331–340 of 358 posts
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And Television. And Radio. And tons of other things over the years. They aren't going away.
Do you watch TV or listen to radio in school unless the teacher introduces it as part of the learning process?
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I remember buying my first webcam and briefly visiting the forum the manufacturer had set up, in 1999 or 2000. Basically the "forum" was about a dozen guys live streaming (postage stamp sized) pictures of their dicks. I don't know exactly what changed, but you don't tend to see things that blatant as much anymore.
>but you don't tend to see things that blatant as much anymore. I think you stilldo. Chatroulette and similar services were besieged by them a few years ago.
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So in your view a school's main product is entertainment?
In my view, education is more effective if it is also entertaining. There's no particular reason why pedagogy can't take advantage of nearly ubiquitous computing hardware, other than the textbook and curriculum racket that publishers are running. The mammalian instinct for play is essentially a learning mechanism. All it takes to educate is to structure a game such that the lessons being learned are useful in the rea…
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>I'm not sure when the last time was I saw an ad on my phone. Are you running a flip phone? Because most smart phones I see these days have no less than 10 apps that can present ads or notifications at almost any given time.
No, they're just trying to smugly suggest that they're superior to everyone else because they've rooted their phone to run an ad blocker.
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So in your view a school's main product is entertainment?
In my view, education is more effective if it is also entertaining. There's no particular reason why pedagogy can't take advantage of nearly ubiquitous computing hardware, other than the textbook and curriculum racket that publishers are running. The mammalian instinct for play is essentially a learning mechanism. All it takes to educate is to structure a game such that the lessons being learned are useful in the rea…
This!
There's a game my 7 year old couldn't put down until he finished it. It teaches the concepts of basic Euclidean geometry. There are similar ones for algebra and programming that is a little bit beyond him now, but I'll try him on them again in a few months/year.
He also has made these contraptions with random materials. A hammock out of a bit of surplus netting, for instance. I'm pretty sure hours of Minecraft helped with the desire to create things.
Now I do need to find a gamification of basic logic and critical thinking...
I think this is a bad move. When I was in school, I didn't want to carry heavy books all the time. I downloaded Shakespeare and other eBooks, and wrote my own script to convert the text into 1000-character iPod Notes. When someone forgot their book to class, I could share mine with them. Will other portable electronics be banned, or only communication devices? What about the Ti-84 calculator, which is still required…
Oh come on, that's like saying bit torrents are used for downloading legitimate software. No one uses it for those purposes, just like no kid is using their ipod/ipad/iphone/iwhatever for downloading and scripting Shakespeare for class. You are an EXTREME outlier.
Most people are probably somewhere in between.
When a few students are naughty, should the teacher punish a whole class with detention? A whole generation?
TLDR: As a high school level teacher, this would be less of a problem if teachers had stronger enforcement powers. Since we often don't - I would strongly favor a ban. If students need a computer, we have them available all day, every day. As a high school level teacher, I appreciate the attitude that there are amazing opportunities for learning and skill development with computers. I agree with this wholeheartedly.…
At my kids' school, they encourage appropriate cell phone use in the school. For example, if there is a homework assignment on the board, rather than wait for everybody to copy it down, kids are told to take a picture of the board. They also insist on the kids using some kind of calendar to track everything and most kids use their phone calendar. There's some kind of Twitter-like service that is used for teacher-stud…
Bad choice: this is losing one opportunity to get them to write something. As a teacher, one should look for every possible occasion to practice writing, especially when it has a purpose.
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Children given unsupervised access to the internet is ridiculous. People freak out if a predator lives int heir neighborhood but they let their child be accessible to millions of predators via their phone or table. This is why kids initial exposure to porn is 8 in the US and 10 when kids are getting addicted. This is all happening prior to puberty. I still remember working with children and teens and found out, throu…
I'm torn on the issue. On the one hand, I view the early internet as saving me/raising me. I detested school, still do. Sure there were dangers back then too, but that's why we learnt to be skeptics, anonymous, question people's motives, and actually understand the technology. On the other hand, social networks weren't around, videos weren't really around, advertising wasn't around, nothing was monetized, there was n…
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This ban doesn't protect them from regular in-person bullying. Just crowd-sourced, Internet scale bullying. Ever had your photo released mockingly, and been laughed at by an entire school? Or even millions?
How does a phone ban stop this from happening? Not to mention the challenge of actually enforcing it. I suspect the kids who want to take pictures of others and upload them mockingly will still do it.
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> full of chalk and blackboard Thanks for the link to Mr. Alexandre's talk; very informative. He's a little heavy on the hyperbole but many of his warnings ring true, esp. the fact that Europe is squashed between the American GAFA and the Asian BATX, with no response of her own. That said, French schools are not esp. technology-adverse; most (all?) classrooms are equipped with a "TNI" (tableau noir interactif) which…
s/TNI/TBI/ : "tableau blanc interactif". Having led some experiments with those, I am not sure they are a real improvement over a chalkboard: - they cost much more and are pretty useless without computers / tablets for the teacher and pupils - they require skills from the teachers to operate them - the software ecosystem is poor - slightly OT, wifi is not allowed in schools So, while the concept is attractive, the cu…
I did discuss this with my children's teachers and challenge the whole concept, since like you I thought there should be a lot of value to justify replacing an ages-old technology that doesn't require power with a fragile one that can break and needs to be plugged in.
I was surprised to see the teachers themselves were very enthusiastic about it.
The one feature that really sold the technology to me was the fact that one can switch from the problem to the correction and back, which is impossible to do with chalk.
Also, teachers can prepare the lessons in advance. Basically, it helps productivity, it saves time. Another detail, the teacher faces the class when writing on the TNI, instead of turning her back to the pupils, which I remember was a great opportunity for children to be unruly.
(And TNIs didn't remove blackboards, they're in addition to them; if the TNI stops working or if the teacher prefers, blackboards are still there and still available.)