111–120 of 203 posts
This is hilarious, and quite impressive given the presumed age of the kids that'd be interested in doing this. I'm sure some K-12 tech staff are stressing over the exploit right now.
If someone is smart enough to find this and unenroll their device, they're probably smart enough to be left to their own devices. (Literally)
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School should be preparing people for the “real world” after graduation. Learning to think on the computer is a useful skill and 6th graders US (11 year olds are year 7 in UK) have had half a decade of paper instruction. So making the jump at 11 is perfectly reasonable. Chromebook is simply cheap to buy and manage. The point of these is a simple tool, little different than a calculator. If Google offends you feel fre…
I think we all had no problem growing up being ready for IT, and my parents can do taxes online. Forcing kids to do everything online in school and at home is what's fundamentally new and wrong here. There is no option of paper. Of course, unless by "real world" we mean an army of zombies training somebody's else AI and consuming reprocessed digital matter... I wish Chromebook was only a calculator at school, but kid…
The same is true for computers. Most people may stumble through doing their taxes, can watch YouTube, and figure out email but they aren’t fluent. If I asked you what the current light speed delay between earth and Saturn is right now you could probably find out it’s somewhere between 87.66 and 71.02 minutes in a few seconds. But, finding it was 1 hours, 29 minutes and 36.6430 seconds from earth as I write this involved more effort and having some idea where to look.
You might not think of that as computer literacy, but people need to know how to do more than just the GUI on a WYSIWTG editor to actually write a good essay.
I wouldn't have a career in IT if I hadn't spent many hours at ages 11 to 15 trying to get round my schools network security. My logon was frequently disabled for misuse and I was even suspended for a couple of days once but I learnt more that way than in any class I've ever taken.
We managed to figure out how to override our typing program to give certificates saying we typed 200wpm at 100% accuracy. By passed the internet filter to access gmail (back in it's early days, we held onto that ability for a while) and a few other things I forget about now. He was one of my favorite teachers.
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I'm not the person you responded to, but when I was in school, if a class didn't captivate me, it wasn't going to be any better if I "paid more attention". It was either I'm listening and actively learning, or I'm bored. We didn't have laptops back then. Now when I do learn, with the benefit of experience and technology, it's a mix of videos + active research / googling. And I often enough just leave educational vide…
> There really are different types of learners, and applying one method to everybody means some people lose out. You get it -- this is exactly what I'm getting at. The second issue here is that many people grow up thinking they're bad at a lot of things, when in reality they just were bad at learning it in the prescribed way. My favorite example is the one computer science course I took, I failed. And I failed it har…
I spent half my life convinced that I was bad at mathematics. My math grades in high school dropped sharply the second we hit algebra, and they never really recovered. When I decided to reorient my studies towards programming approaching my mid 20s, this led to me missing some HS prerequisites. Long story short, we have 3 levels of math classes in the last two grades of high school here, I passed the mid-level of 4th grade, needed mid-level of 5th grade at least. So I enrolled in remote HS for this one class.
All it took was me sitting down with the teacher once and grilling him with all my questions for everything I misunderstood as a teen to finally click. Working on exercises on my own terms, and actually having the opportunity to understand _why_ things work the way they do rather than just learning obscure formulas and applying them, let me realize "well shit, this stuff's actually easy". I aced the class, got my prerequisite, and got in my CS program. The rest is history, I've now been working for almost 7 years, stepped up from junior to leading my own team.
I'd wager I'm far from alone in this situation. The one-size-fits-all approach to education is IMHO doing more harm than good.
I hope I don't sound like a Luddite, but I don't think kids should have chrome books, or any type of laptops in school...
Sorry to dash your hopes but you do, in fact, sound like a Luddite. Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20 years.
I wouldn't have a career in IT if I hadn't spent many hours at ages 11 to 15 trying to get round my schools network security. My logon was frequently disabled for misuse and I was even suspended for a couple of days once but I learnt more that way than in any class I've ever taken.
I hope I don't sound like a Luddite, but I don't think kids should have chrome books, or any type of laptops in school...
Getting Chromebooks to schools is the single most horrific act we could have done to our education system. This act undermines the very future of our nations. A big proportion of all the classwork and homework is now done on the screen. There is plenty of evidence that handwriting boosts cognitive processes - thinking on paper is something that the next generation will mostly lack. Rich and powerful are all aware of…
I don't see why you would want to sabotage the next generation by denying them access to the tools which would be available to them in the workplace.
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Getting Chromebooks to schools is the single most horrific act we could have done to our education system. This act undermines the very future of our nations. A big proportion of all the classwork and homework is now done on the screen. There is plenty of evidence that handwriting boosts cognitive processes - thinking on paper is something that the next generation will mostly lack. Rich and powerful are all aware of…
School should be preparing people for the “real world” after graduation. Learning to think on the computer is a useful skill and 6th graders US (11 year olds are year 7 in UK) have had half a decade of paper instruction. So making the jump at 11 is perfectly reasonable. Chromebook is simply cheap to buy and manage. The point of these is a simple tool, little different than a calculator. If Google offends you feel fre…
Instead, they catered to the same jackasses who featurespec'd SharePoint. Missed opportunity.
_However_, I’m a little more ambivalent knowing that most of them do that to look at naked ladies, presumably. Maybe create pictures of naked ladies (again: very impressed by Generative AI, with the caveat that it’s widely used for pr0n)
That doesn’t feel ideal for the emotional maturation of middle-schooler. In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Nowadays, it also means risking ending on a psyops from Russian secret service, whatever Andrew Tate is (and please, don’t tell me: that’s one shred of innocence I want to keep) or, inexplicable, worse. I remember ridiculing music producers who were saying that if you didn’t pay for CDs, you would end up empowering “pedonazis”. That felt ridiculous at the time. It feels less so now, both not paying for music and enabling actual pedophiles and actual nazis by sticking blindly to open-web principles.
I am very happy that the kids stick it to the man. I feel like we grey manes need to put our heads together and think about how we talk to them about emotional maturation, bad people, and safely exploring. It will sound ridiculous coming from the generation that cared about Facebook, but I feel like we can’t just stand in the bleachers and clap every time the JV red team scores a point.
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I think this vastly overestimates the difficulty in learning how to use a computer. How is it that entire generations of people were able to get through school with no computer classes whatsoever and still able to invent computers, the internet, the very software you're using to talk with us right now? Decades of research in interface design have gone into making computers easy to use, user friendly, and accessible.…
Learning how to use a computer is like learning how to use a pen. It’s not binary there is a huge difference between knowing how to say surf the web and actually know how to use it for research. Carpentry a great analogy as you can learn the basic skills to build a perfectly functional house in a few weeks. However, you can literally spend a lifetime mastering it. So, let’s not pretend the bare minimum of computer li…