It's because medtech is only useful if individualized, and individualized does not scale. You will end up with 'range' of kids, but even that is dumb because each children apprehend different subjects differently. You can put each kid in a range for each subject (history, language, math), but even that isn't enough. In the end, it just cost 'too much' (I.E more than we want to spend).
The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
81–90 of 528 posts
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#82IMO education is still built around Victorian structures and needs to be reworked from examinations downwards. Examinations are an exercise in being good at examinations, not proficiency in the subject. Once you strip that away the you wind back all the structures that feed it. You can see this working at schools designed for the neuro diverse. Those students simply can't sit and listen to a teacher all day, so each…
In my opinion without exams, kids will never solidify what they learn. It’s usually pretty easy to think you have a solid grasp of some thing until you’re actually asked to solve a brand new problem.
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#83Router-manufacturer should be mandated to implement a functionality that allows applying a whitelist filter for certain times of a day. It would have helped me a lot as a parent to make sure that my children can only access Desmos, online Office sites etc. while they are supposed to do their homework.
Unfortunately the internet has been corrupted by JavaScript. A website is rarely loading a single site anymore. Try noscript and you'll quickly see that, even a trivial website loads dozens of dependencies. Dependencies that shift over time.
Reality is whitelisting can't work as you'll simply break websites. This has been my experience at several schools now. Websites may or may not load. And even if they do, they rarely work properly.
Irony is, students are clever enough to realise you can use translate websites to load anything with translation from English to English. No blocking at all!
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#84The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is not clear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. Of course all the nuances and little details make all the difference: board picture, structure, teacher personality, pacing, choice of topic, interaction, motivation, excit…
My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.
There was a story in the NY Times a few months back about a basically one room schoolhouse in Alta Utah. Of course that's a small and mostly homogeneous community and, as I recall, it was unclear from the article how well students were learning other than presumably becoming good skiers.
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#85We'll do/try/pay for anything except for teachers and good teaching
Here in Canada teachers are paid well but we still don't want to pay for good resources. Anything where money is going into overhead that's separate from teaching students is viewed with a stink-eye. They killed textbooks and replaced them with nothing.
Think about how many teachers are out there scrounging up and making up their lesson materials, tests, etc. because state/provincial bodies don't provide that content top-down, even as an optional resource for them to draw upon. Then teachers are told "also you need to accommodate all these special cases where students have distinct educational needs" but the basic easy stuff that could've been pre-made is consuming all the time they should've been able to spend "personalizing".
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#86I 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…
A bit tangential but related. I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1]. I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel l…
I dropped out around the same time, and one other key thing I’ve noticed is the tech bootcamps hadn’t completely taken over yet, so there was less of a flood of other entry level people to fight for every single opening. You would even get a call back sometimes applying cold (no internal referral).
I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#87I discovered some amazing EdTech recently: the game Prodigy. It’s brilliant. Kids play it, and it’s an utterly uninspired example of modern gamification with a big dose of paid (by parents, of course) DLC. The selling point is that it’s (a) free for schools and (b) mixed in with the gamification is a little bit of measurement that is supposedly aligned to common core standards. The game does not even pretend to teach the material it measures.
And now we’ve gone past the usual endpoint where the metric becomes the goal. It seems that the ability to waste everyone’s time measuring the metrics has become the new goal.
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#88I teach tech to elementary and intermediate grades. The Chromebooks are locked down ewaste. I'm not saying if one of you guys buy a Chromebook you can't have it function as a general purpose computer. But the Chromebooks students use aren't computers.
The more that I think of it. They are terminals that permit students to access random edtech platforms. Very little computing going on. Which is absurd when a potential computer is sitting right there in front of you in computer class.
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But leads to kids guessing. Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.
That's closer to real life physics than knowing formulas is!
You probably want to get units correct too. Say Newtons vs Kelvins vs Amperes... Still able to estimate right size is in general skill that should be taught.
Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
#90This is interesting, and I think plausible, but I find it... surprisinging that the evidence base is so poor. Like, I know entire states have banned smart-phones now, can we see those effects yet? If it's anywhere near as powerful as the author suggests, surely we should? The second question I have is about the outcome variable on these (but I realise I should probably just go read the damn research) - is it possible…
I don't think there are any smartphone bans for US states that have been in force for more than a school year, no?
They banned cellphones/smartphones in Ontario schools in 2019... but it was a "ban" with no plan for enforcement and no roll-out so everyone ignored the ban.
So they banned them again this year.
Policy so nice they did it twice.