Why Classroom Technology Is Costing More Than Its Worth (2016)

I'm not sure I've thought this through very deeply at this stage but I do have a deep distrust of formal education. I learned by playing with stuff until it broke and skim reading chunks of books I didn't have the patience to finish.

Also - the classroom is full of distractions of other kinds. Move here, do this, listen to this, copy that. There's a huge amount of busy-work at school that is only tangentially related to learning. Technology might not be a magic bullet but it's no worse than some of the nonsense kids are put through.

And the problems with computers in the classroom are not limited to grade school! Nobody should use a laptop in class. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

The $315B figure is there just to have a click bait title. He just assumed teachers only use 30% of the features from the solutions is used, thus 70% of the money is wasted. But in the real world that's not how it works. The same goes for enterprise market, where feature availability is important. It doesn't mean that every business will use every feature but vendors have developed this multitude of features over the years to address specific needs. It doesn't mean that if you don't use every feature you are throwing money away. You are not expected to use 100% anyway.

Bad educational technology can get in the way of teaching and learning. Errors/bugs and confusing UX can cause lengthy delays in the classroom.

Teachers can easily spend 15 minutes running around playing IT support when students are using a new technology – out of a 50 minute class which was scheduled in 5-minute increments.

That doesn't mean it needs to be "beautiful, seamless" software like we tend to idolize. Or the most featureful or innovative. It can be, but getting bog-standard basics working without confusion or errors is far more important. I certainly agree with the author on that.

(Source: previously cofounded an edtech startup, spent time in many classrooms observing these things).

I've been thinking about trying to build tools that let teachers create educational content (incl. formative assessment, etc) and share that content with each other.

Does that sound like what you have in mind? If so, would love to chat.

Hearing what they use them for just makes me think that Apple needed someone to dump last year's leftover iPads on. It's really dumb stuff. They don't get access to the internet. They get a handful of stupid "learning" apps to use and a social network type thing that can be summed up as "instagram where mommy and teacher watch and control everything".

The devices are so locked up that inquisitive kids ignore them, dumb kids never figure them out, and everyone in between just kinda lugs them around because they have to.

I am beginning to think that tech capitalists have milked the general market and are now turning to the next juicy targets of education and healthcare.

Still, like a lot of stuff coming out of Computer Science in the 60s, Papert et al. are a good place to go for raw inspiration channeled into consumable, actionable ideas.

The move now seems to be to teach coding via apps with friendly graphical interfaces, 10 years ago it was based around learning MS Office apps.

I've worked in tech for nearly 20 years and the most important skill I learnt was to touch type. Then HTML, which lead me to simple scripting, and onwards.

I'm not sure of the logic of teaching 11 year olds to code when some of them don't know how to copy and paste.

I've worked at 2 edtech startups and have a few teachers in my family, and my personal observation has been that technology is best when it removes friction in the areas of classroom control, assessment, communicating with parents, and organizing presentation materials. For the part where teachers figure out how to engage students and get them over conceptual humps, it seems like teachers are way ahead of any technology.

The canonical technology fail in edtech is to dump computers or robot kits into the classroom with no training. I have been in a number of classrooms where stuff like that winds up piled in a very expensive corner.

Also useful and sort of technological: https://donorschoose.com

It really doesn't require any new software or particular teacher training, only that the text be made editable, which is very much not the default now.

I don't have a non-university link, but the article I remember is Bill Bernhardt, "Reading and writing between the lines: an interactive approach using computers", Journal of Reading March 1994. (on jstor as a pdf composed of noneditable bitmaps)

Those aren't practical skills that need to be taught to secondary school students. They need to learn mathematics, writing, reading, literature, science, etc. They don't need to learn how to code, they don't need to learn how to make memes in Paint or youtube videos of themselves playing minecraft, nor how to play irrelevant (if fun) games like Chess.

>Only use for computers is for people to write documents, search online, print and... waste a lot of time on games, social networks.

We certainly were not allowed to be on social networks or games during computer lab time whe{re,n} I went to high school.

>Then, test taking could use more automation. Lots of teachers do their test taking by hand... Grading tests without an written answer is very easy to implement.

That's simply not true. Test taking is done in written form for good reason. It's possible to draw diagrammes, to write emphasis, use italics, etc. without learning some arcane editor or (worse) syntax when you're meant to be doing a test.

Marking tests without a written answer might be easy to implement, but that just encourages more fucking shit tests like they have in the US, where there are few written answers. EVERY test should be ENTIRELY written answers.

At a ballpark a 30 student class might be ~12,000$ per student, but a starting teacher salary is on average ~45,000. Pay the teacher 120k (including benefits) and that's still only 1/3 of the total cost. (NYC pays over 20k per student and pays teachers $54,000 - $119,000 annually.) http://www.teachingdegree.org/new-york/salary/

[0]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...

[1]http://study.com/articles/Average_Salary_With_A_Bachelors_De...

For anyone else who had trouble parsing the article, here's a TL;DR:

1. Why buy fancy top-of-the-line hardware when something cheap and utilitarian will do just fine?

2. The author's figure is made up. He takes an estimate of total spending and then assumes 70% of it was wasted. Based on unsubstantiated personal anecdote. But there's a page-long rant about cookware written in cringe-worthy style.

My take:

I'm sympathetic with (1). But I also know some people in K-12 IT. They're professionals with some accounting education who know how to perform a reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

Sometimes money gets wasted on expensive toys.

But sometimes it's less expensive to stick with Macs or Windows machines than retrain hundreds of teachers on Chrome OS or whatever. Sometimes there's bundling and the 30% or 70% that never gets used represented a 0% additional cost to the school. And sometimes people are just stupid.