101–110 of 335 posts
Glad I never had a teacher with such an unfortunate attitude. Rubbish/failed experiment - maybe you should ask yourself why you were unable to integrate modern technology into your teaching.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13780702 and marked it off-topic.
Finally. It was always so hard to see schools spend millions on expensive Apple tech when there was equivalent equipment available for half the price that met their needs equivalently well. We really don't need to be spending $400-500 per tablet to outfit a classroom with 1 device for every 3 kids, when each kid really needs their own.
It's telling that MIT still lectures with blackboards while other universities spend oodles of dollars on expensive electric whiteboards, projectors and whatnot.
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> I'm also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful. Depends on the use case. So in your case where you teach programming, it makes sense, but there are legitimate cases where it makes sense to not expose the filesystem directly and disallow native apps. This has the benefit of better security.
It's a school, and people are there to learn. Knowing how to maintain a computer is a pretty darn useful life skill.
If you want teachers & students to use tech it needs to be truly frictionless.
Schools should start using Linux more.
It was well known the average GPA dropped by a sizable amount (mine personally by nearly .5). There wasn't a good way for the school to lock down games, and it was really hard to self regulate. The technology side of Canvas worked pretty well once teachers knew how to use it, but the fact that so many games could be played just distracted the hell out of everyone, and the teachers knew this. Without a way to lock down device gaming, I don't think they're a good idea in a school environment unless you antipate and actively try to curb gaming, but this can be hard and will make the teacher seem like the bad guy, which is never a good thing.
I'm a HS teacher. I was so happy when my school finally phased out iPads as the designated device for our year 7 students. It's such a rubbish device for content creation. The touchscreen is a POS for anything other than web browsing and casual games. Teaching coding, image manipulation, file manipulation was utterly painful or impossible. Typing on them is beyond painful and of the hundreds of students I taught, few…
The biggest problem I saw was the inability to mass-create Apple ID's for all the iPads. Leading the classroom through doing so was very frustrating.
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> Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. What to your mind would not be rubbish? I'm a Microsoft employee, so I have a vested interest in Windows devices being the dominant choice for schools, but I don't see anything realistic students at the high school or below level couldn't do on Chromebooks. Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" is not high school in the US.…
> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them t…
They could have received iPads, Windows or linux setups... Wouldn't have mattered since there was no plan in place.
I'm at a point where I strongly believe schools should just hand out Raspberry Pis to students to tinker with instead. Add a proper curriculum and let the students fail, mess up their RPIs to get to know the system. Let them write simple scripts. Anything. RPIs are easy to restore.
Maybe other schools are doing better over here, but when my nephew (growing up with minecraft/pokemon go on mobile only) didn't dare to touch most of the stuff on his school laptop due to being afraid of messing up I tried very hard not to scream.
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Schools are always looking for ways that teachers can teach without doing work and students can learn without doing work, and computers are the magic tool that promises to do that. It's like using a forklift to raise the barbell. Sure, the barbell goes up, but you don't get any stronger.
Yes. However, if your goal is to learn to lift up large masses, learning to operate a forklift is a good thing to do. (I cannot write about a "forklift operator" without asking if you have seen this German "educational" film. It starts slowly, but... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo )
My daughter wasn't allowed to use a computer for homework and such until she got to 8th grade (it is a private school and it is their policy -- they should be playing outside with friends and not spending hours shooting monsters and watching TV). When they get to 8th grade, the policy then says the kids needed to have a computer. They get classes on keyboarding, creating web pages, binary math, programming with Scratch, and they start doing homework on their computers.
They were told they could use either Macs or PCs, no preference. We got our daughter a decent Lenovo PC; it is better than my own computer. After a year, she would have none of it, as nearly all of her classmates have Macs. It simply has caché that PCs don't. My daughter was willing to go through a second learning curve and convert her 16th birthday present in order to get a Mac, just to be like her friends at school.
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Thanks for clarifying. I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding. I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding. I think they can probably work there, but you're right that a "real" computer is a better choice for that.
I'm running a coding class right now that is almost entirely run over ssh on chromebooks to a linux server. Works beautifully. No fancy IDE, but lots of actual learning to code.