alt Hacker NewsUK here. My kid's school is insane. They think they are so progressive because they banned personal phones entirely, which is fair enough. But they forced us to buy marked up Yondr pouches, which is not fair.
However this isn't the only problem. They also force us to pay monthly for iPads with wonky ass Logitech cases to be issued on which they do everything on Google classroom.
Google Classroom is an abhorrently bad bit of software on an iPad. It's just horrible in every possible way. Clunky, interface sucks, slow, unreliable.
Then they give detentions when children can't submit work, some auth issue means the entire device goes down the toilet for two days, documents won't open because the staff use Office instead, they keyboard case craps out and you can't type with anything but the screen, the staff forget to submit the work until an hour before it's due, the entire school wifi network is down for a week and they have no backup.
They should ban that too. Technology MUST be fit for purpose in a classroom and most of it isn't.
Go back to paper for everything. Work, journals, timetables, the lot. And the teachers can use whatever to drive projectors in the classroom.
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I teach CS in the US and I have gone back to pencil-on-paper quizzes for my classes. I allow one page of hand-written notes and given them a quiz review beforehand where I essentially tell them what's going to be on the quiz.
My intent isn't to trick anybody with hard questions, but rather to force the knowledge through their head out through their hand, then back through their eyes and through their hand again.
Next semester I'm doing in-person paper readings, where the first 20 minutes of the class are reading a paper I print out and hand to them, we discuss the paper in class, then they submit their annotated papers to me for a participation grade.
An irony of the AI era.
Probably a similar problem to AI. Using AI for the sake of AI in an engineering workflow probably wastes time right now. Using technology in the classroom for the sake of using technology is probably similar. Is it really creating access, opportunity, saving time. All that? I am skeptical. I have had similar experiences with my children over time. There was a layer of technology that made sense for education. Probably peaked when I was in school in the 90s.
Do you have an elected schoolboard? In my state, if something was that bad, there would be no end to the meetings and public complaints.
I have worked in Edtech for the last 15 years, and I stand by it when I say most of it is just added noise.
1:1 programs are a waste of money and time. Students don't need continuous access to a computer. Shared computer labs with a set goal for the time will always have better outcomes.
Kids frankly aren't learning more today with all this tech in the classroom than they were twenty years ago with paper and whiteboards, and the metrics prove it.
> They should ban that too. Technology MUST be fit for purpose in a classroom and most of it isn't.
Absolutely agree.
It’s just bad luck that your kid is in a school that can’t get it right.
My 16yo kid’s (state) school is far from perfect but the school provided laptop works well, is reasonably locked down and policed, and is fixed or swapped out quickly if there is a problem. Sure we have to contribute towards it but we can (and we pay extra to help cover the cost for someone who isn’t able to pay for it). There are no similar tales of broken WiFi, unavailable servers or whatnot.
They went through some problems where there were multiple systems in use and the kids regularly got confused about where they had to check for homework, with different teachers for the same subject using different systems, but that was resolved eventually.
Phones are officially banned but enforcement is sometimes sporadic. If they do take the piss with it then it gets confiscated and a parent has to come in to get it released (the school has some generic Nokias to hand out at the end of the day if the kid has to have some way of being in contact). That deals with the majority of it.
They seem to have got the balance mostly right in terms of doing enough to keep the lessons mostly distraction free, and also reducing access to keep FOMO down (if hardly anyone has access to their phone during the school day then they, as a group, don’t think they are missing out on much).
Not a fan of them going back to paper for everything, but 100% on screens isn’t good either, especially as the exams are pretty much all paper based.
My children's secondary school (England) also banned use of phones, but the rule was that the phone had to be switched off and kept in the school bag, which was all very sensible.
State schools cannot charge for essential equipment needed for the curriculum. Some schools are taking the p. If all parents told them to do one they would have no leg to stand on, and it is rather scandalous that nothing is done to stop this at Council and government level (they probably prefer to turn a blind eye rather than footing the bill).
Man. Offloading all tbose costs to parents is stupid. But that aside: why is it always that edTech seems to have such shoddy software?
This reminds me of university. Thankfully I did it long enough ago that a lot of stuff was still pen and paper, but some obvious stuff used computers (I did finance and econ, so some programming, lots of spreadsheets and statistics, etc...).
We had some student portal thing online for submitting assignments, MS Office was "required", but the portal was weird and it was right after the .doc/.docx fiasco so everything related to office was a shitshow. Some of our profs simply gave up on the blessed tech stack, issues assignments as Google Docs files, and had us submit assignments through Google Docs. So much easier. I know Google gets a bad rep because of weird perceptions about surveillance, but no one does cloud syncing better. And because most of their software is browser based, it does basically "just work".
When I was in uni I would repeatedly get told that such issues with their software were fine because the lowest N quizzes/homeworks/etc wouldn't get counted. So instead of spending that leeway on a bad day I had to use it on their servers being down or whatever.