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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#311

Post by phyllistine »

luzojeda wrote: post #274
phyllistine wrote: post #71

This is largely just anti tech puritanism. I cant comment on the psych and neurological arguments, but the following line of reasoning > A pre-Covid survey exploring how US students aged 8-18 utilize digital technologies both inside and outside of school provides the answer (values below are per week) ...If we extrapolate and consider a typical U.S. academic school year of 36 weeks, these numbers suggest that student…

IMO the correct analogy would be a physical object where you could switch back and forth between Harry Potter and books used for learning. If that were the case I'd agree with you. But here we are talking about two separate distinct physical objects, the Harry Potter book and, for example, a biology book. When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in…

Switching to nonsense with physical books is as easy as having two books in your bag/desk, or reading a physical newspaper with a comics section. Treating the ability to switch context quickly as essentially bad for learning is reductive, especially when the ability to add more context (searching unknown words, useful videos, articles etc) can obviously be incredibly useful.

Stopping the ability to do ctrl+T+reddit.com also prevents the huge amount of info the rest of the informative internet can provide.

The article also includes smart watches as computers, and personally as a Apple Watch user, the amount that this device can distract is incredibly low, and obvious to viewers like a teacher.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#312

Post by williamcotton »

jdprgm wrote: post #293
donatj wrote: post #10

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…

I've always thought it would be interesting to have a education system that focused primarily on the best outcome for the brightest students and focused the vast majority of resources on the top 5% or so. I wonder if the total impact made (gdp, research contributions, etc) by a cohort of students this way would be higher vs spending resources to slightly bring up the average on a large number of students that never m…

There are concrete objectives for educating a voting public in a democracy that would be entirely unserved by this proposal.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#313

Post by rahimnathwani »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #292
rahimnathwani wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered Have you tried Math Academy? From seeing my son using it, I'm guessing it's more effective than live coaching from a median middle school math teacher.

I saw that on HN recently, and it does look good, but haven't tried it yet. I might give it a try. One factor is I'm my son's math coach so I don't mind sitting down with him and books (he's 2 grades ahead). This isn't to say EdTech can't be useful, and my previous comment was perhaps a bit harsh. Khan Academy is great for drilling into specific subjects; my older child (now finished college) used it at home in HS as…

  I'm not even sure it's a good classroom tool, but rather is a useful _supplement_
We may soon get to a point where, for certain subjects, edtech is the classroom tool, and the teacher/coach is the supplement.

  I don't mind sitting down with him and books (he's 2 grades ahead).
My son is also 2 grades ahead in math. He skipped Kindergarten and now, in 3rd grade, he does math with the 4th grade class (which is currently working through the Singapore Math 4A book).

At home, he's just over half way through Math Academy's 5th grade curriculum (which is roughly equivalent to 5th grade common core standards). He still comes to me with questions. Sometimes, I can give a great, personalized explanation just because I know him well, we have shared context etc. But usually he's just been too aggressive at skipping past the explanations or worked examples in the MA lesson, and I just tell him to scroll up and read. He does that and says 'oooh, now I get it...' and then he can continue on his own.

What I'm trying to say is: I also don't mind sitting down with my son with math books. But it's more effective for MA to be the core experience, and for me to be an on-call coach (i.e. for me to the supplement).

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#314

Post by gamblor956 »

leereeves wrote: post #184
dpkirchner wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and that strong bias is likely driven by cost, not the equity boogeyman that causes many a jerked knee.

Can you name any examples of gifted programs being shut down, citing any reason other than equity? The examples I've seen, in New York, Seattle, and LA, all cited equity as the reason. Edit: I'm responding here to the comment "It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up."

LAUSD has gifted programs. As do the dozen other districts in LA County. NY also still has gifted programs...

Yes, some of these were shut down. It wasn't because of "equity". It was because of something called "budget cuts."

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#315

Post by agumonkey »

I stopped monitoring that side of tech, but early MOOCs (first gen coursera, edx, stanford) were as good or even better in some regards than my own college programming studies[0]. I could engage deeper in the material and there was some healthy emulation between people on the dedicated IRC rooms. On site college doesn't give you full focus, you might be distracted by people, teachers won't necessarily be more present for you (so not worse than rewatching a video)

bonus point: there were some famous names in our groups, it was fun to see the spread between absolute noobs and cpp iso standard contributor

[0] for programming, questions + test suites are very effective to try various ideas and see what fails. for other subjects, like philosophy it might differ

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#316

Post by [deleted] »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #161
parpfish wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think part of the reason computers swept into classrooms so quickly is that we had a generation of old folks seeing their jobs get computerized and they (correctly) felt that computer-literacy would be essential for a huge swath of the workforce. however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about te…

…except today's kids are not at all computer literate. They simply know how to click around and sometimes type.

[deleted]

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#317

Post by miningape »

Projectiboga wrote: post #210
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that the kids were learning ahead of the rest of the class and it made the teacher's life harder to keep track of where each kid is, or had to field questions outside of her expertise since often elementary school teachers only know enough to teach elementary school

On top of that the teacher has to juggle two tracks, the normal one and a special needs one. There has been a push for awhile to put mentally disabled kids in with their age peers and the teacher has to handle it, maybe with a low pay assistant.

Denmark did this about 10 years ago, the results pretty much speak for themselves: Everyone is frustrated with it, teachers, parents, students, as well as their special-needs counterparts.

Grades have been steadily decreasing across the board, while enrolment in private education has skyrocketed (private schools do not have to accept difficult students). The private education is particularly surprising as Denmark has a very strong tradition of public education, where private education was viewed as something for the "elites" of society (e.g. royalty), now it's becoming more and more common.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#318

Post by lifeisstillgood »

donatj wrote: post #10

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…

I love the idea of individual pacing of kids educational journies - if you do have the syllabus and software to take every kid individually through school, is it impossible for us to fund the school for five years - and after years of every kid walking out with top grades there might just be some social proof

It seems like it is possible - probably enough people on this thread could make that investment

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#319

Post by unsupp0rted »

luqtas wrote: post #181
unsupp0rted wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a teacher that was comfortably capable with even 50% of whatever EdTech they're handed. How are they supposed to maximize the use of it? I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the set…

as a counter-point, not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free…

* where "evidence-based" in pedagogy is a grad student who studied two classes of 13 Inuit 3rd graders in 2002 and extrapolated from there

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#320

Post by emodendroket »

lolinder wrote: post #78
donatj wrote: post #10

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…

The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that this is always done in the name of "equity", but the result is that the system perpetuates the inequities that already exist. Because the public schools force kids into grade bands and don't allow children who are ahead to learn at their level, wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropria…

It is not "always" done for that purpose; often people don't want children to learn things for other reasons, like wanting to have more control over them, not liking the implications of certain historical events, or having fanciful ideas about preventing their children from engaging in risky behaviors by pretending they don't exist.
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