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

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

#71

Post by gregweng »

untog wrote: post #10
delecti wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people who need to do 9x14 when they have no access to a calculator is pretty much zero.

That doesn't mean it isn't a valuable skill. Mental arithmetic can also improve other brain skills.

No? As an Asian student I have seen countless people try to push their children to exercise arithmetic skills because they believe that does good to their brains. However, it only misleads children to hate "math" and sometimes even their lives based on this the most important subject again and again. Moreover, children would wholly waste their exercised brain on the ruined confidence because some of them just cannot "recite" the patterns well among questions in tests, because you're required to answer too much questions during too short time, which means if you cannot recite the solution patterns from textbook and calculate the answers right at first time, you barely have no chance to try it again. Even those who did excellently in those high-school tests will face another crash at the beginning of university, because the "real math" no matter cares your arithmetic skills, but your abstract thinking and the feeling to grab and deduct rules from axiom. After all, except those real geniuses can conquer these two very different requirements and continuously get payback from that, I don't see any benefits from focusing on arithmetic with so high-strength training.

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

#72

Post by VLM »

pc86 wrote: post #7
jacquesm wrote: 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)?

You only have two sig figs at best for an engineering estimate you could get close by rounding up to 10x15 which is 150. The error on both terms is gonna round to about ten so subtract both error factors from the 1st order estimate and get about 150-10-10 aka a decent engineering estimate done in the head to two sig figs is 130. Thats not too far from a calculated answer, only a couple percent off, which is smaller than the measurement error.

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.

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

#73

Post by panzagl »

b6 wrote: post #46

This was really painful to read. 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 ma…

Tablets are just the next step in replacing teachers with their exorbitant $40K salaries with half that number of $10/hr babysitters, so more money can be funneled to the companies providing the curriculum and testing.

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

#74

Post by VLM »

bonesinger wrote: post #39
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #22

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 ev…

"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.

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

#75

Post by TeMPOraL »

edc117 wrote: post #65
TeMPOraL wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#76

Post by Cthulhu_ »

joeevans1000 wrote: post #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 debacl…

You could argue the same about Windows / Office (required in a lot of schools), student discounts for software packages (notably Photoshop and other high-priced pieces of software), even Linux. There is IMO no such thing as a neutral choice of software, although free software doesn't have commercial goals so it gets more kudos from me. Still, you can't go "I only know vim" when your job is to work with Word / Excel (lots of jobs there).

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

#77

Post by striking »

csydas wrote: post #51
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #22

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…

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 Mackee…

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.

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

#78

Post by megaman22 »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #22

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…

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.

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

#79

Post by dublinben »

greyman wrote: post #68
joeevans1000 wrote: post #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 debacl…

Linux, Raspberry Pi and robots are very specialized topics... we are talking about general education of 8 years old kids.

General education of 8 year olds does not require expensive computing devices.

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

#80

Post by megaman22 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
edc117 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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