I think most schools saw 1:1 initiatives as "the next big thing." Many schools have technology "coaches " who are responsible for implementing technology. To some extent, it's tech *for the sake of* tech. Or if your job is tech, you promote tech.
Don't get me wrong--I love 1:1 as an English teacher because I archive student writing and create materials using and inspired by student writing. It eclipses any expensive textbook materials with sheer authenticity. Students learn better with student writing.
But for many students, they become hopelessly addicted and never get past Chromebook addiction and basically fail school instead. I'm not sure most districts want to blame themselves for any lack of achievement thanks to Chromebooks.
I think you're right about districts not wanting to blame themselves. Hopefully they can learn from those on the ground like yourself. I find it funny that most of the Big Tech execs send their children to Waldorf and Montessori schools. Why not learn from those who know how the brain works, with play and abstract concepts?
I'm glad you brought up the Waldorf and Montessori schools! Many folks would be shocked to hear that. And I agree 100% about learning how the brain works, learning from play, and learning about abstract concepts.
But as far as learning from the ground? That's likely not to happen.
Thank you Adam! In case you're interested / ever have time, I wrote about Waldorf and Montessori here, along with what many consider to be a fringe (yet should not be ignored) topic of wireless radiation:
Roman - there is no one way 'the brain' works, because every unique child has been exposed to particular stimuli, both positive and extremely negative.
As soon as you expose a child to pain beyond a threshold, the brain deliberately shuts down whichever parts of the feeling emotions that will cause the child ongoing damage. You see this in war zones, you see it with children neglected in the first year of life (be that in orphanages, mothers with severe postpuertal depressions), you see it with sexually abused children, you see it where a parent dies suddenly, unexpectedly.
Play works best for children where the pre-school years pan out well - two well-adjusted loving parents, no brutalisation, no bullying, no serious adverse events.
Children who have 'shut down' become more like adults very young. They can be very analytical at an age most children still won't analyse. They have adult insights that often don't happen to many adults before their forties. They may become observers rather than participants, unless strongly encouraged otherwise.
You will find that 'war zone therapy' often includes painting - helping children to express their unspoken pain in art. You may find that the solution for a shut down child is to start speaking to them at the emotional level of when they had to shut down - you may find that they 'rush through the ages and stages' with a superior emotional mentor and start to catch up.
It's almost impossible to have one single system that works for all children - people need to devise multiple routes to adulthood and work out the traits in young children that make them best suited to particular approaches.
I substitute teach pre-K to HS all around San Diego County (CA), mostly in lower SES schools. Chromebooks and iPads are omnipresent. Kids love to revert to playing games and switching to iReady Math or whatever they're supposed to be doing when I get close to them. In spite of this attachment, I never see the joy of exploration on the computer that I see in a child when s/he picks out a book and sits down to leaf through it, looking at the pictures, reading, jumping around the book, sharing with a friend. Books may be obsolete for adults, but for kids they are much more tangible gateways into new worlds.
What happens when children can no longer read, due to the oxidative stress of 450 nanometer blue light, and the depletion of ocular dopamine that increases addiction? When does technology become a hindrance, vs a tool for the mind?
I also find that from a sheer quality standpoint, the information in books is far superior to information presented online or even in digital learning portals. Books published for kids are written well, illustrated well, researched well. There are plenty of gates that this information has to pass through to ensure its quality, and the Internet lacks those gatekeepers. Plus, as a teacher, you have to sort through tons of irrelevant/unhelpful digital content before you find something that's actually good. Books are better for teaching for a lot of reasons, but I rarely see folks talking about how poor quality the information available on the internet actually is.
I did an MA in Digital Education, so this was quite saddening to read, although not a surprise. I initially was quite evangelical about education using computers - our texts were full of the idea that ‘digital natives’ would learn by playing games. A couple of things changed my mind. One was my own experience of online learning, which was never as effective as being in a class with other people. Another was the failure of digital education during Covid. This should have been a fantastic success for digital education but clearly wasn’t.
Thank you so much for covering this issue in such depth.
technology isnt going anywhere, so i dont presume that MA was for naught – if anything should help inform the problem set that we need to solve! i myself am in technology and hav been going through a similar process. i am still trying to think of ways that this could be used to bring balance to humanity relationship to (addiction to) technology ... its an ongoing thought process
Thank you! It’s certainly a useful tool in the classroom. The history of tech in the classroom tends to be about acquiring things at great expense that get put into the cupboard when they don’t work that well, and they age quickly. There’s a great bit in The Simpsons where they are looking for a projector for a really old film and Bart says, “ I know! The school!.”
I was in the vanguard of the 1to1 movement. I became a high school science teacher in 2001 at the age of 44 after an engineering career spent successfully harnessing tech to improve productivity many-fold. 1to1 computing in the classroom was like the holy grail for me and I got my first teaching job largely on my tech skills. I pushed tech to the limit and was extremely proud that by 2010 I had created a "paperless classroom.". I'm retired now but I still substitute occasionally at my old school and I see the damage done. Cheating is rampant and the large majority of students are captured by their screens. I thought that the productivity gains I helped usher in for industry during the 80s and 90s would translate to the classroom. I was wrong. Tech has become an impediment to learning and higher order thinking for most students. For my part, I apologize.
May I suggest that you write a personal essay for an educational journal and/or newsletter? Or even for the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has a lot of field-of-education readers?
Check out the comment below by Sumay Lu, young siblings who are discussing this issue on a podcast.
Excellent piece Jared! You lay out a cogent argument that dispells the myth that the use of digital technology in classrooms is a modern necessity. Given that schools are heavily tied to monetary investments by tech companies, it will be uo to the parents to demand that their students have access to a learning environment free from digital distraction. It would be helpful for articles like this one to be offered in pamphlet or pdf format so that parents can present it to their school administrators. Thank you for your work!
Excellent article! Thank you for articulating the impact that multi-tasking has on learning. As a school based SLP, I witness daily the harms to learning and social emotional health due to the 1:1 devices placed in students hands. The challenge that I am also witnessing is that digital curriculums are being pushed on school districts by state department of education through organizations such as www.edreports.org since they are considered "High Quality Curriculum Materials". The research that curriculum developers use to push their products are often very weak, yet packaged in a way to dazzle administrators that their product will boost test scores. These products are then connected to CAT's (computer adaptive tests) which are then use to progress monitor students along with evaluate teacher performance. A significant amount of funding is also being funneled to research for use of AI in education. Please check out my article https://www.public.news/p/big-tech-hubris-and-greed-behind which highlights the profits of big tech with the push of EdTech in schools.
I taught for a few years last decade. Our district was moving to ChromeBooks. It was evident right away that it was a distraction. Kids were using their tablets for Netflix, Movie Piracy and porn.
The teachers though don't see it that way. It can make many parts of teaching much less time consuming and they will fight like hell in certain areas to keep the Google coming.
Chromebooks are nothing but an attempt by Google to create a new generation of customers while also having access to the data from the kids. I am sorry Google but the world runs on Office, there will never be a need for Google Sheets when everyone uses Excel.
This is such an important topic and I'm glad you are covering this along with phones. Both problems need to be confronted.
My time teaching High School led me to believe that some solutions are quite simple but frustratingly complex to enact because of how beholden we are to entrenched systems. Such as "EdTech". So much damn inertia... Laptops being a main tool for learning, in my opinion, is a disaster. As much as districts try to put blocks and guardrails on them, they are a relentless tool of distraction. Whether it is chatting friends on Teams, finding the online games that aren't blocked, browsing the internet; they are a massive headache. Not to mention the added layer of having a teacher always be on the alert to determine whether or not the devices are being used to stay on task. Along with phones, teaching ends up feeling like Whack-A-Mole in EdTech environments. Always distracted by trying to reign in the distractions. It's never-ending. Other than Microsoft Office suite products and maybe Canva for presentations, I have never felt that the job of teaching is made easier by EdTech. Even Canva and PPT are becoming so smart that you hardly have to put in any work to create a good looking presentation. We need more books. Less EdTech.
Thank you for the thought provoking piece. My sister (age 12) and I (age 15) will be doing a podcast about this article on the WEquil App channel explaining the reasons why we disagree. Our conclusion is that the fundamental problem has to do with the paradigm we have towards child development and education. Even when we have digital tools and otherwise beneficial means towards improving efficacy and efficiency, it will not be helpful if it is towards a bad goal. We hope to provide some constructive criticism so we can all learn together and find better ways of helping young people around the world.
I looked for your app on the Google Play Store. It would be great if you could put up more of a description than "An Education Technology Platform for learning by doing real things". What kinds of things? How does learning happen? What does "connect with others in rooms" have to do with it? I'd like to know more. Thanks.
Thank you for the suggestion! Here is a short description: Empowering students, parents, and professionals to thrive in an AI-driven world through Creative Intelligence. Build, innovate, and create what AI can’t.
Essentially, we are providing education and technology solutions to help people build Creative Intelligence, what sets us apart from machine learning models to help people become irreplaceable in the digital age.
In identifying digital tools as just another tool, you are correct! As you point out, the difficulty lies in ensuring that the tool is used for its intended purpose. If I walked into shop class and found 20 students using their individual 24v circular saws to pound nails into pieces of wood, should my response be "well everyone gets a handsaw!"? Maybe yes, maybe no - good pedagogy may demand it, in the short term. But in the long term, I will have failed as a shop teacher if the students cannot use common power tools for their intended purposes. An imperfect analogy of course, but the point stands - digital tools are incredibly powerful tools, and their primary focus is the creation and delivery of information in one form or another. A case against their use in the classroom will end up being much like a case against using books in the classroom: potentially plausible (think pre-K or shop class), but ultimately temporary and limited.
The interesting irony here is that as mobile devices took over, hard computer skills have actually dropped from where they were in the 90s and 00s. Terms like "C Drive," "folder," etc. make little sense to people who are using devices most of their waking day. And this is not because they've cottoned on to the proper terms, terms used by the developers of the devices in their hands (mount, directory, etc), but because digital education itself has been neglected. Yes, people can do more with their devices than ever before - but they understand less about the tools they are using. Is it so surprising then, that they are using them to pound nails?
Your last point is so important! Digital education/knowledge of computers is not taught. Kids intuitively figure it out but they can't explain what they are doing or why. And meanwhile their attention span is being systematically weakened as the temptation to get fall off task is almost constant and they often fail to finish reading the article, much less an entire book or even directions. What a mess.
Great point Aleks. These tools are hard to put away, however, as they dictate and manipulate so much of our behavior through blue light and magnetism. It's hard to put a hairnet on them, as one would long hair in wood shop, as these phones fly out at us every chance they get. Once the phone is in the room, it changes the ecosystem of the entire room and its inhabitants and their behavior.
Ok, blue light I'll grant, magnetism not so much. The overweening factor I believe is in how they act as training devices for our brains though, teaching and encouraging certain responses - scrolling, swiping, endlessly, for shallow, quick gratification. It is no accident that the drop in test scores correlates with the rise of 1:1 devices - because this rise is correlated with the rise of kids having 24/7 access to phones/internet. Devices and connectivity got cheaper and more popular, and thus kids got more devices, both in and out of school.
So yeah, hard. We don't give first graders circular saws - but it'd be silly for highschoolers not to have them. On the gripping hand, if a student is taught to hammer nails with circular saws from 4pm to midnight, it stands to reason that they will tend to do the same thing from 8am to 4pm. I *think* I've got mine trained to at least recognize the damage done - they've had devices since the age of 4, but very tightly controlled to focus on long-term gratification - reading, minecraft but no servers, hard games, etc. Only time will tell.
I suspect that since I started using computers and the internet before they were so "user friendly" I've always valued them primarily as tools that let me do things I couldn't do otherwise. I spend maybe 12 hours a day in front of a screen during the week - but spending a week completely off the grid causes absolutely 0 angst. I pray I have managed to convey this approach to the next generation, and I sub this stack cause I think it supports this view and helps educate parents now to the dangers inherent in piping the internet straight into kids' brains, despite my quibbles about edtech specifically :)
I love the discourse you provide and as a Tech Integrator/Coach and a Librarian I live in both the tech and book world. There are a couple of things that I feel like the article omits. We've been teaching students with books, pencils, and lectures for literally 200 years. Its only been in the last 25 (being generous) that students have had access to computers. Along with that education as many well know is glacial in efforts to change. Nothing against Hattie, his work is some of the best, but those tests were not developed for students who were born into the technological eras. These students were born into a time where newspapers are rarely delivered to your home by a paperboy (I was one) they are now read on a phone.
I believe the biggest argument that is omitted is one of a future unknown. With the technology that is currently invading every area of our lives, not having a technical foundation seems dangerous. I am all for the ban on phones at school and avoidance of multitasking. To that point I always say a good lesson is a good lesson tech or no tech. That said, how many people are working in a job where they don't use some kind of tech? That would be a nice statistic to measure. Education needs to adapt and do so soon, but I dare say a return to the 'sit and get' lecture is not going to prepare students for the future that they will face.
Great points - I think there need to be stages with how tech is introduced.
For example:
Children are meant to be in the theta brainwave state, which allows them to be creative. Blue light puts us into high alert/ beta brainwave, and may facilitate more of analytical state of mind.
Electro-magnetic fields from wireless can also manipulate alpha states of consciousness.
true, digital tools are useless improving scores, so let's revert to teachers (who have also proven to be useless at improving scores). The only 'technology' that seems to work is 'tiger' parenting (commonly from first or second generation of immigrant parents)
The idea that kids will do what the teacher wants on a machine with a browser is laughable. Even with the strictest filters they will always find a way to access a vpn or a rammerhead server. They shouldn't even be faced with that level of temptation in an academic setting. It is quite simply a joke.
It is such a relief to see some quantitative data that backs it up.
"This is why, when using a computer for homework, students typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. This is why, when using a laptop during class, students typically spend 38 minutes of every hour off-task. This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking. It’s not that the students of today have abnormally weak constitutions; it’s that they have spent thousands of hours training themselves to use digital devices in a manner guaranteed to impair learning and performance. It’s also that many of the apps being run on those devices were carefully engineered to pull young people away from whatever they were doing."
This sums it up nicely. Short attention spans; multitasking to see what your friends are doing, etc..
There are certain occasions where the screen reader, ebooks, etc. help my son keep up in class despite his dyslexia. So that is a clear example of the exception he noted for learning disabilities. That being said, I supplement his school’s curriculum with real books, real maps, etc. at home because I have seen the massive distraction that his school-issued Chromebook can be more often than not. Their textbooks are now ebooks that require scrolling side to side and up and down if the ebook doesn’t format correctly. Answering questions requires tons of clicking around when a normal assignment with a book would let you write on paper while simply looking at the page. It annoys me and distracts me and I’m an adult that knows how to focus!
After ten years 1:1, I'm convinced we just gave kids school-sanctioned distractions and addictions.
Probably because parents and teachers themselves are easily distracted by these same addictive devices, no? Why/ how do you think this happened?
I think most schools saw 1:1 initiatives as "the next big thing." Many schools have technology "coaches " who are responsible for implementing technology. To some extent, it's tech *for the sake of* tech. Or if your job is tech, you promote tech.
Don't get me wrong--I love 1:1 as an English teacher because I archive student writing and create materials using and inspired by student writing. It eclipses any expensive textbook materials with sheer authenticity. Students learn better with student writing.
But for many students, they become hopelessly addicted and never get past Chromebook addiction and basically fail school instead. I'm not sure most districts want to blame themselves for any lack of achievement thanks to Chromebooks.
I think you're right about districts not wanting to blame themselves. Hopefully they can learn from those on the ground like yourself. I find it funny that most of the Big Tech execs send their children to Waldorf and Montessori schools. Why not learn from those who know how the brain works, with play and abstract concepts?
I'm glad you brought up the Waldorf and Montessori schools! Many folks would be shocked to hear that. And I agree 100% about learning how the brain works, learning from play, and learning about abstract concepts.
But as far as learning from the ground? That's likely not to happen.
Thank you Adam! In case you're interested / ever have time, I wrote about Waldorf and Montessori here, along with what many consider to be a fringe (yet should not be ignored) topic of wireless radiation:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/children
Oh wow! That was quite the post! I'll have to look more into EMF radiation.
Yes, it's fringe, to me. I'm an electronics tech, as was my father before me, with a degree in physics.
Do tell us about the rigorously controlled double blind experiments about EMF compared to natural EMF.
Roman - there is no one way 'the brain' works, because every unique child has been exposed to particular stimuli, both positive and extremely negative.
As soon as you expose a child to pain beyond a threshold, the brain deliberately shuts down whichever parts of the feeling emotions that will cause the child ongoing damage. You see this in war zones, you see it with children neglected in the first year of life (be that in orphanages, mothers with severe postpuertal depressions), you see it with sexually abused children, you see it where a parent dies suddenly, unexpectedly.
Play works best for children where the pre-school years pan out well - two well-adjusted loving parents, no brutalisation, no bullying, no serious adverse events.
Children who have 'shut down' become more like adults very young. They can be very analytical at an age most children still won't analyse. They have adult insights that often don't happen to many adults before their forties. They may become observers rather than participants, unless strongly encouraged otherwise.
You will find that 'war zone therapy' often includes painting - helping children to express their unspoken pain in art. You may find that the solution for a shut down child is to start speaking to them at the emotional level of when they had to shut down - you may find that they 'rush through the ages and stages' with a superior emotional mentor and start to catch up.
It's almost impossible to have one single system that works for all children - people need to devise multiple routes to adulthood and work out the traits in young children that make them best suited to particular approaches.
We need to hear and see this!
KIDS NEED BOOKS, not tablets....
Remove the tablet, and you get a whole new ecosystem. The study of epigenetics proves the fact,, no?
can you share more about this?
Kids need books? No, kids need education in how to use edtech, as do most teachers.
edtech allows easier reading, wider access to knowledge worldwide.
Books are obsolete. Really.
Did you read the piece?
I substitute teach pre-K to HS all around San Diego County (CA), mostly in lower SES schools. Chromebooks and iPads are omnipresent. Kids love to revert to playing games and switching to iReady Math or whatever they're supposed to be doing when I get close to them. In spite of this attachment, I never see the joy of exploration on the computer that I see in a child when s/he picks out a book and sits down to leaf through it, looking at the pictures, reading, jumping around the book, sharing with a friend. Books may be obsolete for adults, but for kids they are much more tangible gateways into new worlds.
What happens when children can no longer read, due to the oxidative stress of 450 nanometer blue light, and the depletion of ocular dopamine that increases addiction? When does technology become a hindrance, vs a tool for the mind?
I also find that from a sheer quality standpoint, the information in books is far superior to information presented online or even in digital learning portals. Books published for kids are written well, illustrated well, researched well. There are plenty of gates that this information has to pass through to ensure its quality, and the Internet lacks those gatekeepers. Plus, as a teacher, you have to sort through tons of irrelevant/unhelpful digital content before you find something that's actually good. Books are better for teaching for a lot of reasons, but I rarely see folks talking about how poor quality the information available on the internet actually is.
The research on early learning outcomes proves otherwise.
I did an MA in Digital Education, so this was quite saddening to read, although not a surprise. I initially was quite evangelical about education using computers - our texts were full of the idea that ‘digital natives’ would learn by playing games. A couple of things changed my mind. One was my own experience of online learning, which was never as effective as being in a class with other people. Another was the failure of digital education during Covid. This should have been a fantastic success for digital education but clearly wasn’t.
Thank you so much for covering this issue in such depth.
technology isnt going anywhere, so i dont presume that MA was for naught – if anything should help inform the problem set that we need to solve! i myself am in technology and hav been going through a similar process. i am still trying to think of ways that this could be used to bring balance to humanity relationship to (addiction to) technology ... its an ongoing thought process
Thank you! It’s certainly a useful tool in the classroom. The history of tech in the classroom tends to be about acquiring things at great expense that get put into the cupboard when they don’t work that well, and they age quickly. There’s a great bit in The Simpsons where they are looking for a projector for a really old film and Bart says, “ I know! The school!.”
I was in the vanguard of the 1to1 movement. I became a high school science teacher in 2001 at the age of 44 after an engineering career spent successfully harnessing tech to improve productivity many-fold. 1to1 computing in the classroom was like the holy grail for me and I got my first teaching job largely on my tech skills. I pushed tech to the limit and was extremely proud that by 2010 I had created a "paperless classroom.". I'm retired now but I still substitute occasionally at my old school and I see the damage done. Cheating is rampant and the large majority of students are captured by their screens. I thought that the productivity gains I helped usher in for industry during the 80s and 90s would translate to the classroom. I was wrong. Tech has become an impediment to learning and higher order thinking for most students. For my part, I apologize.
May I suggest that you write a personal essay for an educational journal and/or newsletter? Or even for the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has a lot of field-of-education readers?
Check out the comment below by Sumay Lu, young siblings who are discussing this issue on a podcast.
Excellent piece Jared! You lay out a cogent argument that dispells the myth that the use of digital technology in classrooms is a modern necessity. Given that schools are heavily tied to monetary investments by tech companies, it will be uo to the parents to demand that their students have access to a learning environment free from digital distraction. It would be helpful for articles like this one to be offered in pamphlet or pdf format so that parents can present it to their school administrators. Thank you for your work!
Excellent article! Thank you for articulating the impact that multi-tasking has on learning. As a school based SLP, I witness daily the harms to learning and social emotional health due to the 1:1 devices placed in students hands. The challenge that I am also witnessing is that digital curriculums are being pushed on school districts by state department of education through organizations such as www.edreports.org since they are considered "High Quality Curriculum Materials". The research that curriculum developers use to push their products are often very weak, yet packaged in a way to dazzle administrators that their product will boost test scores. These products are then connected to CAT's (computer adaptive tests) which are then use to progress monitor students along with evaluate teacher performance. A significant amount of funding is also being funneled to research for use of AI in education. Please check out my article https://www.public.news/p/big-tech-hubris-and-greed-behind which highlights the profits of big tech with the push of EdTech in schools.
I taught for a few years last decade. Our district was moving to ChromeBooks. It was evident right away that it was a distraction. Kids were using their tablets for Netflix, Movie Piracy and porn.
The teachers though don't see it that way. It can make many parts of teaching much less time consuming and they will fight like hell in certain areas to keep the Google coming.
Chromebooks are nothing but an attempt by Google to create a new generation of customers while also having access to the data from the kids. I am sorry Google but the world runs on Office, there will never be a need for Google Sheets when everyone uses Excel.
spot on take about google
unfortunately i think google is succeeding in this plan (RE: overtaking Office) more than you might think 😬
This is such an important topic and I'm glad you are covering this along with phones. Both problems need to be confronted.
My time teaching High School led me to believe that some solutions are quite simple but frustratingly complex to enact because of how beholden we are to entrenched systems. Such as "EdTech". So much damn inertia... Laptops being a main tool for learning, in my opinion, is a disaster. As much as districts try to put blocks and guardrails on them, they are a relentless tool of distraction. Whether it is chatting friends on Teams, finding the online games that aren't blocked, browsing the internet; they are a massive headache. Not to mention the added layer of having a teacher always be on the alert to determine whether or not the devices are being used to stay on task. Along with phones, teaching ends up feeling like Whack-A-Mole in EdTech environments. Always distracted by trying to reign in the distractions. It's never-ending. Other than Microsoft Office suite products and maybe Canva for presentations, I have never felt that the job of teaching is made easier by EdTech. Even Canva and PPT are becoming so smart that you hardly have to put in any work to create a good looking presentation. We need more books. Less EdTech.
Great comment! Right on point. I taught in K-8 classrooms and witnessed the same issues that you are describing.
Thank you for the thought provoking piece. My sister (age 12) and I (age 15) will be doing a podcast about this article on the WEquil App channel explaining the reasons why we disagree. Our conclusion is that the fundamental problem has to do with the paradigm we have towards child development and education. Even when we have digital tools and otherwise beneficial means towards improving efficacy and efficiency, it will not be helpful if it is towards a bad goal. We hope to provide some constructive criticism so we can all learn together and find better ways of helping young people around the world.
Sincerely,
Sumay and Aila Lu
Co-Founders of WEquil App
Great that you are engaging. I hope to listen to your podcast episode.
Good for you that you're engaging thoughtfully!
I looked for your app on the Google Play Store. It would be great if you could put up more of a description than "An Education Technology Platform for learning by doing real things". What kinds of things? How does learning happen? What does "connect with others in rooms" have to do with it? I'd like to know more. Thanks.
Thank you for the suggestion! Here is a short description: Empowering students, parents, and professionals to thrive in an AI-driven world through Creative Intelligence. Build, innovate, and create what AI can’t.
Essentially, we are providing education and technology solutions to help people build Creative Intelligence, what sets us apart from machine learning models to help people become irreplaceable in the digital age.
The podcast is out! https://youtu.be/ndhsCVSs5pI
In identifying digital tools as just another tool, you are correct! As you point out, the difficulty lies in ensuring that the tool is used for its intended purpose. If I walked into shop class and found 20 students using their individual 24v circular saws to pound nails into pieces of wood, should my response be "well everyone gets a handsaw!"? Maybe yes, maybe no - good pedagogy may demand it, in the short term. But in the long term, I will have failed as a shop teacher if the students cannot use common power tools for their intended purposes. An imperfect analogy of course, but the point stands - digital tools are incredibly powerful tools, and their primary focus is the creation and delivery of information in one form or another. A case against their use in the classroom will end up being much like a case against using books in the classroom: potentially plausible (think pre-K or shop class), but ultimately temporary and limited.
The interesting irony here is that as mobile devices took over, hard computer skills have actually dropped from where they were in the 90s and 00s. Terms like "C Drive," "folder," etc. make little sense to people who are using devices most of their waking day. And this is not because they've cottoned on to the proper terms, terms used by the developers of the devices in their hands (mount, directory, etc), but because digital education itself has been neglected. Yes, people can do more with their devices than ever before - but they understand less about the tools they are using. Is it so surprising then, that they are using them to pound nails?
Your last point is so important! Digital education/knowledge of computers is not taught. Kids intuitively figure it out but they can't explain what they are doing or why. And meanwhile their attention span is being systematically weakened as the temptation to get fall off task is almost constant and they often fail to finish reading the article, much less an entire book or even directions. What a mess.
Great point Aleks. These tools are hard to put away, however, as they dictate and manipulate so much of our behavior through blue light and magnetism. It's hard to put a hairnet on them, as one would long hair in wood shop, as these phones fly out at us every chance they get. Once the phone is in the room, it changes the ecosystem of the entire room and its inhabitants and their behavior.
Ok, blue light I'll grant, magnetism not so much. The overweening factor I believe is in how they act as training devices for our brains though, teaching and encouraging certain responses - scrolling, swiping, endlessly, for shallow, quick gratification. It is no accident that the drop in test scores correlates with the rise of 1:1 devices - because this rise is correlated with the rise of kids having 24/7 access to phones/internet. Devices and connectivity got cheaper and more popular, and thus kids got more devices, both in and out of school.
So yeah, hard. We don't give first graders circular saws - but it'd be silly for highschoolers not to have them. On the gripping hand, if a student is taught to hammer nails with circular saws from 4pm to midnight, it stands to reason that they will tend to do the same thing from 8am to 4pm. I *think* I've got mine trained to at least recognize the damage done - they've had devices since the age of 4, but very tightly controlled to focus on long-term gratification - reading, minecraft but no servers, hard games, etc. Only time will tell.
I suspect that since I started using computers and the internet before they were so "user friendly" I've always valued them primarily as tools that let me do things I couldn't do otherwise. I spend maybe 12 hours a day in front of a screen during the week - but spending a week completely off the grid causes absolutely 0 angst. I pray I have managed to convey this approach to the next generation, and I sub this stack cause I think it supports this view and helps educate parents now to the dangers inherent in piping the internet straight into kids' brains, despite my quibbles about edtech specifically :)
I love the discourse you provide and as a Tech Integrator/Coach and a Librarian I live in both the tech and book world. There are a couple of things that I feel like the article omits. We've been teaching students with books, pencils, and lectures for literally 200 years. Its only been in the last 25 (being generous) that students have had access to computers. Along with that education as many well know is glacial in efforts to change. Nothing against Hattie, his work is some of the best, but those tests were not developed for students who were born into the technological eras. These students were born into a time where newspapers are rarely delivered to your home by a paperboy (I was one) they are now read on a phone.
I believe the biggest argument that is omitted is one of a future unknown. With the technology that is currently invading every area of our lives, not having a technical foundation seems dangerous. I am all for the ban on phones at school and avoidance of multitasking. To that point I always say a good lesson is a good lesson tech or no tech. That said, how many people are working in a job where they don't use some kind of tech? That would be a nice statistic to measure. Education needs to adapt and do so soon, but I dare say a return to the 'sit and get' lecture is not going to prepare students for the future that they will face.
Great points - I think there need to be stages with how tech is introduced.
For example:
Children are meant to be in the theta brainwave state, which allows them to be creative. Blue light puts us into high alert/ beta brainwave, and may facilitate more of analytical state of mind.
Electro-magnetic fields from wireless can also manipulate alpha states of consciousness.
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/i/142911438/electrical-frequencies-can-change-our-personal-reality
The average adult doesn't develop their entire brain (neocortex) until age 27.
Introducing hardwired computers into classrooms could still give us all of the benefits of tech, without sacrificing development.
Are you aware of the hazards of wireless?
true, digital tools are useless improving scores, so let's revert to teachers (who have also proven to be useless at improving scores). The only 'technology' that seems to work is 'tiger' parenting (commonly from first or second generation of immigrant parents)
And a slightly more dialed back version of "tiger parenting" could also help.
home schooling as well?
The idea that kids will do what the teacher wants on a machine with a browser is laughable. Even with the strictest filters they will always find a way to access a vpn or a rammerhead server. They shouldn't even be faced with that level of temptation in an academic setting. It is quite simply a joke.
It is such a relief to see some quantitative data that backs it up.
"This is why, when using a computer for homework, students typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. This is why, when using a laptop during class, students typically spend 38 minutes of every hour off-task. This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking. It’s not that the students of today have abnormally weak constitutions; it’s that they have spent thousands of hours training themselves to use digital devices in a manner guaranteed to impair learning and performance. It’s also that many of the apps being run on those devices were carefully engineered to pull young people away from whatever they were doing."
This sums it up nicely. Short attention spans; multitasking to see what your friends are doing, etc..
Excellent analysis.
Respectfully
Couldn’t agree more. I’d like to know exactly how much time my kids are spending on their devices at school each day!
They are likely exhausting all of their “recommended screen time” per day at school – and then some!
There are certain occasions where the screen reader, ebooks, etc. help my son keep up in class despite his dyslexia. So that is a clear example of the exception he noted for learning disabilities. That being said, I supplement his school’s curriculum with real books, real maps, etc. at home because I have seen the massive distraction that his school-issued Chromebook can be more often than not. Their textbooks are now ebooks that require scrolling side to side and up and down if the ebook doesn’t format correctly. Answering questions requires tons of clicking around when a normal assignment with a book would let you write on paper while simply looking at the page. It annoys me and distracts me and I’m an adult that knows how to focus!