task just yet of full on computer management. Even fairly savvy kids would fall the the sales pitch of the one kid who found a free download for a popular game, which of course was packed with malware.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Web_SmartFilter_EDU
Things are much easier if you "embrace" the idea that you'll be infected, and that machines aren't special snowflakes.
most Mac malware isn't worryingly harmful (it can't spread on its own, for instance).
and even if you mess up a machine, you can always restore it. even if you erase everything, you can always have the Mac redownload the OS from Apple's servers.
BTW the admin account wasn't my idea, and it freaks me out. However, I see what the educators have in mind, they are trying to stretch into new places and prepare children for the real world. I appreciate the bleeding edge ethic of crash and burn and find the solution. So I am trying to play the role of facilitating recovery from problems that will arise. We will have system images on thumb drives. Until someone downloads EFI-based malware, the consequence will typically be the kid loses access to their machine for a day or two while the tech re-images their system. And of course, even though docs are in Google Drive, there is the potential for data loss, which is also a great lesson IMO.
Group projects and emphasizing socialization is a crutch that incompetent teachers use to force their intelligent students to do their job for them.
I find the opposite true in my career. Business is 95% about how you interact with others; whether that is teaching, listening to, meeting with, understanding morale, etc.
Let's look at Agile, socialization is at the key, people over processes, scrum meetings every morning looking for who needs help and who can help, sprint meetings with product managers selling ideas to engineers and engineers discussing how it will be solved, retrospectives where everybody tries to figure out what went right/wrong and what to do better.
Then there is pair programming, which is the definition of a group project.
Group projects are a tool to adjust the average performance, without any effort on the teacher's part. The effect is more insidious than a simple numerical average would suggest because group projects introduce a time differential. Consider people as an op-amp. Their internal drive to produce a given quality is the reference voltage. What output the currently have (the progess towards the objective) is the input. When you put top performers in a group to pull up the slackers, the feedback gain of that system is artificially reduced. The good students want a certain level of quality, so they will work even harder to try an bring the quality (input signal) up to their standards. Depending on how bad the slackers are, the good student may even reach saturation, running out of hours in the day to compensate for the incompetence of others.
The incompetent teachers intuitively understand this effect. They are not fostering some kind of social nirvana, they are transferring the workload of pulling up the class average onto the bright kids. The bright kid ends up spending twice, three times as long on the group assignment, and that effort gets averaged out to the other group members' grades. The cost to top performers is all that time they could have been improving, moving forward, was stuck doing large amounts of low skill work.
With the correct group of people, all of this feel-good communication can be replaced by a handful of people that know what they are doing, keeping an online task board updated and communicating primarily asynchronously by email, or if absolutely necessary, synchronously by IM.
Pair programming is a great way to make two people half as productive as either would have been working alone.
Students benefit from explaining it to others by forcing them to clarify and solidify their own mental models; the other kids understand their peers more quickly and when multiple mental models form, the students can explain it to each other for multiple perspectives.
If it's a powerful tool, teachers should use it. Understanding is more important than grades; too many variables affect grades to make them a great predictor.
Edit: Reminder that American education is often bullshit and leaves jaded students. Just because something is useful doesn't mean our teachers use it in a way such that it is useful.
I also recommend teaching somebody something and if possible taking a class with intelligent people that is out of your element. For me, a topology course with a focus on discussion was incredible.
I don't often think I have vision or significant insight, but it's been obvious to me for as long as I can remember that egregious use of technology in classrooms is a profoundly terrible idea. What, educators were worried children wouldn't spend enough time staring at glowing rectangles, and needed to get a head start? Really?
It's not clear whether most adults are even capable of making good decisions about what technologies to invite into their lives. Inflicting computers and software on children in a classroom, I think, demonstrates either profound lack of understanding about the state of these technologies, or judgement, or both.
Pens, pencils, crayons, markers, paper, books, musical instruments. These are the kinds of things that belong in classrooms. Children should be reading and drawing and building and talking and playing creatively, learning to think and solve problems based on experiencing the world directly, not trying to sip secondhand information through the straw of a screen, not wasting time with the latest malware and ads and passwords and an infinite amount of other stupid computer bullshit. Technology is a kind of heroin-like thing you should choose to invite into your life later as an adult if you want, not inflicted on you as a child.
how about using a real source. payscale.com?
chicago isn't an outlier; it's a big city with a higher cost of living.
real costs are hidden behind 'salaries', a term managed by the public unions to understate real comp. 8 months a year / health / sick / retirement age (55 typical) / pension. emotional appeals like your's are what have allowed the public unions to rape the average family (both in the classrooms where they fail, and in the pocketbook where public school teachers are doing their finest work).
Compare three math teachers I had.
One teacher was so laid back he played music in class but it was 1960s music, nobody in the entire class got over 40%.
The second math teacher was also a university professor he was so strict many in his class failed too.
The third was a bit geeky in behaviour, a bit eccentric, he would "pick volunteers" three of them to solve problems on the blackboard at the front of the class. I can't recall anyone in that class getting under 90%.
I'm extremely skeptical about the utility of technology in education, but iPads are a bad idea for reasons other than the above. A room full of kids working hard with pre-iPad technology looks like that too, except they're concentrating on books and paper.
Today too many people are engrossed in facebook and can't continue a conversation without flicking and swiping through facebook every 30-60 seconds. Everybody's faces are now illuminated by their devices' screens.
> One of my saddest days in my digital classroom was when the children rushed in from the lunchroom one rainy recess and dashed for their iPads. Wait, I implored, we play with Legos on rainy days! I dumped out the huge container of Legos that were pure magic just a couple of weeks ago, that prompted so much collaboration and conversation, but the delight was gone. My students looked at me with disdain. Some crossed their arms and pouted. We aren’t kids who just play anymore, their crossed arms implied. We’re iPad users. We’re tech-savvy. Later, when I allowed their devices to hum to glowing life, conversation shut down altogether.
Look I loved Lego's growing up, I still have massive rubbermaid containers full of them but please tell me why playing with Legos is any more valuable than playing minecraft? Let's not pretend that just because kids like different things now that something MUST be lost. I never played a cup-and-ball game like I'm sure generations before me did (I'm sure they lamented the introduction of things like Lego). Every generation complains about the younger generation and how they are going to turn out wrong because they weren't raised the same way they were or with the same things ("I walked up hill to school both ways").
Did the kids get quieter? Sure, I have no doubt of that but who's to say they weren't communicating even more than before using chat programs? I had teachers in HS CONSTANTLY complain about how students were reading less and less all the time which I took issue with not only because I read plenty of books but also I read tons of articles online. The medium may change but the core concept remains IHMO. Reading Pride and Prejudice doesn't automatically make you a better person than the student who know what's happening in the world like the back of their hand.
Lastly not introducing them to tech now is just setting them up for failure down the line. For better or worse the people who know technology will excel more than those who don't. Tech is not it's own little sector/industry, it's everywhere and it's integrated in to everything. To pretend otherwise is to stick one's head in the ground and ignore the world around you.
She did - because it encouraged collaboration and conversation.
Less so with lego, as it's look at this, then destroyed and forgotten. With minecraft they have to articulate what they have created and why, and continuously improve and develop things.
First, it's important for children to use their hands to develop their cognitive abilities. There is more in the world than just "pictures behind glass" to interact with and manipulating objects of various shapes, texture and weight is important.
Secondly, playing Minecraft is great, but maybe that's not what the kids were rushing to do. If they were playing Candy Crush or reading Facebook they would benefit more from playing lego.
Secondly: This is a classroom where the teacher is in charge, just because you give kids iPads doesn't mean they rule the class now, give them the option of Lego or minecraft then and don't allow them to be on FB/CC...
More importantly I don't believe that in person interaction is so critical. For many introverts like myself, forced F2F interaction in school was torture and did nothing but make me hate speaking publicly (which strangely, got a whole lot better once I was older, a little more confident, and actually understood what I was talking about).
In short: They're kids. It sounds like this school went a little too far into iPad territory, but frankly I think those kids will likely get more value out of skills manipulating screens than they will get out of skills involving legos.
In short yes. There is a finite amout of time before you die, and that time is measured in years, not millenia . We spend ~12 years in school playing "general education" where basically we are conditioned to set times for work and hierchael authority. That is 15% of your entire expected lifespan, aka not time to spent lightly. Look at how quickly you learn new job skills and keep up with new technologies. Then look back at public school. Why does it take 12 years to move from addition to calculus? Why does it take 11 years to teach kids that chemistry is between atoms and to learn simple reactions are building blocks? Right now the amount of education that public school provides is laughable compared to how much you learn in a year on the job.
What would it be like if you only took 8 years to get through primary and secondary? That is 10% more time added to your productive shelf life. Better yet, those years have been saved on the front end, where your brain is most agile and plastic.
My personal feeling is that there is a lot of time wasted in the current public education model. When I was in school, I never percieved any A/B testing, or relentless optimization of coursework. Instead everything was the same as it had been 10-20 years ago. At least now I get the sense that now people are starting to look for a better local minimum in the process of knowledge transfer.
Many of us here were introduced to this immersive technology as mature adults & don't know how to balance this technology with the demands of humanity (namely, proper social communication). Give me an iPad, and I'll find a way to watch stupid videos and avoid productivity (that's why I don't have one). Or send me a text and I'll make my best effort at checking it ASAP, even if that means losing focus on a real conversation for a few moments.
BUT: humans have an innate need to communicate. It's not a generational thing--it's a human thing. Kids aren't going to forget they need to make quality bonds with the people in their lives. They'll still do it. And I bet these kids growing up now will be able to achieve this balance between man and machine better than us.
I predict: it's not technology we're going to learn from our kids--it's how to truly live well with it.
> writes about how we are sacrificing connections, one quick check of our screens at a time
The old Computers cause people to disconnect and check out argument again!
As an old Geek I have always heard the anti-social behaviors breed by computer use. The funny thing is I was more connected to people then anyone I knew. The one culture that connects and gathers together have been the Geeks.
PS iPads for each child in elementary school is a bad idea but not for these reasons.
From what I've seen[1], in lower elementary grades technology can be very effectively used in the hands of the teacher (for assessment, interpreting student strengths and weaknesses in reading or math, and for projecting rich media).
Putting devices in the hands of students in lower elementary is probably best done for very targeted purposes and limited time; for example, keeping the rest of class engaged with an activity while the teacher is giving his or her full attention to working with a reading small group for 30 minutes.
[1]I've been part of teams creating teacher-facing tools for elementary, and digital curriculum for middle school and above.
I don't want to sound cynical or like a luddite (I would be posting on the wrong site, for sure), but nearly every application that I have used that is meant to be used in a classroom environment has been extremely shallow.
I cringed 15 years ago when school boards pushed to put computers in every classroom. What good is a room full of kids on MySpace and AIM?
Sure, you need computer skills for the future. But beyond learning how to use a computer for typing, spreadsheets, word processing, you don't need more than that in the K-12 level. Some kids will want to be programmers. Some kids will want to do music. Some will want to do graphics or desktop publish. Have computers available for kids to do that in computer class or art class or math - but don't push them in every setting.
Technology and software are, not to sound cliche, eating the world. Even something you would consider to not need tech for like farming is seeing great advances from technology including but not limited to: drip irrigation, gps auto-pilot machinery, robots to kill weeds without herbicides, weather patterns, crop patterns, and more. Software and technology is everywhere and if it's not somewhere yet then it will be soon. Why should be churning out tech-illiterate students except for a couple of fields? This seems incredibly short-sighted.
The number of people that can't do 9x14 without reaching for a calculator is scary.
The same can be said of general mathematics, and literary analysis, etc.
The main benefit is that knowing arithmetics well makes higher mathematics easier to learn. That's because one won't get distracted doing calculations. That's still true on the calculator era, just a bit less so, thus I do think it's important to learn arithmetics... It just the "it improves your brain" that I find highly suspect.
Example 9 x 14 = (<10> * 14) - ([1] * 14) = 140 - 14 = 126
key: <> easier rounded number [] deal with rounding 'error'
But this is wildly off topic, and in reality I'd rather someone knew how to use their calculator or excel or Python to do this sum than know how to do this sum in their heads.
It's important they know the rough answer in terms of scale and shape, so that any mistype or error is quickly recognised, but I don't think it is important to actually know how to quickly do long multiplication in one's head.
The most important estimating still, after manipulation of sig figs is knowing which way to bend for the overall system. So say I'm tiling a kitchen floor or buying paver bricks for a modest sized patio. Well, some raw material is going to be too ugly to use and I'm going to screw up some of the trimming and cutting and I'm going to drop some, and the cost of the gasoline and time to drive out to the home center and buy one more (mismatched) tile or brick is very high, so in that scenario I'd buy the 10x15=150 tiles and hope thats enough (I'm feeling lucky today). On the other hand if I had 9 steel chains each rated (by whom? Static or dynamic loads? Point concentrations or perfectly (LOL) distributed?) to 1400 pounds each, I would round way down for safety's sake and not suspend more than 10 x 10 or 10000 pounds on that platform. Even if the chains are rated properly I only need to screw up or fail four of them and the thing crashes down.
Anyway for engineering purposes 9x14 is somewhere around 100 to 150.
Math is a perishable skill. You get slow at it if you don't use it.
Sure, but the interesting question is if they negatively impacted math skills.
I remember my classmate, 1st year at university, that passed one of his classes just because his calculator was capable of precise enough numeric integration.
Next semester he was required to construct proofs as well and he flunked the class.
In general, that's the essence of learning. If we stop teaching that, then we're all in trouble ;)
9 x 10 = 90
9 x 4 = 36
90 + 36 = 126
14 x 10 = 140
140 - 14 = 126
Yep and that skill was rendered completely obsolete. Always remember being told "you won't always have a calculator with you!!" because I couldn't be bothered showing my working on my maths work.
How did that work out... oh everyone now always has calculators with them. Glad I didn't waste my time memorising multiplication tables.
There's basically no advantage to taking existing classroom practices, but sticking them on a computer. You'll have to rewrite the entire education process to figure out how to harness computers.
Let me give a concrete example. I am now a fantastic speller, of a language that is one of the harder languages to spell. Am I fantastic because I'm just that awesome? No! Am I fantastic because I have spent years studying lists of words and taking spelling tests? Hell no! I'm fantastic now because every major text input I use now has the red-squiggly line, and the instant I misspell a word and hit space, bam, red line. Backspace & correct. Right-click and select if I really, really can't work it out. (But with backspace & correct actually being way faster, I prefer that.) With instant feedback comes a high rate of learning. I can tell this isn't "cheating", because when I do function in an environment where I don't have this functionality, I retain my spelling skill, the golden standard of whether a skill exists in the tools or the brain. In fact I write many of my blog posts in emacs with no spelling support on, and while I still scan over my posts with a spell checker before posting them, I routinely experience writing several thousand words without a single misspelling, because I have harnessed solid technology to train my brain. I also spell well with handwriting.
This is unbelievably fantastic technology for teaching spelling so efficiently and so effectively that it hardly even need be explicitly taught; sit students down in front of this technology and have them simply write and let the red squiggly handle the spelling training. (You'll still need vocabulary training, but, again, let the red squiggly handle the spelling of the vocabulary while the vocabulary training focuses on meanings.)
By contrast, doing spelling tests "but on a computer" is a terrible way of doing business! First of all, if the students have to "turn in" the test before they get feedback, you've already missed the sub-second feedback rate that would have been so much better anyhow, but second of all, the fact that you're having a spelling test at all is a huge waste of their time. That's the sort of second-order effect we need to be harnessing with computers in the classroom, and we are only at the very, very beginning of that road.
My first grader is just starting spelling tests. He's not quite computer savvy enough to start writing on a computer yet, but you can believe I'll be setting him up with a red squiggly as soon as is practicable.
I still believe computers are going to rewrite education from top-to-bottom, but I find it is proving to be one of the most entrenched, hidebound, nearsighted, and even perhaps terrified of real change elements of society we can possibly imagine. We're so scare of what bad things might happen if we don't stuff a conventional education into our children's heads (moreso than ever, thanks to ever-more test-based education) that we're terrified of experimenting with anything new, and the only acceptable change to the "conventional" education is to precommit even more time to it, making it that much harder to work any experimentation into the system. There are major religions that treat their holy texts as more flexible than the way our culture treats the official line of How Children Are Taught.
This is a well known pitfall in technology integration. I don't think a lot of people in this thread are giving due credit to educators - it's their job, and there's a lot of smart people in education who have just as much common sense as the armchair teachers who think otherwise.
http://www.emergingedtech.com/2015/04/examples-of-transformi...
Until the educators get the central bureaucracy off their backs, it doesn't matter what they are capable of.
If you'd like to read my point as being that the central bureaucracy is "the most entrenched, hidebound, nearsighted, and even perhaps terrified of real change" part of the system, I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
0: http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/educati...
2. Calculators do make people worse at math. I saw this first-hand with my son. As he went through school, they used calculators for everything. Students began to rely on the calculators for simple arithmetic and took the answers provided as gospel, not realizing that garbage in = garbage out. He, along with many of his peers, never really developed the fluency in math to say to themselves "hmm, that answer looks suspect. Let me try again."
> When calculators were brought in instead of the slide rule
> we heard it would be the end of actually "knowing" math.
I'm 40. I come from an Eastern-Bloc country. Back in the day we raised ourselves, running outside all day, building and breaking friendships by playing sports and other more stupid games (e.g. throwing small rocks at cars - yes, THAT stupid).
Just like kids today have Internet, we had a drug - TV. Grandma said: it would rot your brain, it is the Satan, stay away.
Apparently the TV did not rot my brain. I do not watch it today (other than Netflix). I cannot stand it. Yes, we did not have fun exactly like Grandma had in her youth (I bet she had some fun ;-), but we had fun.
So perhaps tablets are not that bad. Perhaps Internet is not that bad. Sure, it will change us, but - just perhaps - in a good way.
Perhaps it is just us, older folks, who cannot see what is good and what is bad for our kids.
I have kids now and know that with my oldest at least (11 year old boy), when there are no boundaries around screen time, the screens are always on. There is a lot more going on in the world of video games, movies, the internet, etc. these days which make it easier for kids to get lost in.
They should be reading from regular books and get regular chalkboard/whiteboard Lectures and doing hands on activities.
Instead of giving them iPads you could have a small set of time in the week to go onto a desktop computer and learn how to keyboard and do those kid like programming exercises and maybe some fun online learning tools.
Technology is only bad for kids if you don't know how to ration it and talk to them about it and limit it to educational uses.
Just giving them iPads makes no sense. All you're doing is helping Apple lol.....
You cannot even teach them practical academic tech stuff like keyboarding or programming using those kid friendly programming applications like Minecraft.
Or at least lock down the iPads so it only has educational apps.
My son (age 5) gets to use a tablet from time to time, mostly to watch "Sendung mit der Maus" which is a famous German educational show. They cover various topics in 10 minute blocks. My son has already learned a lot from that.
I recently visited an elementary school and all the kids were having lessons about squirrels (it was in autumn). I guess "under the hood" they were learning more than just squirrel stuff, like reading comprehension, writing, structuring information and so on. But other than that, I am pretty sure what takes them days to learn about squirrels in school would be easier taught by Sendung mit der Maus.
And the main hurdle here is not the tech but the teachers. With a few exceptions, teachers are technophobes and they don't have the mindset to support tech in the classroom.
(it's an OECD study. I don't really know their pedigree as a source of evidence)