I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper, and i hate having to do online tests too. I like my printed documents and physical books. Many students will say the same, and i also tend to dislike the trend to digitise every and each aspect of learning. The truth out there is that analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole, but many of you are not ready to hear that. Technology is also the problem.
The laptops should be a tool, in addition to other tools. Being well rounded is the best thing you can be.
Ideally they should allow and use both, physical media and notes and digital access to all media. And allow self management. That way they will learn the limits.
But currently they are just forcing digital interfaces on students who did not fully develop yet. Ironicaly, for how much tech they must use, the use of a computer is still sub optimal. Typing skills, for instance, are better trained on a word document with a spell check active. One of the many instances where old tech is still perfectly fit.
Yeah, my 8-year-old has the chrome book, but also gets physical homework, paper and pencil. Dunno how it'll be as she gets older, but I like how it is so far.
I was thinking about trying to find Mavis Beacon and somehow getting it to function on Windows 11. No idea if there's compatible versions. But I used Mavis Beacon all the time growing up and enjoyed the games, made learning to type (properly) fun.
Tech Is Amazing for learning, but the unfortunate truth is that companies got a conflict of interests when it comes to education. The same companies who are pushing the most braindead brainrot and designing apps to be as addictive as humanly possible are then the same ones who sell school learning applications
You know, it wasn't always like this
Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside's out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we'll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand
~ Bo Burnham
Nah, don't buy it. Paper does not produce smart people via some magic, screen does not produce dumb people via some magic. This works in a different, but fairly simple way
I meana, sure. There's a cognitive decline when they get gunned down in their classrooms, or even just the perpetual stress of having to live with that threat on a daily basis.
Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it's just US thing
Nope this conclusion is general everywhere. Replacing textbooks and pen and paper for tablets and digital technology has damaging effects on the learning process. We as a species are not built to learn by clicking and swiping on screens. We learn by touching, feeling and writing on coarse paper. Learning is an incredibly complex process and attempting to simplify it only leads to superficial gains as opposed to real knowledge.
Now when learning 3d geometry for example, people think that buying a bunch of 3d shapes they can touch and bend and visualize easier is better. But what they don't realize is the effort to visualize the shape with ones mind's eye is far better for the learning process even if it takes practice and it is slower.
This race for immediate results in everything created the impression that learning a few things quickly and applying them without actually understanding their depth is better than slowing things down and building knowledge. But the curve must go up up at all costs!
What a silly naturalist falacy. Were not built by anyone and evolutionary speaking pen writing is not any more special than writing on a digital screen. All of the science here is unconvincing at best and fake bullshit at worst.
It's entirely a skill issue.
It could be a skill issue but if that's the case I'd argue that introducing digital learning should have been a slower process. Anyway there are countless studies showing the differences between typing and handwriting (like this one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/) but I also have a story. Years ago I had a friend who was doing different neurological studies and she measured once the difference in the brain when writing vs typing. She said it was night and day. When writing the brain lit up almost completely, because handwriting engages so many centers for so many motions and memory recall etc. Typing she said looked almost the same as pressing a single button over and over. There wasn't much engaging of other motions. I found it very interesting. This was years ago before social media, I don't think smartphones were a thing yet much less tablets.
I am not saying that there is no place in learning for digital technology. It would be stupid to ignore them. But some things are better learned with pen and paper.
I feel like that's still an implementation issue not the fact of that "digital is worse" and yeah you're probably right - the roll out should be better. Using proprietary apple devices and shit by multi trillion budget enterprises (countries) is stupid. The government should task entire governed system with years of preparation and diligent implementation with optimized ebook software and curriculum distribution.
This is entirely a skill issue not a technology / medium issue.
Digital is clearly here to stay and superior form of information exchange - it's literally called IT. To say that we should go back to pen, paper and text books is just pure incompetence. I speak from experience myself as I am a published author but I'm never writing an educational book again when websites exists - physical textbooks are incredibly archaic and should be abandoned entirely and I'll die on this hill.
<By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools.>
There's your problem right there, you bought computers which basically have no programs written for them.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
