71–80 of 173 posts
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"I will honestly prefer to just ban all tech from schools." But can one really hope, to prepare students for life then?
It doesn't particularly seem like kids are learning about computers by using computers in school. They just have a constant distraction in front of them.
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…
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I would rather claim that this is a preparation for the corporate world where (except for the technology sector) work computers suck and are filled with corporate spyware. :-)
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Think of tech like chemistry class. We don't let kids carry around chemicals all day to use however they want. Instead, we have them do experiments in a special lab under close watch. Computers should be treated the same way. They shouldn't be something students can use anytime, anywhere without guidance. Just like we handle dangerous chemicals with care, we should also be careful with technology. It's powerful, and…
Not long ago (before the GWoT) you could just buy pretty damn good chemistry sets intended for children, that contained some pretty fun stuff. Then due to fear of drug labs and terrorism, those largely became relics of a better past.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Believe me, it matters for Google and other big tech who create this layer of abstraction between the reality and their customers. Because it matters for their bottom line. Initially the motive may have been totally benign, like making things easier. But the fact that they are profit-oriented corporations incentivizes them to deepen the abstraction further.
The end result? Google execs owning your skills and your data - they pwn you. You don't know how reality works anymore. You want to find a job? Pay Google. You want to store a photo? Pay Google. Wanna call someone? Pay Google. Want to draw something? Pay Google. Want to develop an app so you could at least have this feeling that you could draw something without paying Google? Pay Google.
They are going to be your overlords.
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…
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This argument is often made (and also wrt preparing pupils for their professional life). I don’t think it the reasons you imply are right.
The problem is that nothing they could use now in school will prepare them for what they will need to use in the future. The software, tools and devices they will need will change as technology keeps evolving. What they need to learn is the basics, how to adapt to a new platform and core OPSEC principles. And they can learn that on pretty much anything.
> We need more hackers.
I was a kid of the 1990s, I know what you mean. But I also was a hacker. We had access to computers at school, which was great. But we did not have to use them all the time for things that are better done by other means of communication.
My kid just spent a couple of hours doing some programming on his school laptop, which is fantastic. What is not is requiring the same laptop to take exams with bullshit spyware and requiring it in the classroom for lectures that would be better without them. Then, they are a distraction and they do not help.
> I just spent three hours last night working on spanish homework on a school supplied chromebook with a high schooler, and it was pathetic how bad the UX was, how poorly the laptop performed, and just how painful the entire experience is.
Yes, Chromebooks are terrible. They are actually a hindrance more than anything else.
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> I will honestly prefer to just ban all tech from schools. If we are talking about high schools and mainly technical high schools banning tech is contrary to the point of the school. I think a balanced view is better: carrying laptops on classes where you need them and also adapt classes if laptop could be beneficial. Even in elementary school, my child has robotics. In general, I think politicians use binary yes/no…
> laptops on classes where you need them Apart from lessons directly about computing and/or technology - of which there may be a handful of hours per week in a regular highschool - the number of subjects which "need a laptop" in high school is vanishingly small. > politicians use binary yes/no options because they are lazy and/or incapable of working or thinking harder Lobbyists don't even use binary. They're always…
My old high school used the LabPro/LoggerPro platform for that, and it became a core part of how physics and chemistry was taught. https://www.vernier.com/product/labpro/
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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…
Yea bored kids have always found ways to entertain themselves in class. But this is a matter of scale.
Kids being able to covertly play battleship on pen and paper is many steps removed from every kid in the class being constantly plugged into a network where the wealthiest companies in the world are spending billions of dollars competing for their attention.
Kids with unfettered access to the internet in the classroom might as well be sitting in a casino.
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The person you're replying to never said anything like it, they said it made distraction worse. You're arguing in bad faith.
“Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction”
Where did they say laptops introduced the concept of distraction to school?