Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

theprivacydad.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 173 posts

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#61

Post by Cthulhu_ »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #7

Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy. The amount of incompetence is beyond reason. My daughter(12)'s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called 'safe exam browser' that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard. Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class. I will honestly prefer to ju…

The amount of damage and breakages to these laptops has to be insane. Teenagers yeet their bags, mess with each other's tech, etc. As a school you can't make the parents responsible for damages, because a lot simply cannot afford replacements or repairs.

While IT skills are important and should be taught at schools, please do it in the traditional fashion; have a computer lab, make everything abuse resistant, and get a favorable repair / maintenance contract.

We have a 15 year old that managed to destroy 3 or 4 laptops and four phones in the span of five years.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#62

Post by op00to »

blackhaz wrote: post #48
throwaway71271 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are very much responsible for being on the wrong side in the war against general purpose computing. The "user" not being able to change or understand any single program they use, being driven further and further away form the technology, in an almost comical way, that we have arrived to the point of "I dont know if i can plug a keyboard in my laptop". She tried to save a file, which of course did not work due to s…

Oh yeah, those kids don't understand the concept of a file, or where and how it is actually stored, or what the file format represents, or that they can even change anything. They don't care about storage, as everything is intangible in the cloud. Our children are dumbed down by the cloud and Google going out of its way to present everything the Google way. We are decoupling our children from the actual underlying el…

None of this matters in real life.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#63

Post by aleph_minus_one »

caldarons wrote: post #21
throwaway71271 wrote: post #7

Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy. The amount of incompetence is beyond reason. My daughter(12)'s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called 'safe exam browser' that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard. Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class. I will honestly prefer to ju…

As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea. In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it ev…

> Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.

I would not fault computers here. At my school time, when pupils were bored, they covertly played card games like Skat [a German card game] or graph paper games like Battleship, Racetrack, Connect Four, ... under the school desks.

I still remember this one girl who, when the teacher confiscated one deck of Skat cards, the moment that the teacher looked away, simply took out another deck from her school bag, and play continued (she played Skat semi-competitively, so she nearly always had, I think, dozens of decks of Skat cards in her school bag).

Another former friend had an insane creativity in turning stuff that one could find in a pencil case into contraptions for shooting rubber pieces.

Technology changes over time, humans don't.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#64

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ho_schi wrote: post #37
throwaway71271 wrote: post #7

Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy. The amount of incompetence is beyond reason. My daughter(12)'s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called 'safe exam browser' that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard. Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class. I will honestly prefer to ju…

As far as I know Sweden is rolling back[1]large parts of the digitalization at schools. Not just because of cloud usage, maintenance and incompetence. The digital devices harm learning. Sweden will spend 60 million for reintroducing actual books, focus on actual reading and writing (important for learning and motoric ability). I’m not surprised. While I’m sceptic about many positions of Manfred Spitzer [2] (Universit…

Actual reading is super important; the letteredness of people has been in decline for decades, and while it's partially to blame on the shift in entertainment preferences, schools de-emphasising reading and understanding in favor of other skills has been a big factor as well.

Your remark about the suppliers wanting to get the kids "hooked" on their products isn't new btw, this was happening 20+ years ago already with MS Office and co.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#65

Post by andybak »

caldarons wrote: post #21
throwaway71271 wrote: post #7

Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy. The amount of incompetence is beyond reason. My daughter(12)'s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called 'safe exam browser' that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard. Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class. I will honestly prefer to ju…

As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea. In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it ev…

Would the issue be resolved by a resiliant way to lock all devices into a particular mode?

i.e. "Word processing only" "specific website(s) only" etc

I'm aware that actually implementing this in a fool-proof way is non-trivial - but would it in theory solve the issue and allow the benefits of tech?

I can't imagine taking notes by hand any more.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#66

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

op00to wrote: post #51
caldarons wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea. In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it ev…

It’s amazing that laptops were the thing that introduced distraction to pupils in school. Not paper football. Not whispering. Not passing notes. Not staring out the window. Not sleeping. Not spending too much time in the bathroom.

The person you're replying to never said anything like it, they said it made distraction worse. You're arguing in bad faith.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#67

Post by kergonath »

op00to wrote: post #51
caldarons wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea. In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it ev…

It’s amazing that laptops were the thing that introduced distraction to pupils in school. Not paper football. Not whispering. Not passing notes. Not staring out the window. Not sleeping. Not spending too much time in the bathroom.

That’s a straw man. Nobody said that there were no distractions in classrooms before laptops, just that they made it orders of magnitude worse. Which they did.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#68

Post by mikej1000 »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #7

Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy. The amount of incompetence is beyond reason. My daughter(12)'s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called 'safe exam browser' that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard. Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class. I will honestly prefer to ju…

I think they're a problem in universities too. I'm sure I've seen research that suggests students in lectures who take notes on paper get better grades that students who use laptops in lectures.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#69

Post by westurner »

Notes about the "Turn on Linux" button that's still greyed out for students: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ ctrl-f "Turn on Linux"

Students cannot use Chromebooks to Linux, Python, or Git.

Google Colab requires internet access to run a notebook.

JupyterLite doesn't yet have "GitBash" in a terminal in WASM; though Chrome does now support local filesystem access for notebooks and data.

VScode + Containers or no deal.

Re: Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

#70

Post by noir_lord »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #45
a321neo wrote: post #24

Public sector IT in Denmark has been in a weird tug of war between those eager to sell out our data to American companies and those who naively think Ubuntu and LibreOffice can realistically replace the public sector's dependency on Microsoft. We need to keep our data in Denmark and become less dependent on American companies (and especially Microsoft/Google). But the change needs to be led by IT professionals who ca…

I'm far from a Linux zealot, in fact I'm writing this from Windows as it's the OS I prefer for my personal computing needs, but I don't see much of a problem with elderly office workers using Linux. The main problem with Linux usability is installing and updating it. If all you do is browse, fill web forms and write documents, and you have the software to do so installed and maintained by someone else, I don't see ho…

If someone else is doing the maintenance then moving from Windows to Linux is no different than from Windows to Chromebook (arguably easier) for the average senior.

I moved my mum to Linux over Windows about a decade ago and her only requirement for a computer is that it has to run that "minty thing" - bless her, she has no idea what an OS is or why she should care.

Post reply on HN