Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead
www.nbcnews.com
A loose network of parents are teaching one another how to get their kids off of school-issued Chromebooks and iPads.

The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.

Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.

  • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
    01·
    4 hours ago

    It sounds like there should be a platform designed for school. IT can block access to all resources except the platform. Kids log-in to www.my-school.platform.edu and immediately have an answer for:

    • what’s the curriculum for today
    • what was yesterdays homework
    • what was yesterdays lesson
    • what tests are coming up
    • what’s my personal attendance
    • what’s for lunch today
    • …

    Then there’s not any room for misusing, misunderstanding, or missing-out. Ideally, I’d think a good platform should empower teachers to handle their difficult workload more easily…

    Should also have a Teachers view, an Admin view, …

    • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      There are multiple such platforms - Canvas, ClassDojo, InfiniteCampus. Heck, you can even go with the free and open source Moodle. Most of these also integrate with useful online tools, like Desmos (graphing calculator) and PHeT (science simulations.)

      This can help with workload, because you can often set up things like multiple choice quizzes that grade themselves (but how often should that be your primary way of assessing students?)

      The problem is that some skills simply need to be learned with pen and paper. I have taught and tutored chemistry for years - balancing equations and stoichiometry are skills that you can’t really learn on a computer.

      There’s also evidence that computer based notetaking is less effective - that students remember less.

      • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s plenty of research to back up your claim about writing helping memory, too. I used to try to remember things better by (1) writing it down, (2) reading it aloud, (3) thinking about the next level up.

        Number 3 is probably less useful outside fields where you’re constantly trying to “scale” systems… but in any case, it’s a thought experiment that happens to be really good at exposing the boundaries of concepts. Like… “okay, I built one server… now, what if I needed to manage a farm of 1000? What issues then become more pronounced?”

        Out of curiosity, do any of these platforms try to marry itself with paper workflows? Maybe stuff like:

        • teachers can submit a printable paper doc
        • students can print it out as needed, submit the finished result
        • students can take pictures of their handwritten notes and store them in a digital journal
        • platform comes with handwriting analysis, full-text-search, … all that jazz?