Live data from Hacker News

I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

washingtonpost.com

31–40 of 127 posts

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#31
post #7
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But calculators actually did negatively impact basic arithmetic skills. The number of people that can't do 9x14 without reaching for a calculator is scary.

To this point is there an easier way to do this than mentally do (9x10)+(9x4), which is what I've done since I was in elementary school (29 now)?

I find (10x14) - (1x14) = 140 - 14 = 126 slightly quicker and less error prone than carrying the ten across the hundred boundary with 9x10 + 9x4 = 90 + 36 = 126, I'm not an educator though so there may be better ways taught now.

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.

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#32
I'm surprised that (by appearances) these iPads were in essentially full-time 1:1 use in a 3rd grade classroom, when students have a lot of learning to do about and through movement and physical manipulation, not to mention social engagement.

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.

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#33
So the real issue here is the lack of in person face to face? Which is the continued argument that adults/college students don’t know how to handle social interactions with tech. Is it possible adults/college students don’t know how to handle social interaction with tech around because their exposure was much later in life? Is the lesson these kids learning even more important? How to hold on to humanity in the face of technology. Or possibly humanity and tech has entirely different direction and we are just trying to fight it all together.

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#34
Remember when that guy was offering to buy every classroom free TVs in exchange for the school's commitment to have the kids watch a certain amount of programming a day? The programming included ads. This seems the same. Having the kids load linux onto laptops, yeah... I could understand the value in that. Having them work with Raspberry Pi's, I could see the merit in that. Program robots? Definitely. But this debacle of Apple products for kids has been terrible. I do believe the schools and city councils are well meaning. Yes, these expenditures are so huge the city councils have to often get involved. But introducing kids to computing via the walled gardens of Apple are a disservice to them, and a step back, in my opinion. Apple devices are imminently non-configurable... they are designed to walk you through the computing experience, training you to seek the help of 'geniuses' as opposed to becoming your own genius. The cost of these programs is astounding. Districts could be loading linux onto machines bought for relatively nothing... those linux skills would be immediately applicable to Raspberry Pis and to robots. Are schools afraid of really educating their students, as opposed to making them dependents of Apple's consumer culture?

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#35
post #25

Good lord.... I don't think I can roll my eyes hard enough.... > 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…

> but please tell me why playing with Legos is any more valuable than playing minecraft? She did - because it encouraged collaboration and conversation.

Minecraft has servers that multiple people can join in on and there are audio chat programs but if they are in the same room they can just talk to each other as well.

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#37
post #4

Change is hard. When computers were first introduced to schools there were similar arguments and complaints. When calculators were brought in instead of the slide rule we heard it would be the end of actually "knowing" math. Teachers who are great find ways to use technology and tools available to inspire their students and create engaging lessons. This teacher just sounds resistant to change.

Change also doesn't just happen because you dumped a computer in a room. I personally haven't seen a computer used effectively in a classroom, in a large part because the teachers don't know how to integrate them into their lessons. They were given devices and then given no instruction on how to use them.

Education is just barely starting to come out of what I call the "... but on a computer!" [1] era, which is when you try to do exactly the same thing you did before, but now it's on a computer (or a tablet in this case).

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.

[1]: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#38

Change is hard. When computers were first introduced to schools there were similar arguments and complaints. When calculators were brought in instead of the slide rule we heard it would be the end of actually "knowing" math. Teachers who are great find ways to use technology and tools available to inspire their students and create engaging lessons. This teacher just sounds resistant to change.

Two counter-points... 1. Computers in classrooms have rarely, if ever, been deployed to entire classrooms in the way that tablets can be. Typically, you'll see one or two PCs in a class, plus a computer lab. PCs don't distract in the same way iPads can. 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 rel…

But you as a parent could easily fix that. Schools don't have a monopoly on education.

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#39

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…

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.

Re: I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

#40
post #3

Change is hard. When computers were first introduced to schools there were similar arguments and complaints. When calculators were brought in instead of the slide rule we heard it would be the end of actually "knowing" math. Teachers who are great find ways to use technology and tools available to inspire their students and create engaging lessons. This teacher just sounds resistant to change.

But calculators actually did negatively impact basic arithmetic skills. The number of people that can't do 9x14 without reaching for a calculator is scary.

> negatively impact basic arithmetic skills

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.

Post reply on HN