Comment by CodeWriter23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodeWriter23 | Hacker News Reader

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We don't have any of those problems at my daughter's school. First, all the iPads are locked down using some management software, so the kids are locked out of the clock, etc. that can cause unintentional distractions. Second, they limit use to about 30 minutes per day, so traditional lessons are taught using traditional techniques. Third, our school emphasizes social interaction with project-based learning, with the children working in teams. And a sizable portion of their report card deals with socialization and citizenship.

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.

I would argue that in this case it is a waste of education budget. Their high cost and non-core use sounds like it raises costs without cutting anything. For technology to work in the classroom, it needs to be attractive to administrators.

Agreed, my girlfriend's school implements iPad use and she has none of these problems. They have a single IT person in the school who setup all the iPads. My gf setup guided access on her 30 ipads to lock them down and the kids only use them for 1 or 2 lessons max. The majority of her teaching is down without iPad use. A lot of the author's issues seem to be a lack of awareness on technology, how to use iPads, and even proper classroom management.

"They have a single IT person in the school who setup all the iPads"

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.

That would depend on your instatution, all of the private schools I work with let the teachers find new apps and we can push them to the iPads pretty easily. Budget has been provided with a little extra so we can buy apps during the year if needed, and we do.

Win a decent MDM, the apps work and work well.

I would have flunked out of such a school, instead of being my class valedictorian.

Group projects and emphasizing socialization is a crutch that incompetent teachers use to force their intelligent students to do their job for them.

> 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.

The difference in your Agile and pair programming examples is that those interactions are fundamentally between people with similar abilities. In business, the teaching, listening, and understanding are communication between people with similar baud rates. My impression is that you may be projecting your experiences with groups of competent engineers -- who all passed a rigorous screening process and years of performance reviews -- onto the behavior of children drawn at random from the entire population.

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.

All of these things you are describing are a good way to waste large amounts of time without getting anything worthwhile done. The 5% where you are not interacting with others is the tiny sliver of time you are afforded to actually produce the product that the rest of the business is built on.

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.

There are often stark contrasts between the idealistic academic approach and the practicalities of the 'real-world' career!

Emphasizing socialization is one of the big tools of highly-ranked education systems.

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.

My anecdotal doesn't follow your statement. My daughter is one of the intelligent students, and is severely challenged socially. She hasn't figured out the difference between "leader" and "dictator" yet. As a lone wolf myself, I can see how this helps prepare children for careers where they do more than just max out the number of hours they can bill.

I don't know if you'll know this, but are they implementing any other safeguards on the Macbook Airs? (MbA) Just from doing tons of work in a Mac-centric university where the students' idea of pirating was to search "[item] download mac", the search results are crawling with predator sites that promise anything from PDFs to interactive solutions manuals, only to actually download a dmg full of malware (usually Mackeeper and a few others). And of course students (and professors alike) would dutifully punch in their admin pass without thinking about it, and quick enough there'd be a nice and infected machine.

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.

No doubt it is going to be a bundle of surprises. Thanks for your input, I'm going to bring up your "[item] download mac" experience at our next technology committee meeting.

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.

I think that's sort of the point of "teaching the children not just how to use their computer but how to take responsibility for keeping it running".

Show of hands: who here would want to be the admin for a network you know is going to be routinely infected with any number of malware or rootkits.

Networks in school are supposed to facilitate education. The standard approach of making everything impossible to use so that nobody can break anything may work in a corporation, but it does not work for education.

But that is what they do anyway. I learned a lot from using school computers - like how to access VPNs and routing proxies so that I could defeat Bess[1] and access the Sun Java docs to do my AP computer science homework.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Web_SmartFilter_EDU

I would, depending on the implementation. Basically, can I just have a "wipe-and-go" policy? or do I have to manage user-settings/profiles/etc.

Things are much easier if you "embrace" the idea that you'll be infected, and that machines aren't special snowflakes.

Docs in the cloud, combined with "Wipe and go" is our chosen disaster plan. I realize of course this is not perfect. When it breaks down however, I feel there are really good lessons to be learned. Like keep prized docs on that thumb drive like we've been telling the kids.

so disable admin access for students and give them free Time Machine access?

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.

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