Where Educational Technology Fails: A seventh-grader's perspective

https://micahblachman.beehiiv.com/p/where-educational-technology-fails

by subdomain • 8 months ago

54 128 8 months ago

micahblachman.beehiiv.com

mjevans• 8 months ago

Maybe work should be put into make the curriculum more engaging so that it's less drudgery and boring work and more rewarding.

A practical example of this from fitness is turning exercise into a sport.

Razengan9• 8 months ago

Early school should be like a game onboarding tutorial for this world:

"You are a human."

"You are on this planet."

"This is what this world is like."

"This is what humans have made so far."

"This is what's out there."

and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.

analog313• 8 months ago

"You are a human."

"Here's the refrigerator."

"Here's a cell phone."

LoFiSamurai• 8 months ago

Do you have kids? You’re going straight to planets huh.

onionisafruit• 8 months ago

“This is what the world is like” is a full education in itself.

jayd16• 8 months ago

Grammar and reading comprehension are important and can be enjoyable or at least unlock the enjoyment of understanding literature ...but I seriously doubt a 10 year old is going to think to take a class in it on their own.

wakawaka285• 8 months ago

and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.

This "capitalist churn" is how we get things done for society. While some exploration makes sense, the vast majority of people are not gifted in the arts or endowed with genius. They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use. Even under communist "utopian" regimes, children are forced to do basically the same stuff they do under capitalist regimes, because people and their needs are the same under both.

giantg24• 8 months ago

"You are a human."

"You are on this planet."

"This is what this world is like."

"This is what humans have made so far."

"This is what's out there."

That's basically what school is. Many of these topics can't be explained in reasonable detail and complexity until after 10 years old.

analog313• 8 months ago

Just have overworked teachers with minimal tech savvy compete for engagement with trillion dollar companies that employ armies of psychologists and programmers, and who have popular momentum on their side. Have them do this without turning into the industry they're competing with.

I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.

aleph_minus_one• 8 months ago

I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.

Even without knowing anything about your music, I'm 98 % certain that I would prefer to go to your concert than to a Taylor Swift concert. :-)

clickety_clack2• 8 months ago

The tough thing is probably trying to make it Type 2 fun, where hard work leads to rewards rather than Type 1 fun that’s basically just entertainment. Ultimately, learning something new is always kind of painful, and learning to push through that pain is in itself a key lesson you have to learn for adult life.

card_zero15• 8 months ago

No. Fun is learning. You've just internalized an ugly perspective.

card_zero15• 8 months ago

Less drudgery and boring work? How about not drudgery and not boring. To accomplish this the thing has to be optional, and it has to be freely chosen. No amount of window dressing on a thing you're forced to do makes it truly fun. But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated, and so we get endless "make learning fun!" crap on top of compulsory drudgery.

jacknews3• 8 months ago

Life is not all fun. You need to learn how to buckle up and just get it done.

graemep9• 8 months ago

Its not that hard to balance, but it takes individual attention. Learning is intrinsically fun and you need to avoid turning it into drudgery.

I home educated by kids from about eight up to sixteen when they had done GCSEs (exams school kids in the UK do at 16). I very rarely had to force them to do anything, but I did have to make an effort to find the right approach to make things interesting.

I think the solution is to let kids do what they choose but intervene if they are not learning at all. This takes judgement and knowing them as individuals.

You could do it in schools if you have a very low student-teacher ratio (I say below 10 to 1 - so in the UK you would need about double the number of teachers in the state system), trusted teachers' judgement over metrics, and had more flexibility about learning to individual needs rather the prescribing exactly what kids need to learn at a particular age.

foobarian• 8 months ago

But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated

It's not not possible, but the problem is you'd end up with a majority uneducated populous who would decide that sacrificing goats and watering crops with Gatorade is the thing to do, and they would hang you if you disagreed

giantg24• 8 months ago

They already have tons interesting and gamified stuff in schools. Part of learning should also include how to tackle subjects you find boring. Discipline and perseverance are useful life skills that I think are increasingly disappearing.

jacknews3• 8 months ago

"teach kids how to use technology responsibly"

I teach a code club. I try to get the students excited and focused, and especially on projects where they work together, it generally works really well, even for students who obviously aren't quite 'into it'.

But at absolutely any opportunity where they are not focused (and there's always someone) they try to play roblox or other games. They try to have it running in the background and switch. And even installed a workspace switcher so it wasn't obvious they had game windows open.

It's really like highly addictive drugs. For kids, at least, the best solution is to make them unavailable while they are supposed to be learning.

card_zero15• 8 months ago

This is because they like playing Roblox, and are getting something out of playing Roblox, and are not persuaded that your thing is more rewarding for them, and unless you can pull a miracle of engaging enthusiasm out of the bag they're right.

jacknews3• 8 months ago

So if they take crack cocaine instead of literature class, they're right too?

Sorry, but learning is actually a slog. The best we can do is get them addicted to learning, instead of gaming, but let's help them on the way by removing the gaming temptation while they are in class.

ramon156• 8 months ago

Offline-first teaching! Let them only be able to read docs available to them

SoftTalker3• 8 months ago

This is now going on in college. I was just hearing from a professor the other day that it's impossible to keep students off of social media. They cannot sit for a 50 minute lecture without pulling out their phones (that's if they even physically come to class; if they're online, they are half-listening at best).

These are now the COVID lockdown and post-pandemic kids. They come in to college unprepared/lacking mastery of prerequisites, don't listen in class, they don't come to office hours, they don't do their homework (or try to have ChatGPT do it) and get upset when they fail.

lurking_swe3• 8 months ago

Except the great part about college is you don’t need to pander to students and their parents.

Can’t keep up with the class because you’re distracted on your phone? Not the teachers problem! Good luck on the test lol. You’re paying for the class either way…

It’s different if a student is earnestly trying to focus on the material, showing up to office hours, etc.

petermcneeley3• 8 months ago

The word your looking for is Discipline. The way to control babies and animals it to simply take it away from them. This is not the way to control twelve year olds.

Retric3• 8 months ago

That’s a strategy doomed to failure.

12 year old kids are still developing the brain structures to be able to handle discipline. Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.

When you look around and everyone is suddenly overweight and addicted to their phones humans didn’t suddenly lose willpower, their environment changed.

petermcneeley3• 8 months ago

Sure but in less than 6 years your 12 year old is a complete adult. You must give them the gift of Adult discipline in that short period of time.

Without that you will get the result in your final sentence.

gf0003• 8 months ago

Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.

Is it not because they failed to learn it in there teenage years?

My mother is a teacher and she noticed that kids that regularly do some kind of competitive sports tend to be much more hardworking in school, and it does extend to their university studies as well. Meanwhile "former gifted children" often experience the first year of university as a giant slap on the face, because they never learnt how to study, how to work hard for something, and being smart is often not enough at this level. Many can't even stand up from that hit.

So this is absolutely a huge disservice to not teach children some sort of self-discipline, motivation is never enough, there will always be days when you don't have enough of the latter, and only the former could push you forward then.

pessimizer• 8 months ago

There isn't any educational technology. There are (and have been, for decades, accomplishing nothing) a bunch of companies trying to come up with ways to exploit educational institutions to create revolving income streams and failing. Letting kids access the internet at school is just an admission of complete failure, being bad at blocking bad sites doesn't make that failure any worse.

No phones, no internet at school. If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless. Leave the screens to their software and programming classes.

I'd say it will be a blessing when this debacle is replaced with AI, except the AI will also come from the revolving income stream guys, and will also have children's well-being as an afterthought. It will be the same failure, but with 4x the margin going to 1/100 the previous number of vendors, just like every "tech advance" in the past decade.

28304283409234• 8 months ago

Parent of two teenagers. Came here to say exactly this.

Scubabear68• 8 months ago

This. Exactly this.

The answer isn’t some fancy security software or screening, it is much simpler: no software, period. The bulk of school should be learning in a classroom, computers are not required.

They can and should be allowed in limited doses early on, and can build over time, particularly as courses either obviously require it or the computers truly facilitate the learning.

We had her public school teachers trying to tell us the answer to our daughter’s reading issues was more screen time. We ended up sending her to a private religious school with very limited screen time, and she is now an A and B student.

This is a huge problem in public schools because state and federal governments are complicit in burying kids (and parents!) in unnecessary technology. During Covid, the feds flooded schools with literal billions of dollars that did not go to better teachers, it went to smart boards and MacBook pros and iPads and dozens of “School as a Service” providers who existed only to extract money from clueless superintendents who have a seemingly endless supply of tax money to draw from.

Wowfunhappy• 8 months ago

I teach a 5th grade computer science class at my school. We just finished our "chatbot" project. I thought the kids some very simple Python syntax--assigning variables, concatenating strings, input, print, if, elif, else--and they made programs that could have a conversation with the user.

I suppose I could have done this without internet on air-gapped laptops. They do need laptops though, and the internet makes it much easier for them to submit their work for me to review after class.

I realize that a bounded computer science class probably isn't what you're talking about. However, my school has in fact really been trying to clamp down on technology use this year, and it has been challenging for the computer science department!

anonymouskimmer3• 8 months ago

If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless.

The numbers are smaller and smaller, but there will still be kids whose only access to the internet is their parents' smartphones. When I personally mentored a couple of pretty bright high school student interns, one of whom scored above 1500 SATs and a 36 ACT, they both found it really helpful to look at Khan Academy / YouTube clips to better understand what I was explaining.

If the poorer kids don't have access to these explanatory videos, except when their parents are done with their phones, they will fall further behind than they otherwise would have.

Perhaps a compromise would be to limit internet access to the school library?

mariodiana2• 8 months ago

I'm may be a little off-topic here (but I don't think so).

In my opinion, elementary school (grades K-5) should really focus a good deal on rote memorization, but only if this focuses on teaching every kind of game and technique to facilitate that kind of learning. By that I mean making flash cards, learning to create and use mnemonic devices, etc.

I just asked ChatGPT, and got something like 15 different techniques, some of which can be used with kindergarteners, all of which can be used by grade 5.

There are always going to be "boring" things to learn. These things are often no longer boring once you know them by heart. In fact, they're often extremely valuable to know. I think by grade 5, if kids are going to be taught anything, they need to be taught the techniques that they can use—on their own—to make learning fun.

SoftTalker3• 8 months ago

This is the classical approach where early education ("grammar") is focused on learning facts.

mariodiana2• 8 months ago

Yes. But I'm adding that learning methods should be explicitly taught, to where they become second nature to the student.

Herring• 8 months ago

In my opinion too many people have opinions where they shouldn't. Just import a working system, like Estonia successfully imported from Finland. You don't have the skills to roll your own.

drivebyhooting• 8 months ago

That was exceptionally well written for a 7th grader.

anonymouskimmer3• 8 months ago

I plugged it into a couple of free readability analyzers and got 10th - 12th grade reading levels.

https://charactercalculator.com/readability-checker/

- Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade

- Reading Score: 59.00

- Reading Note: Fairly difficult to read

https://hemingwayapp.com/readability-checker

- Readability checker: Grade 10; OK. Aim for 9.

- 5 of 19 sentences are very hard to read.

- 6 of 19 sentences are hard to read.

There are some poor word choices[1], but yes, all in all this 7th grader is definitely writing above grade level. Hopefully his English teachers give him feedback pertinent to his demonstrated ability.

[1] - E.g. "That’s not to say a school’s system is necessarily completely ineffective. Last year, my school had left unblocked the spammy-sounding Unblocked Games 66."

would be easier to understand if re-written as:

"That’s not to say a school’s system is completely ineffective. Last year, my school failed to block the spammy-sounding "Unblocked Games 66.""

650• 8 months ago

There are multiple em dashes present. I strongly suspect AI help.

aerostable_slug2• 8 months ago

I hate this trend because I use em dashes a lot in my writing. Someone tell the AIs to throttle back on them a bit — people might think I'm using AI when I'm not.

gampleman• 8 months ago

Where has educational technology not been failing?

riedel• 8 months ago

This reminds me of the times playing snake on our TI 84 calculators.

kkfx• 8 months ago

You can't force people to learn, you must interest them, and FLOSS desktops would help much, if well presented. Otherwise you only create dysfunctional dictatorship who only exalt conformism and mediocrity.

armchairhacker3• 8 months ago

I think laws/regulations are very similar. "Obvious" ones are good (e.g. violence, food safety), analogous to "of course they should block actually inappropriate content". But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations, and fine-grained laws and regulations don't work, because of loopholes.

To get a healthy society, you must teach people how to behave, then (again, still explicitly prevent serious crimes, but otherwise) trust them. Some will take advantage of the system, but they may still face natural and social consequences, and some abuse of the system is OK.

Forgeties793• 8 months ago

But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations

I guess I’m not really following where this logic is going. Are you saying “therefore we should not have laws and regulations”? I highly doubt that’s what you actually mean, but I am unsure how to parse what you do mean if not that.

armchairhacker3• 8 months ago

We should have laws and regulations for things that are important and (relatively) easy to define and enforce. But laws and regulations aren't enough, because people find loopholes, and trying to patch these loopholes with more laws and regulations doesn't work.

Examples of "obvious" laws and regulations: physical violence should be policed, companies should have to pay salaries and have basic restrictions on work hours, safety, sanitation, etc. Examples of things that can't really be regulated: "gambling" and "harmful social media". When does a game become "gambling"? When does a site become "social media" and "harmful"? Various countries have legal definitions for these, but they're very long, so companies find loopholes (e.g. sports betting, loot-boxes); or they straight-up break the laws, but the government doesn't bother to enforce them, because it's too difficult and the general population doesn't notice or care enough. Complex and ineffective laws and regulations also tend to have unintended consequences, like Balatro being considered "gambling" in Australia, and the UK's "Online Safety Act" affecting small forums.

Part of the reason is that the people writing and enforcing laws and regulations themselves are corrupt. But this goes back to the source: you can't police those people with more laws, because their enforcers are also corrupt, and so on. A society is controlled and its morality is defined by its people, so to some extent, a society must teach its people to be moral and give them the leeway to still behave immoral.

BobbyTables24• 8 months ago

Teaching has gotten lazy.

In my day, tests were on paper and collected at the end of class.

Now they’re online and kids exchange answers by taking the cell phone to the bathroom.

Or they will exploit the online nature and compare answers during the passing period AFTER the class a submit it before the next class starts. Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!

Instead of being 25-50% short response, tests are all multiple choice so they can be automatically graded.

To think my teachers recorded grades in a ledger and computed averages by hand for classes of 35+ students…

jeffjeffbear• 8 months ago

Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!

What about students who need extra time, which can be part of an IEP, and other issues, I don't think that part is lazy. Also a decent amount of the usage of Canvas or similar LMS's is subject to school or district wide rules.

Edit: I taught highschool CS during the pandemic to try to help out with issues in my district.

empressplay• 8 months ago

Project-based learning / assessment is much more common now.

Students have to explain their process when they present their projects, and answer questions, which ensures they did the work.

These projects make up most of their grades.

samarthr1• 8 months ago

Wasn't the push for standardized testing to reduce biases introduced by personal examination?

SiempreViernes• 8 months ago

Back in my day there was nothing wrong with how testing happened, I know because I succeeded in that system.

The above is maybe not an entirely fair summary, but I think it captures the spirit of Bobby's comment in vivid detail.

parsimo20102• 8 months ago

This feels like an uninformed opinion. Are you saying teachers aren’t fully occupied during the day? That would be news to me. If you admit to teaching being a full time job, what would you rather see teachers not do so they can spend a few extra hours grading? Just claiming that teachers need to give paper assignments and spend time grading by hand without considering the tradeoffs sounds like a step backward.

Cell phones haven’t magically made students cheat. Students were cheating plenty with paper tests too. Ands if the students are trading answers with cell phones, they will definitely have a way to trade answers to paper tests. Nearly every smartphone has a camera. Instead we should figure out how to regulate cell phone use at school if they are the enabler for cheating.

Teaching is undoubtedly different than it was a few decades ago. There is technology integrated into most schools and classrooms. The requirements of teachers has changed, but I wouldn’t say teachers have gotten lazy.

lurking_swe3• 8 months ago

technology is integrated into classrooms, and yet, most new high school graduates can only successfully operate a smartphone, a tablet, or a chromebook (lol).

My point is, in regards to education tech is a distraction 95% of the time…and i say this as someone working in tech! Tech makes grading easier. Great. Has instruction improved? Are most kids learning more now? Are most kids _actually_ prepared for a basic office job, if they desire one?

Frankly, going back to basics would benefit all of us. Math is the same as it ever was. Blackboard and paper is all you need. Same with most other classes.

Schools will happily waste thousands on ipads and chrome books that do little for actual education. Yet they are happy to feed crappy lunches to kids because good food is too expensive. Apparently gadgets are more helpful for learning than nutrition? I’m sure Google and Apple are laughing all the way to the bank…at least the teachers and kids get to feel modern.

BobbyTables24• 8 months ago

I’m mainly saying that the shift from short response to multiple choice has nothing to do with academic rigor or assessment but is purely driven by technological convenience and has significant downsides.

Even “fill in the blank” has disappeared yet could be auto-graded in principle.

Another harm from the loss of paper tests is that teachers no longer return graded test papers to students. Sometimes completed tests made available online, often not.

Students will see their numeric grade but not immediately know why and might end up never seeing the completed test if and when it is finally made available.

The whole dynamic of returning the test papers and the students asking the teacher to explain missed questions is totally lost.

ryukoposting• 8 months ago

Before I lodge my criticism: the kid's right. DNS blocking has always been a non-solution to the "kids screwing around on school computers" problem. When I was his age, we'd pull up breadfish.co.uk on all the computers in a single pod in the library, then un-mute all of them at once. They blocked breadfish, but then we just started pulling it up on youtube.

1:1 ed tech (e.g. chromebooks) probably exacerbates the problem because kids have a single machine that's their own. They can customize it as they please, for better and worse.

When I was his age, my school's thin clients would wipe most of your customizations every time you logged out. For the handful of standalone desktops, you'd still have to set stuff up on each machine individually. This limited the effectiveness of the various tricks we played to get past IT guardrails.

I think the title is a little misleading, though. The essay details why DNS-level blocking doesn't work in educational environments. The title suggests it'd talk about why ed-tech fails in a more general case. Remember, projectors, document cameras, VHS players, and Smart boards were all red-hot tech at some point. Even today, ed-tech is more than just computers assigned to kids.

singpolyma3• 8 months ago

It's depressing that anyone would call internet censorship "educational technology"

mr_frog3• 8 months ago

I was just looking for unblocked games what is this website

lunias• 8 months ago

Sounds pretty similar to how I felt in middle school. I learned a lot while getting around their silly controls. I'm sure things are much more locked down today, but where there's a will there's a way!

mr_frog3• 8 months ago

Hola

mr_frog3• 8 months ago

I didnt know the will work

Where Educational Technology Fails: A seventh-grader's perspective

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