I’m a teacher. Technology is important, but the way we (society not just schools) treat it has become at least of few of the 1000 cuts that have destroyed schools.
The practicality simply doesn’t pan out. Dealing with broken or uncharged Chromebooks cuts into teaching time, student learning time, and often leads to the most at risk kids becoming even further behind. When a kid doesn’t have their text book, you can plop one down, turn to the right page, and boom, they are back in the game. When a text book dies, you have to hope you have an extra in the room, it needs to be signed out of, the student needs to sign into it, then they need to go to Google Classroom and find the assignment. Or maybe they have it but it’s not charged. Extra chargers are not cheap, but also, having kids move to where there is a charger is disruptive.
I did the math one time, and Chromebook problems alone in one English class added up to something like 3 full days of missed calls time.
The costs are astronomical and students don’t respect them. Schools can have a hard time ensuring their investment stays in good shape and if a Chromebook gets busted, it can be very difficult to blame it on the student rather than normal wear and tear. Or administrators might have to make judgement calls as to whether they absorb the cost or make a student from a low income family pay for it.
There are great tools on computers, but we also lost a lot introducing them. Handwriting is atrocious these days and them not performing more handwriting is helping cause (among many other factors) difficulty in putting thoughts together and in writing well.
It is very difficult to consistently track AI usage, and because good teachers typically should be walking around and checking in on students as they work quietly, it can be hard to manage the nanny software we can use to make sure students are on the right websites.
Also, information about those tools like nanny software are not ubiquitously known. Some teachers know it and use it, some prioritize other things. There is no one way to operate a class.
Politicians love the idea of 1-to-1 technology for students. They think it leads to more equitable results. It doesn’t. It is a failure.
Now they can be incredible convenient for writing projects, and while it is a huge pain in the butt for a teach to plan and sign out computers or a computer lab for such projects, it also isn’t really worth having Chromebooks if you aren’t going to use them a lot.
Also, so many teachers don’t know how to incorporate the computer into the classroom. The other part is there are very few practical lessons about how best to use computers. You know how your parents will do things like search for a website on google rather than type it into the address bar? Yeah, teenagers are doing that, too.
The ways all the education websites shift and the way social media has trained kids intuitively has led to them not knowing how to use computers. You know how if you try Snapchat, there aren’t really labels for things, you kinda swipe around and figure it out? That’s great for Snapchat, but when you need to have more of a fine tuned ability on something like a word processor, the kids just kind of give up on them because it’s not just a swipe away or something.
In short, students haven’t earned Chromebooks. You shouldn’t type your papers until you have learned to write and plan out your essays by hand.
You know those videos of teacher crying because their seniors can’t read or write or just act incredibly apathetic? This is part of why.
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I’m a teacher. Technology is important, but the way we (society not just schools) treat it has become at least of few of the 1000 cuts that have destroyed schools.
The practicality simply doesn’t pan out. Dealing with broken or uncharged Chromebooks cuts into teaching time, student learning time, and often leads to the most at risk kids becoming even further behind. When a kid doesn’t have their text book, you can plop one down, turn to the right page, and boom, they are back in the game. When a text book dies, you have to hope you have an extra in the room, it needs to be signed out of, the student needs to sign into it, then they need to go to Google Classroom and find the assignment. Or maybe they have it but it’s not charged. Extra chargers are not cheap, but also, having kids move to where there is a charger is disruptive.
I did the math one time, and Chromebook problems alone in one English class added up to something like 3 full days of missed calls time.
The costs are astronomical and students don’t respect them. Schools can have a hard time ensuring their investment stays in good shape and if a Chromebook gets busted, it can be very difficult to blame it on the student rather than normal wear and tear. Or administrators might have to make judgement calls as to whether they absorb the cost or make a student from a low income family pay for it.
There are great tools on computers, but we also lost a lot introducing them. Handwriting is atrocious these days and them not performing more handwriting is helping cause (among many other factors) difficulty in putting thoughts together and in writing well.
It is very difficult to consistently track AI usage, and because good teachers typically should be walking around and checking in on students as they work quietly, it can be hard to manage the nanny software we can use to make sure students are on the right websites.
Also, information about those tools like nanny software are not ubiquitously known. Some teachers know it and use it, some prioritize other things. There is no one way to operate a class.
Politicians love the idea of 1-to-1 technology for students. They think it leads to more equitable results. It doesn’t. It is a failure.
Now they can be incredible convenient for writing projects, and while it is a huge pain in the butt for a teach to plan and sign out computers or a computer lab for such projects, it also isn’t really worth having Chromebooks if you aren’t going to use them a lot.
Also, so many teachers don’t know how to incorporate the computer into the classroom. The other part is there are very few practical lessons about how best to use computers. You know how your parents will do things like search for a website on google rather than type it into the address bar? Yeah, teenagers are doing that, too.
The ways all the education websites shift and the way social media has trained kids intuitively has led to them not knowing how to use computers. You know how if you try Snapchat, there aren’t really labels for things, you kinda swipe around and figure it out? That’s great for Snapchat, but when you need to have more of a fine tuned ability on something like a word processor, the kids just kind of give up on them because it’s not just a swipe away or something.
In short, students haven’t earned Chromebooks. You shouldn’t type your papers until you have learned to write and plan out your essays by hand.
You know those videos of teacher crying because their seniors can’t read or write or just act incredibly apathetic? This is part of why.