Technology

They give each kid in middle school and up a lenovo windows computer at mi kids' school. My daughter does her school work on her Fedora PC, transfers the files to the lenovo over FTP, and uses it only in school. The funny thing is that she came home complaining about that, and I quote, "garbage computer they gave me at school, I can't work on that thing", and decided to instead use that workflow. I'm so proud of her 😍

Na the kids need a basic ass machine with only a command line like we did growing up on apple IIs

You’re partly right. Did you read the article? One of the chief complaints is that in fact the devices aren’t locked down and kids are using them for things like games and youtube.

You’re in a Lemmy echo-chamber for the rest of it. The average user isn’t us.

As for the rest, schools teach to the lowest common denominator. The article itself plainly shows that the people “in charge” haven’t a clue how to effectively monitor, limit, and control usage of these basic devices. So throwing more at them isn’t the solution when they can’t even manage what they’ve got.

Bingo. Not a tech issue, it is a pedagogical issue. The way we teach hasn't changed in 50 years. The problem is systemic. Teachers are taught to develop lesson plans in antiquated ways. Teachers aren't encouraged or empowered to innovate. Funding is insufficient. Testing takes priority over learning because funding is tied to scores. Then you've got big tech lobbying to suckle at the teet of taxpayer dollars influencing decisions being made where the interest of children and learning is secondary.

With things like learning long division or cursive handwriting I think we frequently run into the doorman fallacy. There is so much value in teaching people to think and teaching people to learn that we get distracted by everything having to be a useful skill for future employment.

I wholly agree. Bring Computer Labs back, ditch the chrombooks. Let kids actually learn to write and nottake, and fucking pay our trachers more.

I bet people down voting me are the sales reps that sell/lease thousands of iPads and Chromebooks to districts along with software licenses and contracts to supple the personnel to support that hardware.

My mum gave me her old slide-rule that she'd used as a kid. Kinda mechanical calculator, very early computing tech. She told me that there was debate about whether kids should be allowed to use them in school or just calculate manually. She said they were taught to do it manually then when they could do that they were taught slide rule, because many jobs would expect people to have slide rule skills.

When I was little, calculators still had kinda bulbs for each digit, then LCD screens came along and they suddenly got small and more powerful. There was the same controversy about whether we should be allowed to use them in class. We were taught how to do algebra n shit with paper and pencil, but also how to use the calculator.

This has worked for the past couple of generations of tech, I don't see why this one should be handled any differently. Kids should learn Pythagoras and algebra n stuff, how to do it themselves. Then they should be taught how to do it using a computer, and all the other stuff you can do with the computer.

Honestly, computer lessons in schools need to step up, at least in my country. Back in the 80s we were taught on 32k ram BBC B computers - we only had to learn to code a bit of basic, but those of us who wanted to dig deeper could learn assembly, start fucking with registers n stuff, learning binary and hex. Gave me a very basic understanding of how a computer actually worked.

I'm told that in my country, kids these days are taught how to use office. And that's about all. Fuckin shame and a missed opportunity for those children who are drawn to tech and want to dig deep.

So yeah, I'm just saying we gotta teach them to do math on paper, really understand it - and then we gotta teach them the tech.

One class seems too few. 75% of jobs in the US use computers regularly. Even the plumber shows up with a tablet and such. On top of that, what ever was the point in making us write the essay twice, rough draft, the final... and have to rewrite the whole damn thing if we made a mistake. When it comes to writing, computers are where it is done.
Math... yeah, pencil and paper, calculator for the high level stuff. History/social studies... videos and articles are just easier to distribute via computer. Though initial presentation with follow up commentary is ideal. I think computers are overused in school, but 1 class is too far in the other direction.

Pay teachers more, free breakfast and lunch for every child. These two things are the only things that you can just throw money at to improve outcomes that can be replicated everywhere.

As a generalization, they don't need more money for textbooks, they don't need more tech, they don't need building upgrades, they don't need whatever the latest software scam is, etc.

I saw somewhere that general tech in schools makes students worse overall by 2/3 of a standard deviation. A class on it is an great approach, and the constant live experimentation on our youth education needs to stop. The pain of learning isn’t optional, I say.

Minecraft isn't the problem.

The problem is the 24/7 input of corporate right wing propaganda and brainwashing.