Using laptops to replace books and writing is not a tech first approach in the first place. It’s just that you replace a book with a computer, that’s not tech education. The letters and words are still the same, except now you have a distracting screen in front of a kid on a machine that can do other things to satisfy the impulses of a bored kid. Their is nothing wrong with laptops in class just use it to teach the kids to use the tech for things those machines were build for. And not as book and a teaching assistant substitute. Teach kids how to operate a real OS, teach them basic cyber security and cyber hygiene, let them install a printer and wifi. Anything that is useful for when they will use a PC as adults.
May I add in the “opensource astronomic simulation software” like KStars that can’t be replicated by books?
TL;DR: it’s not the screens or tech’s fault. It’s the overall pressure to lower standards and people that for whatever reason can’t work with tech.
After seeing my kids go through school I’d say one of the chief issues with performance is external. Tech and screens are like any tool, they’re only as good as the user.
Parents and society place less importance on education and critical thinking, in fact they often insult it. Parents teach their kids that they’re not responsible for their failings, it’s the teacher’s or the school’s fault. Parent’s don’t have the knowledge to help with the tech, nor will they police the kid’s use of the tech, either because they dgaf or can’t understand it. Teaching standards keep moving the goalposts to help the least common denominator. Teachers also aren’t allowed to teach in a way, there’s always some “do-gooder” latest study that’s supposed to teach kids better, but it’s bullshit management worried more about studies and metrics than just teaching. Teachers spend more time jumping through hoops than teaching.
You can have a Linux running on a raspberry pi, but you have to build the device yourself. That’s my solution.
It’s not the tech, it’s capitalism, and the fact the people making decisions are usually oblivious to the dangers of capitalistic tech.
the problem is advertising. advertising distracts away from the school’s own messages, education and purpose.
How is it that it took until 2026, nearly 100 years after the advent of the nuclear bomb, for school administrators to realize that not all technology is inherently good in every application?
I preferred pen and paper for note taking, didn’t take notes on laptop for CS uni even. But having instruction material in digital form wins imo. Bulky exercise books are not worth it imo. I suspect publishers prefer those for beefy books for other reasons…but I would not be surprised if for lower elementary school exercise books with lots of images and fun exercises have positive impact.
Maybe I have bad digital attention span but whether it’s educational books or documents at work, I’m much better at retaining and locating information in paper. The physical register of the document location, location of information within the document, and location on the page gives me a fuller memory of the info.
Absolutely, i keep my desktop amd documents pretty clear but for a project or presentation I willprint everything and have them mapped out as required. Its more tactile and less stressful
same, laptop is too distracting anyways.
Only way I have ever learned, in school, is by writing notes by hand into my own notebooks. Rewriting text book chapters, taking notes from teacher, writing answers down. It takes time, longer than taking notes on a laptop. But writing on laptop just doesn’t “stick” the information into my head. Back in high school, I was the last student to still hand-in my essays etc in paper and my teachers were very happy to grade them, one told me it brought her good memories from the times there were less screens and teaching was easier. No wonder…
When I had laptop in glass, it was very easy to play games, watch Netflix or scroll Reddit. I had no self-control, I was not able to force myself to focus in learning. They started using laptops and tablets in glasses when we were 13 and most of us found ways to play games etc on them, bypassed the restrictions. And we shared the knowledge on that. Oh, also I dropped out eventually.
Yeah I couldn’t learn if I took a laptop out in class. I only got it out when the class time was spent on a project. Honestly switching to a desktop my final year was probably better for me, it led to me spending my computer time in labs or home instead of having every distraction every time
maybe you shouldnt have let them use AI, which is the final blow. plus you had like 16 years to deal with it, you ruined a generaiton
We can blame Google, Microsoft, and Apple for this mess.
I agree, the obsurd idea that “screens in class would help students” was just devices being pushed on customers.
And it’s not without consequence obviously.
This is TERRIBLE! We MUST put
ChildrenCorporations FIRST!-Republicans!
Let’s also remember that before the screens, we had shitty textbooks, and underpaid teachers and a serious shortage of supplies.
Schools in the United States need more than a review of tech, but a complete overhaul and a budget that doesn’t look like Republicans are literally trying to kill the education system.
you only had those things if you were in a poor school district. also probably half your teachers or more were drunk townies who had no interest in educating you and were just there to relive their glory days as high school atheletes forever and ever.
if you were in a rich one you had great books and great teacher and tons of supplies.
the key to american education is to have parents who have a lot of money and put you in private school, or can afford a town with million dollar homes where the public school is excellent,
simple don’t be born to a poor family and you won’t have a shitty education, and if you have to be born poor, at least do so in a major city where you can get into an exam school. major city exam schools are frequently rated as the best schools in the country, on par with the richest suburban school districts.
Texas used to define the content of school textbooks for the entire country.
And the people who decided what went into those textbooks were not educators or even required to have any kind of degree. They are political appointees.Even worse, is that textbooks are not replaced with updated content every year. So, incorrect information lingers in the textbooks for years without correction. And then those textbooks are passed down to poorer school districts for even more years of use.
This person isn’t wrong. I know most of school funding comes from property taxes which means more prosperous regions usually have schools with better funding. Moreover per family children are fewer (statistically) in more prosperous families. This makes the schools have more money per student in already prosperous communities.
Federal and state grants may skew this but these have not been >2/3 of funding for a long while
well, let’s be a bit more specific: The screen is not the problem. The operating system, the applications, and the abysmal integration is the problem.
This is likely a hot take but, I don’t think this was the fault of the in-class laptops. They thought removing phones were going to solve the issue, it didn’t, they thought computers were going to solve the issue, they didn’t.
The core issue is: School is fucking boring. As a kid/teen you spend 8-10 hours a day sitting at a desk listening to a teacher yap about shit that at the time you don’t believe is even important so you can regurgitate said useless information in tests that you then proceed to forget 2 weeks after taking. Hell even now I think I learned more actual life and useful skills in college. I have more engagement and entertainment working a full time job, than I did in a classroom, and at least I was making money with the job.
The school districts are shocked that upon providing a tool that could be used to lessen the tedium and lifelessness that school shoves down kids throats they then misused said tool. I don’t understand it.
Make learning fun and engaging, add actual life skills to classrooms like how to read an analog clock, or how to write a check. Talk about how to survive in the real world, how interest works, how your credit score is really important, maybe how the government works cause I know I never had a civics class. Stuff that kids in middle/high school would actually care about, instead of how to solve 3 unknowns in an equation, or how to find an angle of a triangle when you know the 2 angles, or learning about colonization for the 8th time. Make it so it isn’t just “read this board, repeat on the test”.
If you solve the underlying issues at play, instead of trying to remove the tools that kids are misusing in order to fix the issue that the school system as a whole created, I think it would be found that computers would be a net positive. I know having a computer in class significantly improved my scores and learning capability, as I could use it for legible note taking, and I could record sessions if I needed to. Yes I definitely accessed coolmathgames at times but, I can tell you right now, the ability to do that helped remove the monotony of the classroom, and if I didn’t have that tool at my disposal, I would have simply zoned out and gained nothing out of the day, instead of what I did. My scores definitely wouldn’t have gone up like the article seems to be alluding to.
I assure you that children find classes on budgeting and civics to be dreadfully boring
I was hoping AI would take us there. All the kids have computers. A guided LLM walks them through videos and concepts. tests them, lets them advance at their own pace.
I wanted to zoom through the lessons, learn everything, but I didn’t want the awful college-prep bullshit or the high scrutiny of my essays. Did I understand the work? Yes, and that’s enough. I showed up to every class, knew what they asked, and aced tests.
How cool would it be for every kid to be able to ask unlimited questions and be given different ways to understand a problem and its corresponding answer until they understood them properly?
Set the text books and workbooks, guardrail the conversations. Double-check for incorrect assertions.
Let them go and seek out on their own whatever subject they wanted at whatever time they wanted.
Personally, if AI wasn’t so destructive, or blatantly stolen as it was, and they changed basically everything about it to make it more reliable and stuff, I agree. I do think eventually something that is called AI will do that, but it won’t be the LLM tech we have today that’s for sure, it will be some other form of tech.
I would love if they had something like you see in the futuristic movies where theres a hologram teacher, could have every kid have their own. I just don’t forsee it happening reliably with our current tech.
Reliable teaching would be straightforward, but not cheap to set up. You wouldn’t want the models used to have the entire sum of the internet trained. Just verified clean data.
You could start with textbooks, peer-reviewed studies, IC data from teachers, then add 20% reviewed, distilled content from a fully trained LLM. Set the whole thing up on rails. Curriculum, pacing, and testing would all be classical programming, architected by people, using a more widely trained LLM to sort out language and edge cases. New edge cases get human review. Set up a quorum of models that get hit on every request to sus-out errors. Backend is the source of truth, front end is not allowed to countermand the backend, and that’s tracked by another quorum.
I think the biggest problem isn’t doing it, the biggest problem is not destroying society to get it done and not allowing society to take it over with an agenda. We can’t have the teachers disappear. It’s ripe for corpo/government manipulation. For something like this to work, you can’t have capitalism driving profits. You can’t have cults indoctrinating. It would all need to be very post Bell Riots Star Trek, and we KNOW that’ll never happen.
or kids need to stop expecting learning to be easy and entertaining…
and do the work required if they want to learn.
because that’s what adult life is like, learning and working doing difficult shit all day. not being entertained.
You just brought a good point up but I’m not sure if you meant to.
“… If they want to learn” - Most kids don’t, or at least don’t want to for topics they don’t get are important. At least in this country anyway. They are forced to go to school with claims it’s going to help them, to sit and stare at a teacher writing on a board for 8-10 hours a day, of mostly stuff that isn’t clear how it’s supposed to help them, then are supposed to regurgitate what was seen on the board. Usually with little to no interest and little socialization with others outside lunch period or the brief intermission period where you switch classes.
That’s the job of the teachers, to make the kids learn the topics, and the best way to do so is keeping it entertaining. You don’t learn subject matter if you are not interested in the subject, instead you start doing anything but retaining the information. If the school system is stating they are unable to keep their kids attentive of classes, they have failed as a school system. No amount of blaming other resources is going to change that.
The sad thing is, distractions in class isn’t a new concept. My parents have told stories of how kids would play hookie, or go out to hunt over lunch break and not come back till the next day, or how they would pass notes in class, and if the teacher caught them they would have to read the note aloud for better or for worse. Hell people set firecrackers/fireworks off in the bathroom during exam periods to set the fire-alarms off. The issue of it being boring and as such not lucrative to the general student is not a new concept caused by phones or computers, it’s just said concept is now easily blamed on them or the kids instead of the system which is causing it in the first place.
Ammendum: Like I said in the original comment, I have to disagree with your that’s how adult life is. I personally found working a full time job to be way more entertaining and engaging than any of my school experiences. Which is sad concidering you do the same thing every day, but at least you have the freedom of choosing how you do it, and you have a clear outcome of why you are doing it… which is way more than I can say about the highschool/middleschool experience.
I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s worth noting that to some extent learning is inherently boring, like, making it more interesting makes it less effective. Reiterating the same thing to the point of boredom and beyond had been shown to be effective if I remember correctly. It’s why things like Duolingo take so much longer to teach you a language, because they’re trying so hard to be somewhat fun they actually compromise the effectiveness of the teaching.
So I do think schools need to remove distractions, especially ones engineered to be distracting like Facebook.
But your point is valid too, just because some boredom is necessary doesn’t mean they can’t do better, a lot better.
To some extent yes, I do agree with you, but if your student at least understands why they are needing to, or shows reasonable expectation that it will actually improve their life later on, you stop fighting the kid the entire way and learning becomes a whole lot easier.
I do agree that teachers shouldn’t enable it, but I don’t believe the proper response is to throw the blame strictly on the kids and remove a resource to them. Removing said resource isn’t going to make them want to be there, or make them learn anything. You need to address that issue first, otherwise it’s just going to move to the next distraction (like talking to your peers or just skipping class altogether)
Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn’t particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.
In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn’t keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.
The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn’t positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.
I am not going to pretend that boredom can’t factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?
I think you’re probably right actually. I suspect I read about the importance of repetition in learning which seems to be a real thing, and then either over interpreted it or read it from a source with an agenda. It’s true that repetition is critical to learning, but the idea that it’s fundamentally opposed to “fun” might have been layered on top without justification. Though I do maintain that the require practice is tough to keep fun, and is important, so I think there’s some practical truth to it even if it’s not a requirement as such.
You’re definitely correct that boredom isn’t a goal in itself, plenty of ways to be boring and teach nothing, I’ve definitely suffered through that!
Bingo.
Everyone wants a cheatcode at life. But there is no cheatcode for learning things. You have to do the hard work, which is hours and hours of boring repetitive stuff. That’s how your brain works and improves and retains information, from repetitive exposure.
It’s hilarious that people agree with the 10,000 hour rule, but magically think that rule shouldn’t apply to school work.
The trick is to let teachers teach what they are passionate about
I do agree that passion is a huge thing. I also think that explaining why something is important and how it will effect life is equally important. If the student has no reason to care, why would they want to be there, why would they be entertained and why would they actually gain something.
seeing my teachers get excited about stuff? those are the lessons i remember now, 30, 40 years later.
Toss the chromebooks and let kids mess with the inner workings of the computer. Tech them to make their own backups and have restore drives available.
Media lab and AV clubs, like the old days. Love it.
