Remember when that guy was offering to buy every classroom free TVs in exchange for the school's commitment to have the kids watch a certain amount of programming a day? The programming included ads. This seems the same. Having the kids load linux onto laptops, yeah... I could understand the value in that. Having them work with Raspberry Pi's, I could see the merit in that. Program robots? Definitely. But this debacle of Apple products for kids has been terrible. I do believe the schools and city councils are well meaning. Yes, these expenditures are so huge the city councils have to often get involved. But introducing kids to computing via the walled gardens of Apple are a disservice to them, and a step back, in my opinion. Apple devices are imminently non-configurable... they are designed to walk you through the computing experience, training you to seek the help of 'geniuses' as opposed to becoming your own genius. The cost of these programs is astounding. Districts could be loading linux onto machines bought for relatively nothing... those linux skills would be immediately applicable to Raspberry Pis and to robots. Are schools afraid of really educating their students, as opposed to making them dependents of Apple's consumer culture?
The thing is, these iPads aren't meant to teach about computing. They're tools for teaching other subjects, like math or geography or English or whatever. Just like a geography textbook is a bad way to learn about papermaking, so is an educational iPad a bad way to learn about computing.
I still think they're awful for other reasons, but their lack of hackability is a feature, not a bug.
> Are schools afraid of really educating their students, as opposed to making them dependents of Apple's consumer culture?
I think a key component to the problem here is the very clear gap between computing enthusiasts/application developer and your typical K-12 teacher. Which is really not meant to be a knock on our teachers, but I don't think your typical school has the people with the right skill sets to teach "true" computing.
They don't realistically have any choice but to rely on the watered-down end user version experienced through the walled-garden of one vendor or another. Which makes most "technology in the classroom" initiatives to me look more like solutions in search of a problem (ie. not a very effective use of district resources).
You could argue the same about Windows / Office (required in a lot of schools), student discounts for software packages (notably Photoshop and other high-priced pieces of software), even Linux. There is IMO no such thing as a neutral choice of software, although free software doesn't have commercial goals so it gets more kudos from me. Still, you can't go "I only know vim" when your job is to work with Word / Excel (lots of jobs there).
I agree. They could just use books in all classes like before, and possibly netbooks in an IT class (if they have one). It seems to me that the article came to the similar conclusion.
I seem to recall a blogged anecdote from the height of the Apple vs Samsung lawsuit. The blogger had overheard a couple reading about it in a newspaper, and they consistently called the Samsung tablet the "Samsung iPad".
When all the media is yakking about is iPads, all the world knows exist are iPads...
> Apple devices are imminently non-configurable... they are designed to walk you through the computing experience
Which probably seems tempting for budget-strapped schools which can't afford replacing equipment every year nor have the staff to build something themselves around RasPis.
We don't have any of those problems at my daughter's school. First, all the iPads are locked down using some management software, so the kids are locked out of the clock, etc. that can cause unintentional distractions. Second, they limit use to about 30 minutes per day, so traditional lessons are taught using traditional techniques. Third, our school emphasizes social interaction with project-based learning, with the children working in teams. And a sizable portion of their report card deals with socialization and citizenship.
The tablet is a tool, alongside pencil, ruler, scissors, etc. NOT the primary device for delivering content. The kids use them (K-2) to make movies, make sketches of the things they are engineering, and math drills.
It seems a good lesson was lost on the author: teaching the kids how to appropriately use this type of tool. At my daughter's school, we get it. Starting next year, Grades 3-5 will have an admin account on their take-home MacBook Airs. Yep, sounds totally crazy. The value here is teaching the children not just how to use their computer but how to take responsibility for keeping it running. Hopefully El Capitan rootless mode will provide a robust defense against those pesky Flash 0-day bugs.
I would argue that in this case it is a waste of education budget. Their high cost and non-core use sounds like it raises costs without cutting anything. For technology to work in the classroom, it needs to be attractive to administrators.
Agreed, my girlfriend's school implements iPad use and she has none of these problems. They have a single IT person in the school who setup all the iPads. My gf setup guided access on her 30 ipads to lock them down and the kids only use them for 1 or 2 lessons max. The majority of her teaching is down without iPad use. A lot of the author's issues seem to be a lack of awareness on technology, how to use iPads, and even proper classroom management.
"They have a single IT person in the school who setup all the iPads"
This leads to an important side issue that people outside the .edu system don't understand, that you release a product for kids that is web based, my daughter's teacher can roll it out to the kids in about 10 minutes using a laser printer to make a QR code of the URL for the kids to scan and then do math drills or whatever, literally during a single recess period. In comparison, if you wrap the same exact content in an app, its going to take at least a year to get the app approved by the technology council and possibly installed, or possibly not if another teacher makes a stronger argument for using the limited storage space for video recording kid presentations of learning or their pet app or who knows, assuming you have the political clout, time, and motivation to ram the new app thru the system.
Educational apps are dead. Educational websites are where its at.
That would depend on your instatution, all of the private schools I work with let the teachers find new apps and we can push them to the iPads pretty easily. Budget has been provided with a little extra so we can buy apps during the year if needed, and we do.
> Group projects and emphasizing socialization is a crutch that incompetent teachers use to force their intelligent students to do their job for them.
I find the opposite true in my career. Business is 95% about how you interact with others; whether that is teaching, listening to, meeting with, understanding morale, etc.
Let's look at Agile, socialization is at the key, people over processes, scrum meetings every morning looking for who needs help and who can help, sprint meetings with product managers selling ideas to engineers and engineers discussing how it will be solved, retrospectives where everybody tries to figure out what went right/wrong and what to do better.
Then there is pair programming, which is the definition of a group project.
The difference in your Agile and pair programming examples is that those interactions are fundamentally between people with similar abilities. In business, the teaching, listening, and understanding are communication between people with similar baud rates. My impression is that you may be projecting your experiences with groups of competent engineers -- who all passed a rigorous screening process and years of performance reviews -- onto the behavior of children drawn at random from the entire population.
Group projects are a tool to adjust the average performance, without any effort on the teacher's part. The effect is more insidious than a simple numerical average would suggest because group projects introduce a time differential. Consider people as an op-amp. Their internal drive to produce a given quality is the reference voltage. What output the currently have (the progess towards the objective) is the input. When you put top performers in a group to pull up the slackers, the feedback gain of that system is artificially reduced. The good students want a certain level of quality, so they will work even harder to try an bring the quality (input signal) up to their standards. Depending on how bad the slackers are, the good student may even reach saturation, running out of hours in the day to compensate for the incompetence of others.
The incompetent teachers intuitively understand this effect. They are not fostering some kind of social nirvana, they are transferring the workload of pulling up the class average onto the bright kids. The bright kid ends up spending twice, three times as long on the group assignment, and that effort gets averaged out to the other group members' grades. The cost to top performers is all that time they could have been improving, moving forward, was stuck doing large amounts of low skill work.
All of these things you are describing are a good way to waste large amounts of time without getting anything worthwhile done. The 5% where you are not interacting with others is the tiny sliver of time you are afforded to actually produce the product that the rest of the business is built on.
With the correct group of people, all of this feel-good communication can be replaced by a handful of people that know what they are doing, keeping an online task board updated and communicating primarily asynchronously by email, or if absolutely necessary, synchronously by IM.
Pair programming is a great way to make two people half as productive as either would have been working alone.
Emphasizing socialization is one of the big tools of highly-ranked education systems.
Students benefit from explaining it to others by forcing them to clarify and solidify their own mental models; the other kids understand their peers more quickly and when multiple mental models form, the students can explain it to each other for multiple perspectives.
If it's a powerful tool, teachers should use it. Understanding is more important than grades; too many variables affect grades to make them a great predictor.
Edit: Reminder that American education is often bullshit and leaves jaded students. Just because something is useful doesn't mean our teachers use it in a way such that it is useful.
I also recommend teaching somebody something and if possible taking a class with intelligent people that is out of your element. For me, a topology course with a focus on discussion was incredible.
My anecdotal doesn't follow your statement. My daughter is one of the intelligent students, and is severely challenged socially. She hasn't figured out the difference between "leader" and "dictator" yet. As a lone wolf myself, I can see how this helps prepare children for careers where they do more than just max out the number of hours they can bill.
I don't know if you'll know this, but are they implementing any other safeguards on the Macbook Airs? (MbA) Just from doing tons of work in a Mac-centric university where the students' idea of pirating was to search "[item] download mac", the search results are crawling with predator sites that promise anything from PDFs to interactive solutions manuals, only to actually download a dmg full of malware (usually Mackeeper and a few others). And of course students (and professors alike) would dutifully punch in their admin pass without thinking about it, and quick enough there'd be a nice and infected machine.
What I'm getting at is if I were the tech admin for that school, I'd be less concerned about what 0-days exist in flash or java and more concerned about what people are willingly installing on their computer, and though this is obviously anecdotal, seeing what my younger cousin would end up installing despite our warnings, I'm inclined to think kids aren't up to the task just yet of full on computer management. Even fairly savvy kids would fall the the sales pitch of the one kid who found a free download for a popular game, which of course was packed with malware.
No doubt it is going to be a bundle of surprises. Thanks for your input, I'm going to bring up your "[item] download mac" experience at our next technology committee meeting.
BTW the admin account wasn't my idea, and it freaks me out. However, I see what the educators have in mind, they are trying to stretch into new places and prepare children for the real world. I appreciate the bleeding edge ethic of crash and burn and find the solution. So I am trying to play the role of facilitating recovery from problems that will arise. We will have system images on thumb drives. Until someone downloads EFI-based malware, the consequence will typically be the kid loses access to their machine for a day or two while the tech re-images their system. And of course, even though docs are in Google Drive, there is the potential for data loss, which is also a great lesson IMO.
Networks in school are supposed to facilitate education. The standard approach of making everything impossible to use so that nobody can break anything may work in a corporation, but it does not work for education.
But that is what they do anyway. I learned a lot from using school computers - like how to access VPNs and routing proxies so that I could defeat Bess[1] and access the Sun Java docs to do my AP computer science homework.
Docs in the cloud, combined with "Wipe and go" is our chosen disaster plan. I realize of course this is not perfect. When it breaks down however, I feel there are really good lessons to be learned. Like keep prized docs on that thumb drive like we've been telling the kids.
so disable admin access for students and give them free Time Machine access?
most Mac malware isn't worryingly harmful (it can't spread on its own, for instance).
and even if you mess up a machine, you can always restore it. even if you erase everything, you can always have the Mac redownload the OS from Apple's servers.
I don't often think I have vision or significant insight, but it's been obvious to me for as long as I can remember that egregious use of technology in classrooms is a profoundly terrible idea. What, educators were worried children wouldn't spend enough time staring at glowing rectangles, and needed to get a head start? Really?
It's not clear whether most adults are even capable of making good decisions about what technologies to invite into their lives. Inflicting computers and software on children in a classroom, I think, demonstrates either profound lack of understanding about the state of these technologies, or judgement, or both.
Pens, pencils, crayons, markers, paper, books, musical instruments. These are the kinds of things that belong in classrooms. Children should be reading and drawing and building and talking and playing creatively, learning to think and solve problems based on experiencing the world directly, not trying to sip secondhand information through the straw of a screen, not wasting time with the latest malware and ads and passwords and an infinite amount of other stupid computer bullshit. Technology is a kind of heroin-like thing you should choose to invite into your life later as an adult if you want, not inflicted on you as a child.
Tablets are just the next step in replacing teachers with their exorbitant $40K salaries with half that number of $10/hr babysitters, so more money can be funneled to the companies providing the curriculum and testing.
Good teachers are hard to find even when I was in high school in the 1980s I had quite a range.
Compare three math teachers I had.
One teacher was so laid back he played music in class but it was 1960s music, nobody in the entire class got over 40%.
The second math teacher was also a university professor he was so strict many in his class failed too.
The third was a bit geeky in behaviour, a bit eccentric, he would "pick volunteers" three of them to solve problems on the blackboard at the front of the class. I can't recall anyone in that class getting under 90%.
cities like chicago have near 3% property taxes to pay current teachers average salaries over $75k/yr. with health, with vacation, with summers, with cola, with lifetime guaranteed pensions of 70%+. school admins routinely take home $125k+. when are we going to stop with the nonsense that teachers save the world while starving in their yugos?
So bizarre that you used a specific outlier case of $75-125k, more than twice what the actual average is. And given that your outlier exists, I wonder what that says about teacher salaries on the lower end of the bell curve given the average of $55k.
no idea what you're talking about. your number fits a ba with zero experience on a national average. teachers make a lot more with even limited experience in big population areas (with politicians on the dole) with corresponding higher cost of living (ie. chicago, where i stated).
I'm saying your original example was specifically crafted to make people think teachers are well-paid ("average salaries over $75k... school admins routinely take home $125k") by cherry-picking a specific outlier. When I called you on it, you found real data showing the average is actually $55k, which means many salaries are even lower than that. Now you've backpedaled so far as to say the average teacher salary is roughly equivalent to "a ba with zero experience," which I would categorize as criminally underpaid for a position so crucial to the upbringing of our country's children.
chicago isn't an outlier; it's a big city with a higher cost of living.
real costs are hidden behind 'salaries', a term managed by the public unions to understate real comp. 8 months a year / health / sick / retirement age (55 typical) / pension. emotional appeals like your's are what have allowed the public unions to rape the average family (both in the classrooms where they fail, and in the pocketbook where public school teachers are doing their finest work).
> My lively little kids stopped talking and adopted the bent-neck, plugged-in posture of tap, tap, swipe.
I'm extremely skeptical about the utility of technology in education, but iPads are a bad idea for reasons other than the above. A room full of kids working hard with pre-iPad technology looks like that too, except they're concentrating on books and paper.
I've noticed this behaviour outside of school and with much older people. I grew up with a computer and I admit I use it at least 15 hours a day every day, but a big chunk of this time I've used for learning and contributing rather than just pure media consumption.
Today too many people are engrossed in facebook and can't continue a conversation without flicking and swiping through facebook every 30-60 seconds. Everybody's faces are now illuminated by their devices' screens.
Good lord.... I don't think I can roll my eyes hard enough....
> One of my saddest days in my digital classroom was when the children rushed in from the lunchroom one rainy recess and dashed for their iPads. Wait, I implored, we play with Legos on rainy days! I dumped out the huge container of Legos that were pure magic just a couple of weeks ago, that prompted so much collaboration and conversation, but the delight was gone. My students looked at me with disdain. Some crossed their arms and pouted. We aren’t kids who just play anymore, their crossed arms implied. We’re iPad users. We’re tech-savvy. Later, when I allowed their devices to hum to glowing life, conversation shut down altogether.
Look I loved Lego's growing up, I still have massive rubbermaid containers full of them but please tell me why playing with Legos is any more valuable than playing minecraft? Let's not pretend that just because kids like different things now that something MUST be lost. I never played a cup-and-ball game like I'm sure generations before me did (I'm sure they lamented the introduction of things like Lego). Every generation complains about the younger generation and how they are going to turn out wrong because they weren't raised the same way they were or with the same things ("I walked up hill to school both ways").
Did the kids get quieter? Sure, I have no doubt of that but who's to say they weren't communicating even more than before using chat programs? I had teachers in HS CONSTANTLY complain about how students were reading less and less all the time which I took issue with not only because I read plenty of books but also I read tons of articles online. The medium may change but the core concept remains IHMO. Reading Pride and Prejudice doesn't automatically make you a better person than the student who know what's happening in the world like the back of their hand.
Lastly not introducing them to tech now is just setting them up for failure down the line. For better or worse the people who know technology will excel more than those who don't. Tech is not it's own little sector/industry, it's everywhere and it's integrated in to everything. To pretend otherwise is to stick one's head in the ground and ignore the world around you.
> please tell me why playing with Legos is any more valuable than playing minecraft?
First, it's important for children to use their hands to develop their cognitive abilities. There is more in the world than just "pictures behind glass" to interact with and manipulating objects of various shapes, texture and weight is important.
Secondly, playing Minecraft is great, but maybe that's not what the kids were rushing to do. If they were playing Candy Crush or reading Facebook they would benefit more from playing lego.
First: is it? I think that manipulating 3D objects on a tablet can lead to a much greater understanding than paper ever can (see: 3D modeling, even on the computer it was hard to grasp sometimes)
Secondly: This is a classroom where the teacher is in charge, just because you give kids iPads doesn't mean they rule the class now, give them the option of Lego or minecraft then and don't allow them to be on FB/CC...
Does everything need to be skill building and development oriented? I think a lot of the issues we've got right now with our youth are squarely on the fact that we're engineering their little lives from the delivery room to the end of high school.
More importantly I don't believe that in person interaction is so critical. For many introverts like myself, forced F2F interaction in school was torture and did nothing but make me hate speaking publicly (which strangely, got a whole lot better once I was older, a little more confident, and actually understood what I was talking about).
In short: They're kids. It sounds like this school went a little too far into iPad territory, but frankly I think those kids will likely get more value out of skills manipulating screens than they will get out of skills involving legos.
> Does everything need to be skill building and development oriented?
In short yes. There is a finite amout of time before you die, and that time is measured in years, not millenia . We spend ~12 years in school playing "general education" where basically we are conditioned to set times for work and hierchael authority. That is 15% of your entire expected lifespan, aka not time to spent lightly. Look at how quickly you learn new job skills and keep up with new technologies. Then look back at public school. Why does it take 12 years to move from addition to calculus? Why does it take 11 years to teach kids that chemistry is between atoms and to learn simple reactions are building blocks? Right now the amount of education that public school provides is laughable compared to how much you learn in a year on the job.
What would it be like if you only took 8 years to get through primary and secondary? That is 10% more time added to your productive shelf life. Better yet, those years have been saved on the front end, where your brain is most agile and plastic.
My personal feeling is that there is a lot of time wasted in the current public education model. When I was in school, I never percieved any A/B testing, or relentless optimization of coursework. Instead everything was the same as it had been 10-20 years ago. At least now I get the sense that now people are starting to look for a better local minimum in the process of knowledge transfer.
I'm not saying out education system is perfect AT ALL, never would I say such a thing, I'm merely pointing out that the kids not chattering at each other about stupid bullshit and instead doing stupid bullshit on an iPad isn't the problem by a long way, and reversing the inclusion of said iPads will not fix anything either.
Fair enough, I agree with your point about the inclusion of said iPads. The only counterpoint that I would have would be to compare the capital efficiency of letting kids chatter about bullshit, which is free, to using expensive techinical portals to the same ends. I would be really interested to see the insurance policy on those iPads' assesment of expected lifespan, and then use that number to compute the expected value of using iPads specifically as a tablet in the classroom.
I had a long conversation with my friend's daughter as she showed me the entire world she build in Minecraft. The barn she built. The corrals she made and put different animals in each one and named each and every one of the animals. The picnic area she built with a cake a presents for her dad. The roller coaster she made which we took a ride on. Her underground fortress she had hidden under the barn but which you could only get to if you knew where to dig. The house she built with 7 rooms and filled out each one with furniture she built. And on and on. Her dad setup a server so they can play together side by side. She's 8yrs old
Minecraft has servers that multiple people can join in on and there are audio chat programs but if they are in the same room they can just talk to each other as well.
It's also the conversations that go on when they are not playing that impresses me.
Less so with lego, as it's look at this, then destroyed and forgotten. With minecraft they have to articulate what they have created and why, and continuously improve and develop things.
A thought regarding the argument that iPads encourage anti-social behavior:
Many of us here were introduced to this immersive technology as mature adults & don't know how to balance this technology with the demands of humanity (namely, proper social communication). Give me an iPad, and I'll find a way to watch stupid videos and avoid productivity (that's why I don't have one). Or send me a text and I'll make my best effort at checking it ASAP, even if that means losing focus on a real conversation for a few moments.
BUT: humans have an innate need to communicate. It's not a generational thing--it's a human thing. Kids aren't going to forget they need to make quality bonds with the people in their lives. They'll still do it. And I bet these kids growing up now will be able to achieve this balance between man and machine better than us.
I predict: it's not technology we're going to learn from our kids--it's how to truly live well with it.
My school district has lost almost 20% of the teachers and looking at another $13,000,000 in deficit next year. they can afford iPads what a BROKEN Education Funding System we have! Latino students get $0.85 for every dollar spent on White non-Hispanic students.
> writes about how we are sacrificing connections, one quick check of our screens at a time
The old Computers cause people to disconnect and check out argument again!
As an old Geek I have always heard the anti-social behaviors breed by computer use. The funny thing is I was more connected to people then anyone I knew. The one culture that connects and gathers together have been the Geeks.
PS iPads for each child in elementary school is a bad idea but not for these reasons.
Part of that is that there are funds that are siloed to be spent only on getting tech into the hands of kids so money spent there by the school system couldn't necessarily be spent elsewhere by the school.
I'm surprised that (by appearances) these iPads were in essentially full-time 1:1 use in a 3rd grade classroom, when students have a lot of learning to do about and through movement and physical manipulation, not to mention social engagement.
From what I've seen[1], in lower elementary grades technology can be very effectively used in the hands of the teacher (for assessment, interpreting student strengths and weaknesses in reading or math, and for projecting rich media).
Putting devices in the hands of students in lower elementary is probably best done for very targeted purposes and limited time; for example, keeping the rest of class engaged with an activity while the teacher is giving his or her full attention to working with a reading small group for 30 minutes.
[1]I've been part of teams creating teacher-facing tools for elementary, and digital curriculum for middle school and above.
Are there any really decent examples of devices like tablets being utilized creatively and effectively in a K-12 classroom?
I don't want to sound cynical or like a luddite (I would be posting on the wrong site, for sure), but nearly every application that I have used that is meant to be used in a classroom environment has been extremely shallow.
I cringed 15 years ago when school boards pushed to put computers in every classroom. What good is a room full of kids on MySpace and AIM?
Sure, you need computer skills for the future. But beyond learning how to use a computer for typing, spreadsheets, word processing, you don't need more than that in the K-12 level. Some kids will want to be programmers. Some kids will want to do music. Some will want to do graphics or desktop publish. Have computers available for kids to do that in computer class or art class or math - but don't push them in every setting.
Technology and software are, not to sound cliche, eating the world. Even something you would consider to not need tech for like farming is seeing great advances from technology including but not limited to: drip irrigation, gps auto-pilot machinery, robots to kill weeds without herbicides, weather patterns, crop patterns, and more. Software and technology is everywhere and if it's not somewhere yet then it will be soon. Why should be churning out tech-illiterate students except for a couple of fields? This seems incredibly short-sighted.
It may be too late to avoid computers in every setting. Or soon will be - witness WalMart's $10 smart phone. We have to learn to deal with this somehow.
Change is hard. When computers were first introduced to schools there were similar arguments and complaints. When calculators were brought in instead of the slide rule we heard it would be the end of actually "knowing" math. Teachers who are great find ways to use technology and tools available to inspire their students and create engaging lessons. This teacher just sounds resistant to change.
Two counter-points...
1. Computers in classrooms have rarely, if ever, been deployed to entire classrooms in the way that tablets can be. Typically, you'll see one or two PCs in a class, plus a computer lab. PCs don't distract in the same way iPads can.
2. Calculators do make people worse at math. I saw this first-hand with my son. As he went through school, they used calculators for everything. Students began to rely on the calculators for simple arithmetic and took the answers provided as gospel, not realizing that garbage in = garbage out. He, along with many of his peers, never really developed the fluency in math to say to themselves "hmm, that answer looks suspect. Let me try again."
Counter anecdote to your calculator anecdote. I grew up using calculators all through school and excelled in knowing math. Using a calculator did not inhibit my ability to question the result of the calculator whatsoever. I don't think calculators are necessarily to blame here.
Of course, and we did. But, I continue to believe that allowing calculators on ALL mathematics work from a young age does the student a disservice. Calculators certainly have their place, but elementary school arithmetic is not that place.
Agreed. So I taught my eldest arithmetic at home and discouraged the schools from giving him more calculators until the sums involved more than two digits and other operators than the basic four. After the third calculator they got the message. Interesting aside: the teacher couldn't do anything beyond single digit arithmetic without reference to a calculator either. Pretty sad affair, and I really wonder how someone who does not understand the basics gets to be a teacher.
Change also doesn't just happen because you dumped a computer in a room. I personally haven't seen a computer used effectively in a classroom, in a large part because the teachers don't know how to integrate them into their lessons. They were given devices and then given no instruction on how to use them.
Education is just barely starting to come out of what I call the "... but on a computer!" [1] era, which is when you try to do exactly the same thing you did before, but now it's on a computer (or a tablet in this case).
There's basically no advantage to taking existing classroom practices, but sticking them on a computer. You'll have to rewrite the entire education process to figure out how to harness computers.
Let me give a concrete example. I am now a fantastic speller, of a language that is one of the harder languages to spell. Am I fantastic because I'm just that awesome? No! Am I fantastic because I have spent years studying lists of words and taking spelling tests? Hell no! I'm fantastic now because every major text input I use now has the red-squiggly line, and the instant I misspell a word and hit space, bam, red line. Backspace & correct. Right-click and select if I really, really can't work it out. (But with backspace & correct actually being way faster, I prefer that.) With instant feedback comes a high rate of learning. I can tell this isn't "cheating", because when I do function in an environment where I don't have this functionality, I retain my spelling skill, the golden standard of whether a skill exists in the tools or the brain. In fact I write many of my blog posts in emacs with no spelling support on, and while I still scan over my posts with a spell checker before posting them, I routinely experience writing several thousand words without a single misspelling, because I have harnessed solid technology to train my brain. I also spell well with handwriting.
This is unbelievably fantastic technology for teaching spelling so efficiently and so effectively that it hardly even need be explicitly taught; sit students down in front of this technology and have them simply write and let the red squiggly handle the spelling training. (You'll still need vocabulary training, but, again, let the red squiggly handle the spelling of the vocabulary while the vocabulary training focuses on meanings.)
By contrast, doing spelling tests "but on a computer" is a terrible way of doing business! First of all, if the students have to "turn in" the test before they get feedback, you've already missed the sub-second feedback rate that would have been so much better anyhow, but second of all, the fact that you're having a spelling test at all is a huge waste of their time. That's the sort of second-order effect we need to be harnessing with computers in the classroom, and we are only at the very, very beginning of that road.
My first grader is just starting spelling tests. He's not quite computer savvy enough to start writing on a computer yet, but you can believe I'll be setting him up with a red squiggly as soon as is practicable.
I still believe computers are going to rewrite education from top-to-bottom, but I find it is proving to be one of the most entrenched, hidebound, nearsighted, and even perhaps terrified of real change elements of society we can possibly imagine. We're so scare of what bad things might happen if we don't stuff a conventional education into our children's heads (moreso than ever, thanks to ever-more test-based education) that we're terrified of experimenting with anything new, and the only acceptable change to the "conventional" education is to precommit even more time to it, making it that much harder to work any experimentation into the system. There are major religions that treat their holy texts as more flexible than the way our culture treats the official line of How Children Are Taught.
This is the number one reason I love static analysis tools like ReSharper for coding. I write a piece of dodgy code, and it tells me "Hey, this could result in trying to access a null pointer", or, "Hey, dummy, this conditional is logically inconsistent and the block below can never get executed" or "Hey, you can rewrite this great big loop with a simpler LINQ statement." Then after a few times of doing this, I internalize the rules, and start doing it on my own.
What you're describing as the "but on a computer" era is also known in education as the first stage of the SAMR model: Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.
This is a well known pitfall in technology integration. I don't think a lot of people in this thread are giving due credit to educators - it's their job, and there's a lot of smart people in education who have just as much common sense as the armchair teachers who think otherwise.
Educators have their hands tied. We've centralized everything, and the central bureaucracy has decided it doesn't matter how innovative educators can be because the central bureaucracy already knows everything about the best way to teach, and if you deviate from it, you're fired. (A couple of intermediate steps through failing test scores and the consequences, but that's the effect.)
Until the educators get the central bureaucracy off their backs, it doesn't matter what they are capable of.
If you'd like to read my point as being that the central bureaucracy is "the most entrenched, hidebound, nearsighted, and even perhaps terrified of real change" part of the system, I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
Hmm that's interesting - I'd tend to round one of the numbers, whichever is closest to a '5' or '10', to make an 'easier' multiplication, then add / subtract the extra value lost / gained by rounding.
Example 9 x 14 = (<10> * 14) - ([1] * 14) = 140 - 14 = 126
key: <> easier rounded number [] deal with rounding 'error'
I've done that before too, but for whatever reason my mind just defaults to adding two numbers rather than subtracting. Probably either habit or I just find it easier.
You only have two sig figs at best for an engineering estimate you could get close by rounding up to 10x15 which is 150. The error on both terms is gonna round to about ten so subtract both error factors from the 1st order estimate and get about 150-10-10 aka a decent engineering estimate done in the head to two sig figs is 130. Thats not too far from a calculated answer, only a couple percent off, which is smaller than the measurement error.
The most important estimating still, after manipulation of sig figs is knowing which way to bend for the overall system. So say I'm tiling a kitchen floor or buying paver bricks for a modest sized patio. Well, some raw material is going to be too ugly to use and I'm going to screw up some of the trimming and cutting and I'm going to drop some, and the cost of the gasoline and time to drive out to the home center and buy one more (mismatched) tile or brick is very high, so in that scenario I'd buy the 10x15=150 tiles and hope thats enough (I'm feeling lucky today). On the other hand if I had 9 steel chains each rated (by whom? Static or dynamic loads? Point concentrations or perfectly (LOL) distributed?) to 1400 pounds each, I would round way down for safety's sake and not suspend more than 10 x 10 or 10000 pounds on that platform. Even if the chains are rated properly I only need to screw up or fail four of them and the thing crashes down.
Anyway for engineering purposes 9x14 is somewhere around 100 to 150.
I find (10x14) - (1x14) = 140 - 14 = 126 slightly quicker and less error prone than carrying the ten across the hundred boundary with 9x10 + 9x4 = 90 + 36 = 126, I'm not an educator though so there may be better ways taught now.
But this is wildly off topic, and in reality I'd rather someone knew how to use their calculator or excel or Python to do this sum than know how to do this sum in their heads.
It's important they know the rough answer in terms of scale and shape, so that any mistype or error is quickly recognised, but I don't think it is important to actually know how to quickly do long multiplication in one's head.
I do the same. However, recognizing you can do that is part of learning arithmetic and problem solving in general. I learned that method at an early age and it taught me that most big, scary problems in general are really just a bunch of small problems that can be identified and solved more easily.
This is how arithmetic is starting to be taught in elementary schools now, which unfortunately has resulted in those big Facebook blow ups about how "common core" math homework doesn't make sense anymore.
Depends what kind of math skills are you looking for.
I remember my classmate, 1st year at university, that passed one of his classes just because his calculator was capable of precise enough numeric integration.
Next semester he was required to construct proofs as well and he flunked the class.
That's too application focused. The primary value of arithmetic is that it forces you to exercise parts of your mind in a way which would otherwise be difficult.
The same can be said of general mathematics, and literary analysis, etc.
Hum, basic arithmetics is mechanical repetition. There may be some benefit to the brain in doing it, but I'm doubting it until I get evidence.
The main benefit is that knowing arithmetics well makes higher mathematics easier to learn. That's because one won't get distracted doing calculations. That's still true on the calculator era, just a bit less so, thus I do think it's important to learn arithmetics... It just the "it improves your brain" that I find highly suspect.
No? As an Asian student I have seen countless people try to push their children to exercise arithmetic skills because they believe that does good to their brains. However, it only misleads children to hate "math" and sometimes even their lives based on this the most important subject again and again. Moreover, children would wholly waste their exercised brain on the ruined confidence because some of them just cannot "recite" the patterns well among questions in tests, because you're required to answer too much questions during too short time, which means if you cannot recite the solution patterns from textbook and calculate the answers right at first time, you barely have no chance to try it again. Even those who did excellently in those high-school tests will face another crash at the beginning of university, because the "real math" no matter cares your arithmetic skills, but your abstract thinking and the feeling to grab and deduct rules from axiom. After all, except those real geniuses can conquer these two very different requirements and continuously get payback from that, I don't see any benefits from focusing on arithmetic with so high-strength training.
To be fair though, that's the math version of "I don't need to know JavaScript at all because I will always have jQuery." Technically accurate but lazy.
The number of people who can do it quickly in their head, maybe. I don't know a single adult who would look at that problem and say they don't know how to solve it.
Math is a perishable skill. You get slow at it if you don't use it.
I do 9 x 14 in my head by breaking it down. I assume others do this too. Anyone should be able to break a problem down (pre or post tech generation) and do the small parts, then put them together to answer the bigger question.
In general, that's the essence of learning. If we stop teaching that, then we're all in trouble ;)
Ha, very interesting, I do something very similar, although for multiplication by 9 I would multiply by 10(since it requires no mental effort, you just add a zero at the end) then subtract one. So:
Yep and that skill was rendered completely obsolete. Always remember being told "you won't always have a calculator with you!!" because I couldn't be bothered showing my working on my maths work.
How did that work out... oh everyone now always has calculators with them. Glad I didn't waste my time memorising multiplication tables.
> When calculators were brought in instead of the slide rule
> we heard it would be the end of actually "knowing" math.
Plato argued in Phaedrus that literacy would be the end of anyone actually "knowing" anything. Why learn if you can just google^H^H^H^H^H^H read it? Same shit, different millennium.
Hm, this is sad. What I wonder is - couldn't this be anticipated beforehand? If they asked me, I would probably predict that what she describes would happen (having iPad and a child at home). Anyway, why on earth would you give the child a mainly-leisure device, why at least not netbook instead?!
I'm 40. I come from an Eastern-Bloc country. Back in the day we raised ourselves, running outside all day, building and breaking friendships by playing sports and other more stupid games (e.g. throwing small rocks at cars - yes, THAT stupid).
Just like kids today have Internet, we had a drug - TV. Grandma said: it would rot your brain, it is the Satan, stay away.
Apparently the TV did not rot my brain. I do not watch it today (other than Netflix). I cannot stand it. Yes, we did not have fun exactly like Grandma had in her youth (I bet she had some fun ;-), but we had fun.
So perhaps tablets are not that bad. Perhaps Internet is not that bad. Sure, it will change us, but - just perhaps - in a good way.
Perhaps it is just us, older folks, who cannot see what is good and what is bad for our kids.
I grew up with a TV that had no boundaries around it and don't feel like it kept me from experiencing a full childhood either. I did waste a lot of time in front of it but television was mostly just a fallback; I preferred playing outside and with other kids.
The thing about TV then that is different from technology now, is that we were limited more by whatever programming the cable networks had scheduled between all those commercials. TV was actually boring most of the time, especially during the day.
I have kids now and know that with my oldest at least (11 year old boy), when there are no boundaries around screen time, the screens are always on. There is a lot more going on in the world of video games, movies, the internet, etc. these days which make it easier for kids to get lost in.
What....why the heck would you give 8 year olds iPads....my littlest brother was born in 2002 I think and when he turned 8 his school didn't do this nonsense.
They should be reading from regular books and get regular chalkboard/whiteboard Lectures and doing hands on activities.
Instead of giving them iPads you could have a small set of time in the week to go onto a desktop computer and learn how to keyboard and do those kid like programming exercises and maybe some fun online learning tools.
Technology is only bad for kids if you don't know how to ration it and talk to them about it and limit it to educational uses.
Just giving them iPads makes no sense. All you're doing is helping Apple lol.....
You cannot even teach them practical academic tech stuff like keyboarding or programming using those kid friendly programming applications like Minecraft.
Or at least lock down the iPads so it only has educational apps.
That seems a bit one-sided. It is not all or nothing.
My son (age 5) gets to use a tablet from time to time, mostly to watch "Sendung mit der Maus" which is a famous German educational show. They cover various topics in 10 minute blocks. My son has already learned a lot from that.
I recently visited an elementary school and all the kids were having lessons about squirrels (it was in autumn). I guess "under the hood" they were learning more than just squirrel stuff, like reading comprehension, writing, structuring information and so on. But other than that, I am pretty sure what takes them days to learn about squirrels in school would be easier taught by Sendung mit der Maus.
Depends on which apps do you use - there are also a lot of quizzes, puzzles, math and grammar exercises etc. But the problem is, what I also observed on my daughter, that when the exercises are printed on paper, she can just focus on them, since there isn't anything else on the paper. But when on iPad, there is always a lure to just close that educational app and switch to another entertainment one. The attention span is shorted and the focus is shallower, since there is always a temptation to be distracted by something else.
So the real issue here is the lack of in person face to face? Which is the continued argument that adults/college students don’t know how to handle social interactions with tech. Is it possible adults/college students don’t know how to handle social interaction with tech around because their exposure was much later in life? Is the lesson these kids learning even more important? How to hold on to humanity in the face of technology. Or possibly humanity and tech has entirely different direction and we are just trying to fight it all together.
A while back I attended a presentation and the speaker summed it up nicely: "We live in the 21st century, we go to work in the 20th and our kids go to school in the 19th."
And the main hurdle here is not the tech but the teachers. With a few exceptions, teachers are technophobes and they don't have the mindset to support tech in the classroom.
Learning how to take control when faced with all these screens and all this information and communication without getting sucked in might be one of the greatest lessons to teach children today.
These programs are often funded by federal aid based on the number of students on free or reduced lunch. The money, IIRC, can really only be used for library stuff or technology, and it's a sort of 'use it or lose it' deal.
