Topic: Technology in the classroom/at home for education

There has been some talk on this site of using things like Nintendo Labo in schools. Also, today I read an article about some school districts providing Chrome Books to their students with programs pre-installed to use for homework and even assign work on days where classes are cancelled due to weather (like snow/cold days, yes, for you people in warn places, that does happen).

Personally speaking, I am not in favor of this trend. I might only work as an assistant language teacher, but I think this sort of reliance on technology for education has a lot of issues.

First, it relies on a level of familiarity with technology that is not universally held by students or their parents.

Second, it's a significant financial drain on schools. Right now companies like Google are offering, effectively, free samples. But that wont last. While some employees at those companies might be using it to try and legitimately do good, these are corporations they are legally bound to turn profit and the real goal behind this generosity is to generate advertising and press. So ultimately if this trend catches on, schools will be expected to have this technology and it will put an increased financial burden on them. Not unlike what Texas Instruments did with their graphing calculators years ago. (Seriously, go read about that, it's dirty! The fact that we still use their products is disgusting!)

A spin off of that problem is if the schools decide to pawn off the cost directly to the parents. Not every family can afford to buy a tablet or laptop for their child. And if such a device is required to be brought back and forth to school, bullying kids over having a cheaper or older tablet could become an issue. (some kids don't show their phone at school for fear of being mocked, or even lie and claim they have a phone when they don't for the same sort of reason) Not to mention the risk of damage to the device. More than a handful of students I have, have shattered or cracked phone screens.

Another issue is potential cheating. Setting aside hacking as an extreme case, you can't possibly know who actually does the assignments on these devices. Even if a student has their own unique login and password, there is nothing to stop a student from logging in and handing it to a "friend" to do for them. No obviously different handwriting. I say friend in quotes because likely a bully could force another student to do something for them - and it would be even easier for them to get away with it because there is no handwritten detail to compare.

Yet another issue, more specific to America, is the further widening of the wealth gap. Already in the US there is a huge problem with schools in low income towns being under-equipped. This increased demand on schools would further disadvantage those towns and perpetuate the poverty. Poor kids go to underfunded and under-equipped schools, can't get into or afford college, get lower paying jobs, remain at the bottom of the ladder...

I do see some real positives however. This sort of a system, while expensive, can save a lot of paper. And if you have never worked in a school, let me tell you, you probably don't realize just how much a school can burn through! Further, computer based homework can save teachers a lot of time grading, as multiple choice questions can be graded automatically, and even some simple written answers. Further, this could be an opportunity for students to get experience with technology that their families could never afford.

I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on the idea. Are you in favor of schools assigning tech like this to students? Or are you against it? Or do you think our opinions don't matter and the wheels of corporatism can't be stopped so this is inevitable?

I agree. My intermediate school is a 1:1 Chromebook school, as are all the others in the district. Every parent is forced to pay an insurance fee that barely covers any damage. Many students cheat/play non-school related games during class, sometimes even during tests. There has also been a problem with supply. My school has a couple hundred students from 3-4 elementary schools. There were at least 40 students that had to wait for theirs to arrive. This reliance on technology has also impacted other parts of the school. Previously year long classes are turned into semester classes, with the period the class takes place in differing. At least 60 people suffered from this. I just wish we could go back to pencil & paper, as the district lost about $30 million in their budget, limiting printing of paper materials. _{even though they could have just gotten rid of Chromebooks and swallowed the loss, while still have effectively more materials in the long run}

@PolarExperience I don't think we need to abandon technology entirely. I think having a computer lab for computer based lessons, that teachers can reserve for class time is sufficient. At the high school I attended students could also use the computers after school to do research, type up papers, and print things (within a certain limit) etc. That pattern continued even in my college, though with several labs spread throughout the campus. Also at the JHS I teach at there is a computer lab as well. But Japan has notably been much more stubborn that other countries on the issue of tech in the classroom, still preferring chalkboards, rather than dry erase white boards.

I am curious how much that insurance fee is? I imagine it could get costly. Is it every month? Year?

@Heavyarms55 You are right, with the current curriculum, we can’t survive without at least a computer lab. However, there are only about three classes that require a computer lab (and there are only 2-4 of them).

The insurance is only $30 a school year, but the charges really rack up if your laptop was accidentally damaged but there is not a valid reason. For example, someone else throwing it on the floor = a fee of at least $20-40. Even taking off a label or putting a sticker on the Chromebook will land a $20 fine. Yet some students intentionally break their computers and get them replaced free of charge.

@PolarExperience Sounds like a pretty busted insurance system. 30 bucks a year isn't much, but it really adds up when it is something you are required to have. I argued that 20 a year was tiny for Nintendo Switch online, but that was because it was an optional luxury service. Not something a parent has to pay each year, presumably for each of their children. My Aunt and Uncle had 6 kids, that would have been a significant extra expense each year! (and knowing my cousins, several Chromebooks would have been destroyed...)

@Heavyarms55 Very true about the insurance, some kind of discount for larger families should be implemented. Not to mention that some of these kids that are low-income don’t have financial relief for this expense.

Many of the high school credit electives also have fees upwards of $50, some of which I do take part in. If even two people of the same family take just one of these electives with the CB fees, the cost can be $150+.

@PolarExperience That's mind boggling to me. The only additional expenses my high school charged were for Advanced Placement courses for 11th and 12th grade students who were taking specialized tests to earn college credit. Even then, half of the cost of those tests were reimbursed by the state if the student passed the test. I have no idea if it still works that way but that is how it was about 10 years ago when I was there. The kids here at the JHS do have to pay for some things, but everything they pay for is theirs forever. And the school district has programs to help low income families.

@Heavyarms55 The sad thing is that this is the best school in one of the best ISDs in Texas. We started all of the advanced programs here, including Geometry (10th grade, available for “Accelerated students” in 8th grade), Biology (9th grade, available for Pre-AP students in 8th grade), & more because we have the best standardized testing scores (which is a whole other topic that I’m not getting into).

The AP system still works that way, I have sisters that went through that only about 4 years ago and they had a similar experience to you. There is some financial relief, but only for school supplies, if I remember correctly.

@PolarExperience Standardizing testing is a most definitely a whole different can of worms. Trust me, I teach in Japan. Some Americans call it the land of the rising sun in English. But in some ways, it is more like the land of the standardized tests.

I think that tech should be used as an additional tool for the teachers, not the exclusive method of delivery. I'm only 33, so I finished everything before all this fanciful imagining rolled out en masse. But my senior high school year, I had a Computer Networking & Technology teacher (at an adjunct vocational campus) that got one of those interactive white boards when they came out. We used it for more complex lessons, because we were able to create our work and throw it up on the board quickly. But for other things, we all (teacher included) preferred the faster method of just writing on the board. This is also the class were there was a 'dump day' after a couple classes of resistor identification, in which the TAs would be instructed to group everyone, then dump about 1000 sorted resistors out of their bins. (It was nice to be a TA that year, haha)

Another worrying issue I have is something I just learned a few weeks ago. My friend's daughter had to study for a history test, so I was gonna help because I love history. (she's 10, so whatever grade that is) There's no flippin' books. NONE. The teacher makes a 'study guide', which is just 3 pages of something that looks like a crappy presentation with crooked pictures and incomplete facts. Oh, and if they get a 70 they can retake a test. But they have to write out why they should be allowed to, with a parent signature, on a 'report' that doesn't say what they got right or wrong. And her school continually does fundraising things. Why? There's no books. They take tests on computers.

/rant I kinda went off the rails, sorry

Steve Wosniak is disappointed with this thread.

@ReaderRagfish All of your points are correct, couldn’t explain it better.

@JackEatsSparrows The study guides teachers make are awful. Most of the information is not on the test (or not even on the final exam for HS credit classes), but they are still required. History books were almost completely wiped out from my US History classroom, as the district decided to use digital, shortly after realizing the digital didn’t work and still not fixing it.
The retake policy might be better over in her school, though. Here, you need parent signature, attendance to at least one reteach session before/after school/during study hall and need to take the test before/after school/during study hall for the max grade of an 80. It’s way too complex and makes no sense to do all of that just to get a B-.

@JackEatsSparrows No books? Not even digital texts? What do they use for lessons?

@PolarExperience @JackEatsSparrows The idea of test retakes like that is almost totally foreign to me. I'm only 26, but my JHS and high school experience had almost nothing like that. Only on rare special occasions did that happen - usually if the entire/vast majority class did very poorly and it was determined that the test was to blame. Here in Japan that sort of thing is pretty rare as well, but some of the teachers make another psuedo test sheet after the test, based on the most commonly missed questions and do a follow-up lesson based on that material.

My only experience with taking totally digital tests was in university, only a few of the courses took advantage of it, and after one semester I learned that if I had a choice between traditional and "hybrid digital" courses, I'd always pick traditional. I imagine the programs must be more user friendly now, if they are having kids use them. But in university, if your internet cut out, you mistakenly refreshed the page, or closed your laptop... usually you could be totally screwed.

The use the little ‘study guides’ and talk. Another peeve I have with her school, which just comes down to me being old fashioned, is that they don’t want you to get out of the car if you drop them off. I took her to school once when friends car was in the shop, and was about to get out of the truck when my friend said that. Why? Because they don’t want the lane to slow down. So if I had a kid, I wouldn’t be able to come over get them out of the car and walk them a few steps to someone, and wish them a good day. No, instead it’s “well, have fun and now here’s a school person opening the door and bye”.
This isn’t some high falutin city, either. This is in the country.
Grumble grumble

@JackEatsSparrows But what are the study guides based on? The teacher's memory of what they studied? That's absurd!

I can kind of understand the car thing, especially if a LOT of students are dropped off by car. If every parent stopped to get out with their kid, it could be really painstakingly slow. I don't know how big her school is, but that was a distinct problem in my high school that everyone was upset with, teacher, student and parent alike.

@Heavyarms55 In classrooms that do not use digital or physical textbooks, the teacher will either get a lesson from slideshare and upload it on their digital classroom or just give in-class notes and worksheets with some information on them.

Also, the digital classrooms (lets just say Schoology bc that’s what my district uses) are usually not user friendly, only district friendly. If you want to find a lesson, there’s a folder. Once you’re in that folder, there’s another folder. Then you have to select what material you are trying to access. Then you have to open it in your browser. It’s definitely not fun (to be fair, not all digital classrooms are like this, i.e. Google Classroom). The district only uses it over GC bc it auto uploads to our grading program, yet it doesn’t even work all the time. The teachers also hate it, as everything has to be uploaded individually, then for each class.

In short, digital doesn’t always mean better.

I'm Canadian, if that matters. Anyway, when I was in grade 6 (circa 2006), we were a "guinea pig" class. Our entire class was one of several in the province to receive laptops. Every student in the class had their own to care for. They were cheap Lenovo Thinkpads, if I recall. Anyway, the concept was to see how technology could possibly improve the performance of a student. They wanted to see if there was any benefit to this. We also had a Smart Board in the classroom. We did pretty much all of our work on these laptops. Only thing you really had to use a notebook for was math. There were handouts, but not many. We had physical textbooks and novels for assigned reading. The teacher also had the ability to take over everybody's screen, so everyone would see the same thing for the lesson. I had my best marks in elementary/public school in grade 6.

I can't help but reflect on that when I read stuff like this. They must have learned something positive because by the time I got to high school there was a push to have "more technology". Unfortunately for the school I went to, all the money went into a Mac lab that could only be used by certain people, and the rest of the school was a complete dump (it's being knocked down next year, I believe) and programs got cut. And that meant online classes. Never again. Just a terrible way to learn. You don't absorb any information at all, and you won't ever log on to do the course work and then you fall behind. And it was possibly one of the most non-user-friendly things I have ever encountered. You have a course number, then you have a series of folders for the "unit", then you have another folder and another folder... and then oops! You're working on the wrong assignment! So go back and start the cycle again. Sign in, go back to the specific page.... Folder-Folder-Folder-Folder-Assignment. Open the assignment and complete it in Word or whatever is required. Then you go into a completely different part of the website to submit the assignment, and you better name that document correctly (ie. "Your Name - New World History Summative Part 1") or the teacher will send you a snarky, unprofessional message about how he/she didn't receive it.
And don't even get me started on what happens when your home internet isn't working and the provider isn't able look into it until next week.

Then I had a grade 11 anthropology teacher who loved slideshows, even though no other teacher in the entire building ever did this. So every day, instead of actually giving a lecture or engaging the class, she'd have a slideshow and she'd read the bullet points to you. And then she'd print off the slideshow and hand them out as your "notes". I had a 90% average in high school, and I think I finished her class with a 70%. It was terrible.

Heck, I remember in grade 12, they decided they were going to make the teachers do class attendance on the computer. I'm not making this up. This is true. All of the teachers hated it. Half the time it wouldn't even work, so they'd have to use some random piece of paper to write down the names of the kids that weren't there. Who thinks of this stuff?

Anyway, my point is, I think technology has a place and it can improve some things, but nothing beats pen and paper or having a teacher standing in front of you actually teaching.
I think there is a happy medium, and very few people that put programs/curriculum together understand that medium. My understanding is that the folks that draw up the programs didn't even learn with technology, so they're just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

The only fees that were ever required for families to pay were the annual student fees, and I think in high school I had to buy a $10 grammar book for English class.
But if you had corporations like Google moving into classrooms, they'd want to make money. For now, you're just paying a service/insurance fee because your kid is using their stuff. But someday, they might put that fee up a few bucks, and they could do so every year. And what if you have multiple children? It would add up fast. That's actually a terrifying future in some ways. You'd have to have this stuff to go to school, but what if you can't afford it? Public education would become like the ridiculous joke that is the post-secondary system, structured like a business and out of reach for many.

@Gamecubed The Lenovo ThinkPads are mainstream in digital schools at this point. Your grade 6 experience is extremely similar to mine in grade 7, which is when my school started the 1:1 laptop to student program. Sadly, I am experiencing most of what happened to you in high school in just grade 8. Attendance is online (which many teachers forget to do, thus wasting time), all of the main curriculum is online, pen & paper is discarded 90% of the time, etc. This wasn’t the same in grade 6, which handled both digital and physical lessons very well. Very long story short, I hate Lenovo ThinkPads.