431–440 of 454 posts
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How is handwriting important for cognitive development?
Presumably the combination of concentration, fine motor skills, and language use.
I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development. After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left. In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech an…
I have very bad handwriting due to dysgraphia. I suffered a lot in older years of school due to lack of ability to use Word/Latex homework to submit homework. Handwriting is not as important.
But what is exttenely important is ability to think with writing/drawing. Because at the end, paper is still the most free form of writing/drawingyou can do and actually creates and reinforces that individuals own style. Computers, however good you have them, at the end force students into one style of exposition which is the software you are using. Whether word or latex.
Paper allow you and force you to develop you own style of writing/organization information which is essentially what teaching is all about.
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I assume "AI workflows" means knowing how to split up a task to create a chain of agents that can complete a specific task reliably. A bit like software development.
The problem is that the task you've defined "split up a task to create a chain of agents" has changed dramatically in just the last six months, nevermind the last two years. You're wasting effort and teaching an obsolete technology if you try to make primary/secondary education too topical. Students can learn how to decompose a task and how to think critically without ever touching a Large Language Model.
I love how entire cohorts of students across a country are used in education experiments! America dropped the "phoneme, sound it out" of decades past and taught students to recognise word "shapes" and learn what they said. It was a complete, and total failure. Children did not learn to read. What never comes up in the news is the absolutely crazy approach to rolling this out..... "Amazing new education idea is here!…
You make it sound like there is an obvious solution to this. So what is it? No changes ever? Make 20 year experiments before rolling out any change at scale? Hold decision makers personally accountable for billions of GDP loss? Compensate the cohort monetarily for the generational inconvenience? For some things there just is no easy way.
Basically. It wouldn't require a 20 year experiment probably. Looking at whole words vs phonics as an example, you'd get a handful of schools to participate and they'd try phonics in one class and whole word in the other. By the time the kids were in 2nd grade the fact that whole word learning wasn't working and that a higher rate of kids needed remedial lessons to catch up would have been obvious. And if it had worked really well you'd expect to see that performance improvement in reading by 2nd grade too!
So the experiment would take 3 years. Though then you'd probably want a larger scale experiment. I'd think if things were going well once kindergarten finished you could probably start involving more schools in the experimwnt the next year. So like 3-6 years altogether.
We have been successfully educating kids for a long time; if we want to mix things up with some fancy new pedagogy we should absolutely be studying if it actually works before rolling it out at scale!
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TBH the problem is not the iPad here. An offline iPad with a limited set of educational apps/books would be a good classroom aid Of course, an iPad without those limits is bad
Are you certain about that being "good"?
I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development. After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left. In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech an…
I do think that digital technology was introduced a bad way in most schools. In my own experience it was less "digital technology education" and more "navigate Microsoft windows UI education". The teachers didn't know much about computers, of course the result was mostly a waste of time. I think the first thing kids should be taught in computer class is touch typing.
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Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom, or 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up visual intuition? Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python? Should kids be forced to use physical copies of newspapers and journal articles instead of learning how to look things up in a database? I'm all for going back to analog where it makes sense, but it seems wrongheaded to completel…
Until most kids are about 12 - 14 years old, they're learning much more basic concepts than you're describing. I don't think anyone is trying to take intro to computer science out of high schools or preventing an advanced student younger than that from the same. I would rather a teacher have to draw a concept on a board than have each student watch an animation on their computer. Obviously, the teacher projecting the…
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> Although [touch typing] refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys ... the term is often used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for specific other keys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing I think they're referring to the latter.
The strict definition of touch typing reminds me of how when I was a kid, my parents would always tell me that there’s a specific way of holding chopsticks. You gotta hold the top one like a pencil, and rest the bottom one between the crook of your fingers and your ring finger, and make sure they’re the same length and the bottom one isn’t moving and you’re just using it as a base to press against. And then I became…
I've heard this before too but apparently most people hold a pencil wrong anyway so it doesn't actually help.
The same goes for college. I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard. When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head. Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder…
> Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard. I'm a gen Z college student (born 2005) and this is pretty much what I do all the time. I attend most of the lectures, even if they are not very good and I take notes with a pen during each of them. Some people at my school see it as being subservient to the professors and wasting time, but for me it'…