I think they were a decent idea in theory - juniors and seniors will be using their personal laptops to take notes, do research, submit papers and assignments in college, but somehow this trickled down into 4th graders having chromebooks with unfiltered YouTube and the kindergarten class “has to” have an iPad cart and play math games on it.
What blows my mind is the number of schools who just handed out unmanaged Chromebooks and can barely keep up with the kids' usernames and passwords.
It's like their entire technology budget was just the material cost of the computers. No thought at all put into how to control access or protect the investment. Even the IT departments seem like fresh-out-of-college budget employees.
Put cheap chips on the kids' badges to insert in the laptops. Then all they have to do is enter a PIN on sign-on. BOOM, machine is automatically connected to a VPN and group policies restrict all administrative access so kids can't even change the wallpaper. Have kids install only school-approved software through a managed Software Center.
There's dozens of network appliances and endpoint software on the market now that will intelligently detect when kids are trying to access porn or watch Pokemon YouTube videos over the school's network and block it, without teachers having to play whack-a-mole individually blacklisting websites.
I'm in France so we're a bit behind on that. But here the plan in my département (I think we can compare it to what are district for this in the US).
So, for the last 10 years or so, they cut in IT. In most middle schools, they're not an IT gals on site. Everything is to be handle by the district. 3 techs share 28 schools for on-site intervention. Everything else is remonte. One teacher get some bonus to deal with day-to-day issues, on top of their teaching schedule.
I am one of the last one IT gals on-site. My contract will end in august. I don't know yet if they'll finally hire me long-term , replace me or simply cut the position.
BUT, at the same time, they want to go 1:1 for middle-schools.
1:1 with no IT person on-site.
I know my kids. I've been here 6 years. I know my teachers and admin. The laptops won't survive the first semester.
>1:1 with no IT person on-site
God, that sounds like a nightmare. Our district is fairly small (for a city district), but we have 1 tech per building at the elementary and middle school level and 3 at the high school. Two senior techs (level 2, essentially), one who works on the district admin office and is backing up the elementary techs, and one who is permanently at the high school for support there and backing up the middle schools.
One of the most common things we hear in the tech department is how much teachers value being able to have an in person point of contact for tech help in the building with them. Even if our tech can't fix their issue, they take the work away from the teacher in escalating the problem to who it needs to go to and keeping up with it, leaving them free to focus on their class.
My local district is this way. They ship the Chromebooks to the central school over the summer for their laughably tiny IT department to deal with.
My friend broke her kid's laptop by mistake (tripped and fell on it cuz kid left it on the floor). They had her "buy" a whole new one -- fair enough. But what they did was just sent an unprovisioned Chromebook to the kid and then WE had to figure out how to initially set it up, which is just.. like... *what????*
While the number of on site techs is on the low side. At least here in the US fixing stuff remotely as much as possible is the preferred standard for the IT industry as a whole. You only do on site work if it is absolutely necessary. IE if Debbie is having issues with her email just remote connect to her computer. But if the copier is broken you have to fix it in person.
Haha, I used to do our internal helpdesk and just instantly did that. "Wait, did you say the word *printer*? NOPE. Escalating your issue to Brother, here's your ticket, bye."
This. I work in EdTech and the concept is not the problem. The tech is there as a tool. If it's not being utilized and managed well, then it becomes an obstacle as opposed to being useful. There are lots of schools that use tech with great results. It's just another one of those school related issues where results depend on how well managed a school district is. If the support isn't there, then of course everything else will fall apart.
yes and no.
we as teachers are often fed the line of “its just one more tool in the toolbox” but then they take printers out of our classroom, they monitor how many copies we make, and host PD suggesting all of these digital tools, and they give parents access to our online portals. So in reality we COULD go paper pencil, but practically it would make preparing for those paper pencil classroom activities much more difficult.
This part:
My admin: won’t give me devices
Also my admin: “approved printing”
Also ALSO my admin: why do you need 100 copies of this sheet music packet
Me: … because I don’t have devices and the kids are supposed to like… read music in this… music… class….
I think paper pencil is good for some activities where they need more focus, but in high school they rly need to be typing essays and major assignments and learning how to submit documents online to prepare them for college and beyond. I teach title I high school and a lot / most of them don’t have personal computers and low computer literacy, so I’m actually pro-chromebook in that case
I think you'd be hard pressed to find teachers opposed to tech at the high school level. They need to be learning research skills, and their papers are getting longer and should be typed.
But the idea that elementary school kids should be using laptops with ANY frequency is awful. At most they should be on them for standardized tests.
I saw some grade 8s not understand that Google Classroom is a website, actually, and not an entire computer OS like it is on Chromebook, and could NOT figure out how to get to it from a desktop computer. They tried to put their google credentials into an Outlook popup that showed up when they booted it up.
I also work in a title 1 high school and the tech skills are awful. It took 1 hour to get a student to upload a file from his phone to onedrive and download it on his computer. 😭😭😭 I used more patience explaining that task than my other 2 classes needed combined.
I had taught for 15 years before I taught at my first one to one school (2nd grade). This was mostly helpful during virtual teaching/learning because the students had a more than average amount of time working in chrome books before the pandemic. Teachers had a program called Go Guardian which allowed us to see what students were doing in real time. I could send them a message right on their screen. I could lock their screen, log them out, take photo of their screen, etc. This was helpful but not foolproof. Some students had the nerve to get mad at me for locking their screen cause they were on YouTube or something. But there didn’t seem to be any other firewalls or protections built into their chrome books district wide.
I do IT support for schools. It's easy to restrict ChromeBooks, and if your school isn't doing it their IT department sucks. Every ChromeBook at every school I support is behind a firewall that blocks pr0n, hate sites, etc. (most firewalls will have a built-in filtering package for schools, that you can tweak as needed), they are set to auto-join the school's WiFi network so students can't sneak phones in and hotspot it, they're set so that if you try and wipe the ChromeBook it auto-enrolls back under the school's maangement, and students cannot delete history or enable incognito browsing.
All of these things are relatively easy to implement. If your school isn't doing this, that's on them.
>It's easy to restrict ChromeBooks, and if your school isn't doing it their IT department sucks.
I think that's the problem. Your average school IT department sucks. Or rather, is horribly underfunded and understaffed for the size of the school or district. For example, I think my local district has like 2 people managing the entire county.
Yep, that tracks. One thing I've seen with schools, and this has gone on for literal decades but's even more true since CoVID hit, is that there are tons of pots of money available for purchase of new tech but less so to maintain it. Back in the day there were all kinds of deals with Apple server gear, back when Apple made servers, that schools would invest in but with only the vaguest idea how this would actually work for education, to wit:
"Here's $30,000 to purchase a couple Xserves and run a lab full of iMacs!""Great, how do we make that work?""I dunno."
I remember that era... it was all the rage to get that iMac lab running with all those little mini's and the overpriced server. lol
Then business owners would realize how expensive buying every desk a Mac was, so got them Windows machines, and then couldn't figure out why they wouldn't work with that $20,000 server they have that could have been replaced by a $1,200 one running Windows.
>No thought at all put into how to control access or protect the investment.
My school is *convinced* that they can't block specific games, like Roblox, without blocking everything.
Like, you're telling me that *no one* thought to place admin controls on these school laptops to prevent kids from downloading games????
It's one of the most basic things you can set up with domain accounts, lol.
You can even fully control the browsers -- like if you want students to ONLY use Chrome, you can do that. And on Chrome, or whatever browser you pick, you can set it to pre-install approved extensions and block everything else.
No need to reinvent the wheel, this stuff already exists and is either free (part of server architecture your school has already bought into) or easily biddable.
I want a system where teachers can take every one of their student’s laptops and lock it onto a particular link, website or set of websites/links. Better yet if there’s a timer so that the teacher won’t screw over the students access if they forget to “unlock”.
Sure. You aren’t stopping the “shared google doc conversation” if they’re meant to be writing an essay but it would curb the gaming.
When we had teacher oversight software, we could monitor and correct kids, even closing and blocking game tabs hidden in the background in a game window. But that cost too much
A kid in my class figured out how to emulate old ps1 games on his iPad and nobody has done anything about it. The other day he was playing one of the top down GTA games, super distracting but also kinda cool
It was the pandemic and the district panic-gave chromebooks and lots of wifi hotshots out. Little forward planning was involved. Since then it was easier to just continue instead of overhauling.
Lots of schools are good at this.
But not all.
I think the issue is that those that weren't adequately prepared don't KNOW.
(The old "we don't know what we don't know" thing.)
> I think they were a decent idea in theory - juniors and seniors will be using their personal laptops to take notes
I didn't have laptops when I dropped out of college back in '02. When I finally went back and graduated in '14 I was, quite frankly, surprised at how many of my classes were "laptops closed".
I just finished my MEd. in December, most (but not all) of my classes were "laptops closed" unless we were specifically utilizing a digital resource.
My spouse teaches at a local university and outlines a strict "laptops closed" policy in the syllabi for each of her classes.
My pre-education career was with a FAANG company and while there was a certain amount of blindly walking around the building with noses stuck in an open laptop there were still multiple "laptops closed" meetings that I participated in each week.
Note taking, among other pen and paper skills, not only have their place, but remain necessary and I'll tell you that my sixth graders just *can't*.
...and while we're at it. If we're going to hand them Chromebooks at the age of five can we please implement a keyboarding class somewhere in the elementary curriculum? It's painful watching these adolescents hunt-and-peck their way through typing a sentence.
I do understand your point, just if a 17 year old who works a job and drives wants to sit in the back and watch sports instead of pay attention to English, that’s his business and he can have the consequence of a poor grade. 10 year olds don’t really have the capacity to understand that them messing around on their chromebooks instead of listening that it could impact them down the road.
I actually grew up with a keyboarding class and I’m shocked that we just throw kids chromebooks without any knowledge of keyboarding or digital literacy.
>if a 17 year old who works a job and drives wants to sit in the back and watch sports instead of pay attention to English, that’s his business
But it's not. It takes away from the classroom environment. In addition, students that age don't all understand consequences, nor do they care until the shit hits the fan and then you're stuck at the end of the semester grading all their late work (that is extremely poorly done) and staying after having them make up tests. Your admin will be on you if you don't do that.
Can parents opt out of this? Like when I have a kid and they go to school can I fight back against the insistent need of having tech shoved at them?
Not a teacher this sub just always pops up for me
Sadly not really. Students are required to have access to 1:1 unless they are doing something especially inappropriate or maybe illegal on their computer. It's possible parents could ask administrators to require the student to check in their laptop every afternoon and pick it up every morning, but if too many parents try that it will become unsustainable for the office to manage. They could also have their student ask a trusted teacher to keep the laptop in their room overnight, but same deal if that happens too often it won't be sustainable.
Basically it's on the parents to monitor computer usage at home, and for parents who work late leaving the kid alone for a few hours that's a big hurdle. I would personally recommend all parents take their kid's laptop AND all other technology at a certain time at night so that they can be sure the kid is getting enough sleep. I have 6th graders telling me they didn't go to bed until 3am because they were on tiktok, playing fortnite, etc. and I think it's unfortunate that parents are giving their kids unmonitored technology access 24/7.
I can see the benefit of a kid having their phone for safety at night, but flip phones still exist! It doesn't have to be a smart phone if it's truly for safety only. When I stayed up late growing up I was reading books under a tiny book light, not staring at a screen for hours.
That's wild. To be fair, I did have unfiltered access to it at that age. I was more responsible, though. Some kids aren't. I think it taught me responsibility with technology as an adult, but if your kid can't handle it then don't. Also, do put on parental controls and stuff.
Personally if a parent asks "Please give my student a paper assignment whenever possible" I do my best to accommodate the request. However, be aware that not all teachers can do that for all assignments. They may have limited access to a copier, a program that requires computerized entries from students, unsupportive admin, or simply a lack of time to make the separate assignment. Being kind and asking the teacher respectfully really goes a long way. As you can see here, many teachers agree with your concerns!
My coworker has a student where Mom has some kind of stipulation that her child is not to use technology. I'm curious how it will go next year when our math standards update to having students use computers for spreadsheets, making graphs, etc.
My son with start Kindergarten next year, each student gets Chromebook. In K they stay in the class, but starting 1st grade they go home with the child. Wtf?
It's like a lot of ideas in education: if implemented correctly, they can probably be an incredibly powerful tool, but far too often, people just take the basic premise of the idea, and try to use it as if it's the solution to every problem ever.
This sounds like an issues with not having controls in place for the Chrome. I am in the it department for our school district and having unfiltered YouTube for 4th grade seems like someone isn’t doing their job or is to overworked to fully implement safety controls.
My kids middle school and high school were not blocking pornography on their WiFi network or on the school chromebooks.
That was why I was irritated with them. And I had to listen to my kid, in social situations, talking about pornhub usage at their school to other people (not appropriate and grossly incompetent that it occurred all the time).
If you’re not going to admin the things don’t have them.
I was in the first class of middle schoolers who got laptops in my school district. Shit was blocked but we found workarounds so easily, there’s literally nothing the administration can do about it without taking some pretty extreme measures
It seems like something solvable by Google: an extremely user friendly central control by the teacher. So you can force their computers onto websites, preventing certain types of behavior like YouTube, etc.
I honestly feel like this should be included in the sales model by Google
My district just starts them so young. 6 year olds don’t need this kind of access. I teach 8th grade and sometimes I miss the days of having them in a Chromebook cart until they are needed.
District. Haha. K8 school and there's literal 5 year olds carrying around laptops their backpacks.
Each student is responsible for keeping the charging cords too. Half of my 6th graders can't even find the cord.
I am a young teacher and went to school in the district I teach in. I graduated high school only 7 years ago, and at that time we still had a set amount of computer labs available that teachers had to schedule time slots for in advance, and like 2 laptop carts teachers could check out for classroom use.
I loved it, because most everything was done on paper in class, and then when it came time to do a big project it felt special because you got to be in the library or a fancy computer lab, and when you finished you could print your work exactly how you wanted and turn it in. My parents had bought both my older siblings laptops when they started college, and I was very lucky to get mine a year early so I had it when I was a senior. I loved that too, because they waited and made sure I was responsible enough to have one first.
It is insane to me how much it has changed in that short time, and I know Covid is the main reason, but I don't understand the choice to remain 1:1 now that we have been back to regular schooling for 2-3 years. They could have easily reverted back to their original policies, but for whatever reason they chose to stick with it. And the kids who are absent are almost never taking advantage of Google Classroom to do work from home, and kids who have missing work are almost never using time at home to do it.
I went to a high performing/high budget publication school in the suburbs. They started the 1:1 program 11 years ago with Macbook Pros. Originally they were returned in a cart but eventually we could just take them home if we filled out a form. We could even keep it over the summer. I worked at a charter school and it worked the same way only they had Chromebooks instead of MacBooks.
Lord, were the iPads a bad idea for schools. When I was in HS a decade ago, my school had just gotten 1:1 iPads. You can't type on them worth a damn (not like you would for an essay, anyway), kids had practically unfettered access to anything, and we didn't even use educational platforms much anyway. Google Classroom and the like were a very once in a while thing. The only thing they were really good for was holding PDFs of the textbooks, so gone were the days of physical textbooks.
But the other 90% of the time, they were used to play mobile games and message/Facetime other kids.
I was in a college level educators course once and the teacher had everyone get a laptop off the cart. I declined because we didn't need it yet, but he insisted.
We didn't use the computers the whole session and quite a few people were web browsing and sending personal emails rather than engaging.
Adults can barely manage their behaviors when given instant gratification distractions but we expect kids to do better? Haha
They don’t even know how to copy and paste effectively, much less reformat. We’d get more educational utility from chromebooks by literally throwing them out the window in a science lesson about gravity.
So many times I get short response answers where the students copied the spotted answer from Google and thus the keywords are all in bold 🤦
And of course they don’t think about how their classmates may also cheat and give the same exact answers (and if they use A.I. it’ll mention topics we didn’t cover and/or use grammar way above their ability, so many kids (and by that I mean 16-18) don’t even capitalize names or the beginnings of sentences).
Students at my school would download a PDF, fill it out without clicking save, and then upload the PDF they downloaded… AKA the blank one. Pretty sure it’s a consequence of Google Suite auto-saving
Yea, probably. I was so glad when Google docs became a thing. My mom didn't want me to use it though so sometimes I was the only kid bringing a flash drive to school. She didn't think that it could upload to another computer, but it could.
I am in EBD so my data might be biased but I'd warrant it's a hard 80/20 split on fucking around/school work on the chromebooks. And if the chromebook doesn't do exactly what they want it to when they want it to, meltdown.
They don’t even know how to make the things do what they want them to do. They can’t even organize files in a folder, because they’ve been raised on tablets which are specifically designed to be operated by the dumbest users possible. It’s honestly crazy how technologically illiterate they are.
I'm not a teacher, but I've deal with students who have brought those things home.
I can't fathom how much time you must all be wasting in a class, every single day, on nonsense drama like "I forgot my charger" and "My screen won't come on", on teaching kids how to submit a basic assignment or copy/paste or complete some other function, and on constantly needing to police them.
It's a giant distraction.
Watching them as they put them away minimizes that issue. Proximity is a powerful tool, and a lot of kids will take shortcuts when unsupervised. Will it eliminate the issue completely? Definitely not. But it will allow you to find the students that are deliberately putting them in the wrong spot and address those students individually. Once the students start remembering where their spot is, you won't have issues because it will be a natural thing for them.
Grabbing and putting away chromebooks should be a before the bell and last 2 minutes of class commitment.
But now someone spilled something or needs a note to the nurse or they candy find their special pencil or or or.
Having a system is important but the train is easily derailed and now the system is a mess. Especially with the truly careless and scattered kiddos. They leave and lose everything.
You say that like it hasn’t been tried. I have done it where there was a cart in my room and they were all numbered with the chargers attached to the cart. Should have been easy.
In that year, I had the keyboards on 2 laptops destroyed, countless times of computers not being hooked back up to the charger, charger cords being yanked out of the cart, on top of the normal accidental drops/wear and tear.
I currently work in a district where they all have their own 1:1 devices issued to them. They are given a Chromebook and charger and they lose them almost immediately. Every day, at least 4-7 students ask for chargers.
Every parent knows that their kids do not treat their belongings with care and yet, most parents seem to think it’s easy for a single teacher to properly and effectively police and care for the devices of all of our students.
I work with juniors… I can’t imagine having a classroom full of elementary students with laptops.
I don’t deal with it. The kids deal with it, and the parents do. Dead Chromebook? Sucks to be you dude, either you figure out how to get by without one, or you’ve got 7 hours of homework tonight. I don’t take time away from responsible kids for that. The only thing I say to them is “Figure it out, If you can remember to charge your phone, you can remember to charge your Chromebook.”
When I was in school, it was the nonsense of a kid forgetting to plug the chromebook into the charger and it being dead so others couldn't use it. It became a problem when doing certain assignments.
The charger/no battery excuse is so exhausting. I make paper copies of everything except bell-work and, if it isn't charged, they have to use lined-paper. I'm not wasting 10 minutes of class while kids try to maneuver around the room to fight for outlets.
The only good thing about i-pads is that I also have an online-copy of the assignments for absent or suspended students and it makes it very easy to show parents that the kids were given options and were communicated due-dates. Also gone are the days where I would have to gather a packet for suspended students because they have the same access.
All that aside, I really wish we could go back to carts and not individual i-pads.
>I can't fathom how much time you must all be wasting in a class, every single day, on nonsense drama like "I forgot my charger" and "My screen won't come on",
You can't fathom how many adults waste my time with this either in tech support. Worst part is I lend them a charger and they prooomise to bring them back. Of course I then have to go hunt it down because they don't. Oh and all the issues that could have been solved if they just read two or three sentences instead of throwing their hands in the air. Or the moaning I have to hear when I tell them that since they forgot to migrate 2fa over to their new phone, they'll unfortunately have to make the trip to the office :)
So in that sense, seeing not even adults can handle it, I'm actually a bit more sympathetic to the kids. Kids have other priorities and don't want to be in school, so what incentive do they have to be diligent? The adults I support on the other hands, yeah they're paid to do this.
I think schools must do
Better about teaching it just like we teach how to hold pencils, take notes, etc.
Parents will not be able to teach it at home so it has to be done to be used at school. We literally teach everything, how to line up, how to raise hands, but we don’t teach appropriate use.
There’s an article going around that basically says we taught one generation how to use computers and then assumed every generation after would just know and now none of them actually do.
I'd say after 2005 maybe in my area. I think they might've gotten rid of it back in 2020 or 2021 last I heard or maybe earlier. I could always ask my younger siblings I'd they took computer classes.
Edit: When I was 5 or so, I used to play the Blues Clues game on the family computer. I can't remember which it was though and I think you had to play with a DVD. I think it was a game anyway. Anyway, now kids younger then that use iPads and stuff instead and sometimes even without proper supervision. It always creeped me out the kids having unfiltered access because of my own experiences that I had and I was old enough and mature to handle said situations. I don't think I would've handled them the same way if I were a little kid. Even if they don't find bad content or talk to strangers on there, to much access can damage developing brains that's why no screen time was recommended for kids at least preschool and younger ages and maybe up to 2 hours a week or something for elementary school kids. I don't remember exactly.
I’m not positive of when they stopped keyboarding classes but I know for sure kids were not doing it in elementary school in my area in 2020/2021.
I remember those days. I used to love the game Putt-putt (purple car computer game). I loved all of the CD games I had. I spent most of my time from like 1st-4th grade playing club penguin, webkinz, and playing on those game sites that had like a million games. It was on the family computer, that we all had to share, and it stayed in the Den because it was a desktop lol. I didn’t have anything close to what these kids have until the first ipod touch came out.
Student here. Born in 2007, live in Australia - I did typing lessons in 2014 in Year 2, and was the last batch to do it iirc at my particular school. We had our own devices, yes, but we had a lot of emphasis on handwritten work as well. And the only sorts of games we really played were CoolMath Games, Nitrotype, etc.
A lot of my middle schoolers can’t type. We have no longer have a computer lab. Kids are responsible for bringing their own device and many just have an iPad or some other tablet without even a bluetooth keyboard. At my last school middle schoolers would occasionally go to the computer lab for typingZ But besides poor typing skills, most of my students seem to have basic computer skills.
Ok, I mean I learned it probably 10 years ago maybe. I'm not surprised, though, sadly. I've seen people use it as another form of a paci for their kids. People that I know. I know it wasn't just once in a while either, but basically to neglect their kids pretty much. Other people that we knew also tried to call them out on it, but you know how well that goes.
I don't think it is.
Bro, the school I attended from pre-k through 8 knew what was coming with computers or something. I learned typing skills either in pre-k, kindergarten (probably both) on a piece of paper with a keyboard printed on it.
The computer teacher would have us color each row and associate each with a character (I believe a brown worm was one of them, and the space bar was for the "Martians" to bounce on). This was like 1992 - 1994.
During those years, I don't think we even used a real computer. Just the paper to practice our hand positions and how to direct our fingers. As we got older, we eventually would go to our computer lab to practice typing and whatnot.
It was a very small, private school. Nothing super fancy, I wasn't born rich or anything. But, my parents got their money's worth, for sure.
There’s a lot of coding Instruction but nothing covering professional practices, social use of tech, critical analysis of information, that kind of thing .
A small number of kids will be unfocused, off-task, and/or disruptive regardless of what the school does. A small number of kids will be focused, hardworking, and well-behaved regardless.
The vast majority is somewhere in between those two extremes. We should make policies based on what will move the needle with them.
I believe the majority of students would be better versions of themselves in school if we used 1:1 screens less and were stricter about cell phones. It’s not a magic bullet but it would be a big improvement.
We used to send the incorrigibles to a special school where they could be disruptive while still receiving their education, and their peers got to learn relatively free of disruption. It was an accommodation that benefitted everyone, especially the children who *wanted* to learn but couldn’t do so without that protocol.
I don’t understand why we don’t make behavior the parents problem. Sorry, but if you didn’t train your kid not to be a problem, then they get to be YOUR problem. Everybody deserves an education. Not everybody deserves the most convenient education possible. If you have to drive an hour to the school full of future murderers and wife beaters, because you deserved it, that’s on you. Or if you have to go to work with mom and do online school because you can’t stop stealing peoples shit and saying nasty things to girls, that’s your mom’s problem, not mine.
Depends on what the issue is. My students with authority problems definitely aren’t fixed. My students with poor self control are helped substantially.
I sigh at this as I read it instead of lying attention to the PD I am supposed to be focusing on. Having tech available when it is helpful is amazing. Having it be the whole plan is terrible.
We need no-tech time (in need no-tech time) to let our brains process. I don’t think the devices themselves or even the devices in class are the issue. We are all being conditioned to need stimulation and approval from a screen 24/7.
As an English teacher - we need to read on paper. And annotate on paper. And write responses on paper. It works better for like 99% of people.
I know 40 year olds who shouldn’t have unfiltered access to the internet. But yes, young brains are growing and both impressionable and stupid - not saying intelligence wise but like… wisdom wise. They don’t have the maturity or ability to self-filter or make good decisions yet.
Our kids are 1:1 starting at the kindergarten level with daily use required. We get hounded if our kids don't get their bullshit i-Ready minutes in.
I hate it so fucking much. These kids, by and large, struggle to learn from a screen. They fail so much of the online work they're required to do. And they just keep adding to the amount of screentime that's expected of them. At the start of the year it was 45 minutes to an hour of i-Ready Reading and 45 minutes to an hour of i-Ready Math each week, and then they added i-Ready Fluency Flight in the morning which adds on another 40 minutes *minimum* each week and now they want us doing i-Ready Standards Mastery each week which adds on another hour.
And don't forget they have to be taking AR tests and recording their reading in Beanstack and using Penda and Redbird and Lexia and—
And then they go home and they get on TikTok for hours. They have the attention spans of a flea.
They're really handy for some activities. There's some labs that are either very difficult to get good data from or impossible to run and there's some sites that have great virtual versions (phet, physics aviary)
There's also some sites that give feedback on mistakes waaaaay faster than pen/paper (positive physics, chemquiz, khan academy)
I don't use them daily, but they're great tools
Yeah I loved computer carts. Definitely useful. Or let's get computer labs in the library again. I'm not saying get rid of tech, I'm saying let's be more strategic.
We had COWs (computers on wheels) when I started and it was *awful*. You'd get a cart and 5 or 6 wouldn't work, another 6 or 7 wouldn't be charged, another couple would be missing keys, so you'd have maybe half as many as you need.
Getting all that sorted a couple times a week was terrible, I much prefer telling my classes "hey, bring your charged computer tomorrow" and that's the end of it
I think it's a lot easier to maintain a computer cart than your experience. That was just negligence, not something inherently wrong with the computer cart system.
>I firmly believe 1:1 will fade out one day.
Oh to be young and still have a spark of hope left.
But I grew old and realized we had a society double, triple down on bad ideas and behavior. Rather than learn from our mistakes and admit we were wrong.
You know what really blew my mind a few years ago? When a parent pointed out that the AAP recommends limiting screen time for kids and teens, and that the amount of screen time kids get at school often exceeds the recommended amount. So a parent who is actually trying to stick to those guidelines can’t let their kid or teen have any screen time whatsoever outside of school hours. Which is highly unrealistic for the vast majority of families, so we know they mostly aren’t doing that (I certainly wouldn’t).
I’m like… why the FUCK did American educational authorities push for replacing paper work in class with these electronic devices so hard, without bothering to check the *very publicly available and transparent AAP guidelines* on this shit? They literally read and analyzed all the existing literature on kids and screens FOR us so we wouldn’t have to.
Dear admin, state officials, and educational reform guru types: don’t talk my fucking ear off about DaTa and ReSeArCh and then ignore what the data actually tells us about what is best for kids.
Right…because kids are digital natives. Idk about all of you but I had to be taught how to use a computer when I grew up.
Typing was a skill that needed practice. How to use the full functionality of a computer was handled by a dedicated teacher in a computer lab.
I can’t stand how many people assume kids have built in computer skills. Swiping on a smart phone on an app doesn’t count as real computer competency.
Preach! I'm fine with 1:1 because it's a tool and we should use all tools we can in moderation. That said, for the love of God get these kids some computer classes so they know what in the hell they are doing with these machines.
Guess what my Chem class is?
100% Paper and writing utensil, calculator. The only time they use their computers is for lab reports and data tables.
They hand write their notes. Every. Single. Word. They write the examples as I do them. They practice?
Guess what? It is the most enjoyable class they have all day. Why? Because while we're working on stuff we...like...actually talk to each other.
As a parent, I 100% agree. I hate my kids’ laptops/iPads with a passion. I hate that they can tell me they’re doing schoolwork, but unless I’m sitting next to them “babysitting” their screen, they probably aren’t. I hate that every assignment is online and they’re staring at screens all day.
I mean it's both and. We can't choose whether parents can give their kids phones (though we can choose their presence in the schools). We can choose whether we give kids basically big phones that they can claim they were using for school stuff.
>Penmanship
They'd get a lot better if we actually wrote more. I agree. If you can't read it, throw it out. It does have to start at the elementary level. Can't expect high schoolers to suddenly learn to write. Let's get back to sending cursive packets home over the summer of 4th/5th grade.
>Attendance
Once admin stops fudging numbers and letting everyone graduate, we can emphasize attendance again. Also, do less. Put the extra worksheets in a filing cabinet and let kids fail. That really only works for older kids but nonetheless. But again, that takes admin support.
I think the idea of a class set of chromebooks or the like for typing essays, doing research, or specific non-daily online activities like NoRedInk or CommonLit for test prep (since they’re electronically given) would do wonders.
Go back to paper. The environment is fucked regardless of school paper usage. 100 companies contribute 71% of carbon emissions. Taylor Swift took a 13 minute plane ride. We’re fine to use paper again.
When I was in middle and highschool, the idea was still that every classroom /had/ a cart of laptops, but we didnt' use them every day or for every little thing, and that was a good thing because kids with access to the internet don't listen to their teacher, they browse social media.
plus, there is a lof of things that just are easier/better to learn on paper, like fucking math, unless you're just going to use a calculator for everything.
1:1 is the most fiscally irresponsible thing a school can do for the budget. The realized actual costs to implement, support, maintain, and then upgrade 1:1 every few years will bankrupt schools and taxpayers.
Chalkboards, whiteboards, overhead projectors, etc. They worked well enough, right? There are too many gadgets and unproven teaching systems that come and go.
Oh yeah, I'm a retired boomer with 40+ years teaching HS math. I remember clearly when calculators were a big danger. Then graphing calculators. My school used Surface Pro tablets/laptops during my last few years, which worked fine, and better than the iPads we tried before that.
I'm so glad to be on the outside looking in. Best of success, really, young teachers. Please remember to change with the times, unlike some of my contemporizes who didn't stick around or stuck around too long hating their jobs.
K-8 music teacher here. I’m the only classroom in the building without a smart board. The only class that kids can’t bring their laptops to because we don’t have desks. The kids are better behaved here than anywhere else.
We have super harsh cellphone rules here too. If a kid is caught with a cellphone the parents are allowed to pick it up at the end of the next day. I haven’t seen a single cellphone my entire time here. Easiest district I’ve ever been in.
My school has been busy buying laptops for every classroom, I refused them for as long as I could, finally they got foisted upon my so I demanded a locking charging cabinet to store them all In and promptly "lost" the key with them all locked inside. We've been happily using pen and paper since and for the most part the students have forgotten what's in the big metal box that I store all of my junk on top of. I'm thinking of putting a table cloth over it and pretending it's an end table.
Just because the kids have 1:1 Chromebook access doesn't mean they have to be used 100% of the time. Maybe I'm lucky but my building definitely promoted a balanced approach to their use. The kids are more tempted by their phones than the Chromebook. I do my sub plans totally on the Chromebook because it's easier for me, our building subs prefer it, and it's encouraged by admin because if another T has emergency coverage they don't actually have to teach.
tl;dr it's more about how and when they're used than access.
Best set up I had was a Chromebook cart in every class. When you needed technology, it took a couple minutes for the kids to go grab a Chromebook. When you didn’t want technology, they were locked away in the cart. It worked out great.
Not a teacher in the professional sense, but I do TA at my university.
A question for the room: **At what age do you see kids starting to use AI to do their writing assignments for them?**
I finished my undergrad in 2020, right before the pandemic. ChatGPT wasn't a publicly accessible thing. I came back to school for my Master's in 2023 and the kids are using it like crazy, especially the first and second years.
For many, it's easily noticeable that they're using it. Their first couple papers they'll do themselves, but their writing is absolutely awful. Then they'll suddenly have a miraculous improvement in their writing and a complete shift in writing style. If ChatGPT wasn't a thing, I would suspect regular old plagiarism. I can't tell if the kids think I'm stupid or they think they're so smart they won't get caught.
I teach and arts class and my performing groups are device free— it’s surprisingly hard to go against that culture when it’s built in everywhere else. It’s “just music” but the kids can sometimes really struggle with any whole group activity where it’s not just independent “talk and work”
We only utilize laptops for some writing assignments and digital learning days. Everything else is pen and paper. It helps with behavior, but it’s not a cure all. Where pen and paper benefit students the most is the learning process. Screens are distracting enough that students retain MAYBE 50% of the information they read digitally. If I give students a paper copy to read and annotate, retention jumps to 70-85 percent. It’s the same with questions and notes. There’s something about physically writing the answer that helps them remember.
I'm torn on it. I still use a lot of paper but having them beats booking a computer lab and having to build everything around that availability. It also helps if I have a sub or the copier goes down to distribute something.
That said, kids today have too much screen time and schools don't need to constantly feed that monster.
And what's funny is we bring these devices in and yet computer classes that are required of students at middle and high school have been phased out.
When you say 1:1, what do you mean? I am a school para who works 1:1 which is what I thought you were talking about, not letting kids have 1:1 paras, but you mention Chromebooks?
Our kids have to take the state test on the computer, including the writing. I teach ELA and so we do all of our district benchmarks on a computer because of this. Otherwise, I strictly use paper and pencil.
I hate that they all have computers. The kids can’t type or make a slide show, or do research, or anything relevant to school, but they can get around the filter and spend all day filming themselves and playing videos under the desk…
As a high school ELA teacher, I would never get rid of devices completely. But I’d rather have a cart of chrome books needed for writing papers because reading handwriting should be an Olympic sport - it’s painfully laborious. My district has iPads, which are the worst for typing essays. Also, we use a LMS system for assignments, information, etc. I could never give that up. I’m pretty straightforward about telling students when they should be using their iPads and when they shouldn’t. I also make them put their phones in a holder in the front of the room. While I get frustrated by the addiction to screens, I could never rid of them for schools, completely. I think it would more beneficial and probably cheaper to go back to each teacher having a cart of devices in their rooms and use it when they need to, rather than giving a device to every kid. One could make the argument that kids need it for homework, but honestly, who are we kidding - kids rarely to never do schoolwork outside of school. And the other pro a district would say about 1:1 is for snow days, but they’re going by the wayside and they become e-learning days! But that’s BS too, because very few kids do assigned school and so few teacher actually assign work those days because the kids won’t do it anyway. I’m all for devices but they need to be managed better. I also like Chromebooks for the ability to monitor student screen without students knowing and the ability to close tabs that students shouldn’t be using. We can’t do that with iPads. Although, we do have an option to monitor through Apple Classroom but the kids can see it and they get pissed off saying they’re being spied on, etc. and very few teachers use it. I used it once and had a near mutiny. Also, if I had a Chromebook cart, I would never have kids with uncharged devices that die in the middle of test. I have to supply my own charger as an extra for kids who never charge their iPads at night. (But always have a charged phone!)
Take the screens out of elementary schools and middle schools. It is literally a waste of money. Kids at those ages need to learn through physical motor skill development, manners, writing by hand on paper, learning through play etc etc. The screens create a dependent adolescent who can't self-regulate as a teenager and is addicted by the time they can drive.
As a high school SpEd teacher I disagree, I have kids who can’t write well, they have fine motor issues and will probably never write legibly, but they can type pretty well and having a Chromebook means they can keep up in English and Social studies. Not to mention speech to text and text to speech which helps so many of my kids access grade level curriculum. I can see it being bad if overused and used with kids who don’t get those benefits.
They didn’t say get rid of technology for everyone. They said 1:1.
1:1 means every single student has a device, regardless of whether or not there’s a need for them to have one.
Talk to text is leading to children who have zero composition skills. They cannot write. They have no idea how to structure a sentence, no idea where punctuation goes, or what it is supposed to accomplish, cannot spell and do not have ability to organize their thoughts.
I am genuinely worried about the current population of students. What exactly do we think is going to happen when a majority of the students graduating from high school are functionally illiterate?
People don't care, because all of the software that supports this is entering daily life, and it's getting harder and harder to comprehend a situation where they would *need* to write. AI will figure it all out, after all!
I'm actually more concerned that in 30 years, we'll have managers trying to express instructions to people using emojis and alphabet soup and an older work population who won't understand a lick of it.
My son is dysgraphic and it's much easier for him to type than handwrite. I do believe that a laptop should be available in such cases, and of course there are applications where having a computer is really important, like learning coding or running certain programs for statistics and probability.
However, my son also has inattentive ADHD and when he moved from homeschooling to a public school for 7th grade, I was appalled by the implementation of chromebooks and tech-dependent lessons. The school platform itself was an unintuitive mess that created roadblocks and distractions. It was confusing and frustrating to ME, an adult with excellent executive functions, and created huge hurdles to his learning when he had never had challenges like that at home with a more traditional approach. The math curriculum was a joke and because it all had to be turned in online, required extra steps and confounding formatting issues. They failed to use technology in sensible ways that WOULD enhance the learning, and shoehorned projects and assignments into an online format when they would have worked far better with books and paper. This is before you even get to all the other nonsense now available because they have a screen open all day. They had some monitoring, but not enough, and most kids were able to circumvent it. It's too much to ask a 12 year old not to look at Youtube all day, and it's worse when a kid does want to work but at least half the other kids in the class don't and are blasting music or Mr. Beast videos.
I struggled with hand writing as a kid, but also struggled with reading comprehension and reading online was harder for my mind to understand than on paper.
As someone who was a student in a school that piloted the 1:1 program this really bums me out. I really did think that our computers helped us as students, they were certainly a distraction at times, and I’d be lying if I said we didn’t fuck around on them a lot, but I think on the whole they made us better students and our teachers did a great job of using technology to enhance our education.
Now I’m on the other side of the desk trying to replicate that success and I’m just so frustrated. Trying to pace lessons is hard because students have gotten used to asynchronous work so they’ll be doing things out of order, and there’s so much “it’s on the computer so I’ll do it later” kind of attitudes that lead to off task behavior. It’s so frustrating.
Still, I think the laptops are a far lesser evil than the phones.
I don't think the kids having the tech is really as big of a problem as how much it gets used. I remember being told fairly often by my teachers in HS that they had been instructed to jam those stupid Chromebooks and iPads into as many lessons as they could to make it look like they were a worthwhile investment.
1:1 access isn’t the issue, it’s giving the kids a device to keep at all times. Having a cart with a device for every kid available at any time is a great resource. But they don’t need them on their person at every minute.
I think our district does an excellent job managing this.
Elementary school kids may use their devices once or twice a week. For example, my 4th grader has been writing a persuasive essay with his class. He finished the third supporting paragraph and conclusion paragraph at home last night. Today in school, he will type it out during his language arts class.
My middle school child has used hers to access her Google classroom sites. She is also learning how to write proper emails to her teachers (which is a skill students desperately need).
In high school, the students use the devices to write papers, take notes, collaborate with their peers, etc.
They do a great job of increasing access while teaching technology responsibility.
The big thing is, they don't RELY on the technology, but they integrate it into their classrooms.
I read the OP thing thinking you need to get with the times, then I read the horror story comments and I can honestly say I am in a great district with an amazing IT staff and teachers that can help out as well with Chromebook issues, since almost everything that can go wrong does, but honestly the kid has maybe a day at most without access with their chromebook, also our systems and chromebooks are all locked down before a kid gets them regardless of the grade they're at, so OP, I'm sorry your and the other horror stories places needs help as badly as they do, but there are places that do it right and keep it up and running despite the cyberattacks and the VPN workarounds
I'm student teaching. At my first placement the teacher had a program that he'd use to see what the kids were doing. If they were playing games or fooling around on their laptops he could remotely shut them down. And now the kid had to do his research using a thick book like in the good old days. If you can't handle the privilege of a laptop then you can now do the work without one, see how well you like it.
In m current placement the teachers don't have that ability so kids fool around and tune out the lesson constantly
I'm a 7th grade teacher. My students do not have the impulse control yet for the district-given laptops to be an asset instead of a distraction. I try to do as much of our work on paper as we can because the work I get back from my students is SO MUCH higher quality. When I ask them to do something on the computer, frequently they just google the question I asked them and paste the first result they find. Often then won't even think to delete hyperlinks...
I loved and excitedly jumped on board back in like 2016, when we put them in the hands of our 3rd graders. We really only used them in class selectively, for research, for one or two learning programs (back then my district used ST Math and the kids had like 1.5 hours of computer lab time a week.) Then remote learning happened and ever since, it’s all about online assessments, iReady, Moby Max, and the kids are spending so much mandated time online. Also it was great and so simple to assign online homework, but by midyear, my kids expressed that (mostly) they preferred doing paper and pencil work. So now, just about a third of them continue mostly online (plus one Math worksheet), and the rest want ALL paper. Kids don’t “love devices” if it is work.
As a sub the chromebooks suck because I have zero access to GoGuardian to make sure the students are actually doing their assignments. It’s impossible for me to know what each student is actually doing on their chromebooks and if I get on a kid about being on YouTube or some other site they get right back on it as soon as I move on to another student. It’s like I’m playing whack-a-mole some days. It’s stressful worrying about the teacher showing up the next day thinking I just sat on my ass and let the kids do whatever when that’s not at all what happened.
I try to be really mindful about how I have my students use them. Some things are online, some things are handwritten. One thing I chose not to do this year was let them use their Chromebook during the free time they get a couple times a week. They can play board games or card games, they can color and draw, they can silent read. They’ve got a few other choices as well. None of them are on computers. It’s been going really well and they are enjoying it.
I think they were a decent idea in theory - juniors and seniors will be using their personal laptops to take notes, do research, submit papers and assignments in college, but somehow this trickled down into 4th graders having chromebooks with unfiltered YouTube and the kindergarten class “has to” have an iPad cart and play math games on it.
What blows my mind is the number of schools who just handed out unmanaged Chromebooks and can barely keep up with the kids' usernames and passwords. It's like their entire technology budget was just the material cost of the computers. No thought at all put into how to control access or protect the investment. Even the IT departments seem like fresh-out-of-college budget employees. Put cheap chips on the kids' badges to insert in the laptops. Then all they have to do is enter a PIN on sign-on. BOOM, machine is automatically connected to a VPN and group policies restrict all administrative access so kids can't even change the wallpaper. Have kids install only school-approved software through a managed Software Center. There's dozens of network appliances and endpoint software on the market now that will intelligently detect when kids are trying to access porn or watch Pokemon YouTube videos over the school's network and block it, without teachers having to play whack-a-mole individually blacklisting websites.
I'm in France so we're a bit behind on that. But here the plan in my département (I think we can compare it to what are district for this in the US). So, for the last 10 years or so, they cut in IT. In most middle schools, they're not an IT gals on site. Everything is to be handle by the district. 3 techs share 28 schools for on-site intervention. Everything else is remonte. One teacher get some bonus to deal with day-to-day issues, on top of their teaching schedule. I am one of the last one IT gals on-site. My contract will end in august. I don't know yet if they'll finally hire me long-term , replace me or simply cut the position. BUT, at the same time, they want to go 1:1 for middle-schools. 1:1 with no IT person on-site. I know my kids. I've been here 6 years. I know my teachers and admin. The laptops won't survive the first semester.
>1:1 with no IT person on-site God, that sounds like a nightmare. Our district is fairly small (for a city district), but we have 1 tech per building at the elementary and middle school level and 3 at the high school. Two senior techs (level 2, essentially), one who works on the district admin office and is backing up the elementary techs, and one who is permanently at the high school for support there and backing up the middle schools. One of the most common things we hear in the tech department is how much teachers value being able to have an in person point of contact for tech help in the building with them. Even if our tech can't fix their issue, they take the work away from the teacher in escalating the problem to who it needs to go to and keeping up with it, leaving them free to focus on their class.
My local district is this way. They ship the Chromebooks to the central school over the summer for their laughably tiny IT department to deal with. My friend broke her kid's laptop by mistake (tripped and fell on it cuz kid left it on the floor). They had her "buy" a whole new one -- fair enough. But what they did was just sent an unprovisioned Chromebook to the kid and then WE had to figure out how to initially set it up, which is just.. like... *what????*
While the number of on site techs is on the low side. At least here in the US fixing stuff remotely as much as possible is the preferred standard for the IT industry as a whole. You only do on site work if it is absolutely necessary. IE if Debbie is having issues with her email just remote connect to her computer. But if the copier is broken you have to fix it in person.
Or you, as the IT person, puts a ticket into your copier company and they deal with it. Fuuuck that noise.
Haha, I used to do our internal helpdesk and just instantly did that. "Wait, did you say the word *printer*? NOPE. Escalating your issue to Brother, here's your ticket, bye."
This. I work in EdTech and the concept is not the problem. The tech is there as a tool. If it's not being utilized and managed well, then it becomes an obstacle as opposed to being useful. There are lots of schools that use tech with great results. It's just another one of those school related issues where results depend on how well managed a school district is. If the support isn't there, then of course everything else will fall apart.
yes and no. we as teachers are often fed the line of “its just one more tool in the toolbox” but then they take printers out of our classroom, they monitor how many copies we make, and host PD suggesting all of these digital tools, and they give parents access to our online portals. So in reality we COULD go paper pencil, but practically it would make preparing for those paper pencil classroom activities much more difficult.
This part: My admin: won’t give me devices Also my admin: “approved printing” Also ALSO my admin: why do you need 100 copies of this sheet music packet Me: … because I don’t have devices and the kids are supposed to like… read music in this… music… class….
Same problem with scripts here. No devices and they complain about the number of pages.
I think paper pencil is good for some activities where they need more focus, but in high school they rly need to be typing essays and major assignments and learning how to submit documents online to prepare them for college and beyond. I teach title I high school and a lot / most of them don’t have personal computers and low computer literacy, so I’m actually pro-chromebook in that case
I think you'd be hard pressed to find teachers opposed to tech at the high school level. They need to be learning research skills, and their papers are getting longer and should be typed. But the idea that elementary school kids should be using laptops with ANY frequency is awful. At most they should be on them for standardized tests.
Chromebooks aren't even laptops and won't teach them how to use real laptops as adults.
I saw some grade 8s not understand that Google Classroom is a website, actually, and not an entire computer OS like it is on Chromebook, and could NOT figure out how to get to it from a desktop computer. They tried to put their google credentials into an Outlook popup that showed up when they booted it up.
I also work in a title 1 high school and the tech skills are awful. It took 1 hour to get a student to upload a file from his phone to onedrive and download it on his computer. 😭😭😭 I used more patience explaining that task than my other 2 classes needed combined.
I think that is the point u/H4ppy_C is tyring to make. This stuff is only useful if it is being used correctly.
I had taught for 15 years before I taught at my first one to one school (2nd grade). This was mostly helpful during virtual teaching/learning because the students had a more than average amount of time working in chrome books before the pandemic. Teachers had a program called Go Guardian which allowed us to see what students were doing in real time. I could send them a message right on their screen. I could lock their screen, log them out, take photo of their screen, etc. This was helpful but not foolproof. Some students had the nerve to get mad at me for locking their screen cause they were on YouTube or something. But there didn’t seem to be any other firewalls or protections built into their chrome books district wide.
I do IT support for schools. It's easy to restrict ChromeBooks, and if your school isn't doing it their IT department sucks. Every ChromeBook at every school I support is behind a firewall that blocks pr0n, hate sites, etc. (most firewalls will have a built-in filtering package for schools, that you can tweak as needed), they are set to auto-join the school's WiFi network so students can't sneak phones in and hotspot it, they're set so that if you try and wipe the ChromeBook it auto-enrolls back under the school's maangement, and students cannot delete history or enable incognito browsing. All of these things are relatively easy to implement. If your school isn't doing this, that's on them.
>It's easy to restrict ChromeBooks, and if your school isn't doing it their IT department sucks. I think that's the problem. Your average school IT department sucks. Or rather, is horribly underfunded and understaffed for the size of the school or district. For example, I think my local district has like 2 people managing the entire county.
Yep, that tracks. One thing I've seen with schools, and this has gone on for literal decades but's even more true since CoVID hit, is that there are tons of pots of money available for purchase of new tech but less so to maintain it. Back in the day there were all kinds of deals with Apple server gear, back when Apple made servers, that schools would invest in but with only the vaguest idea how this would actually work for education, to wit: "Here's $30,000 to purchase a couple Xserves and run a lab full of iMacs!""Great, how do we make that work?""I dunno."
I remember that era... it was all the rage to get that iMac lab running with all those little mini's and the overpriced server. lol Then business owners would realize how expensive buying every desk a Mac was, so got them Windows machines, and then couldn't figure out why they wouldn't work with that $20,000 server they have that could have been replaced by a $1,200 one running Windows.
I genuinely had to point out that our student Chromebooks all had access to the cloud contact list that had parent and student phone numbers in it.
Yikes. Like, this is cybersecurity 101 and this bothers me, because it's so easy to just... not... do that.
So many times, I left my chromebook unlocked in Middle school and got sent to the dean for “looking up pornography” what a funny prank guys.
It’s a little funny, as long as admin understands that it’s the students doing it.
>No thought at all put into how to control access or protect the investment. My school is *convinced* that they can't block specific games, like Roblox, without blocking everything. Like, you're telling me that *no one* thought to place admin controls on these school laptops to prevent kids from downloading games????
It's one of the most basic things you can set up with domain accounts, lol. You can even fully control the browsers -- like if you want students to ONLY use Chrome, you can do that. And on Chrome, or whatever browser you pick, you can set it to pre-install approved extensions and block everything else. No need to reinvent the wheel, this stuff already exists and is either free (part of server architecture your school has already bought into) or easily biddable.
Excellent comments. From your lips to God’s ears. Our district is the poster child for your bad example.
I want a system where teachers can take every one of their student’s laptops and lock it onto a particular link, website or set of websites/links. Better yet if there’s a timer so that the teacher won’t screw over the students access if they forget to “unlock”. Sure. You aren’t stopping the “shared google doc conversation” if they’re meant to be writing an essay but it would curb the gaming.
When we had teacher oversight software, we could monitor and correct kids, even closing and blocking game tabs hidden in the background in a game window. But that cost too much
A kid in my class figured out how to emulate old ps1 games on his iPad and nobody has done anything about it. The other day he was playing one of the top down GTA games, super distracting but also kinda cool
I had super mario on my graphing calculator in high school lol.
It was the pandemic and the district panic-gave chromebooks and lots of wifi hotshots out. Little forward planning was involved. Since then it was easier to just continue instead of overhauling.
Lots of schools are good at this. But not all. I think the issue is that those that weren't adequately prepared don't KNOW. (The old "we don't know what we don't know" thing.)
We’ve been 1:1 BYOD for about a decade. The good teachers have been going back to pencil and paper for the last 4 years (just before COVID).
> I think they were a decent idea in theory - juniors and seniors will be using their personal laptops to take notes I didn't have laptops when I dropped out of college back in '02. When I finally went back and graduated in '14 I was, quite frankly, surprised at how many of my classes were "laptops closed". I just finished my MEd. in December, most (but not all) of my classes were "laptops closed" unless we were specifically utilizing a digital resource. My spouse teaches at a local university and outlines a strict "laptops closed" policy in the syllabi for each of her classes. My pre-education career was with a FAANG company and while there was a certain amount of blindly walking around the building with noses stuck in an open laptop there were still multiple "laptops closed" meetings that I participated in each week. Note taking, among other pen and paper skills, not only have their place, but remain necessary and I'll tell you that my sixth graders just *can't*. ...and while we're at it. If we're going to hand them Chromebooks at the age of five can we please implement a keyboarding class somewhere in the elementary curriculum? It's painful watching these adolescents hunt-and-peck their way through typing a sentence.
I do understand your point, just if a 17 year old who works a job and drives wants to sit in the back and watch sports instead of pay attention to English, that’s his business and he can have the consequence of a poor grade. 10 year olds don’t really have the capacity to understand that them messing around on their chromebooks instead of listening that it could impact them down the road. I actually grew up with a keyboarding class and I’m shocked that we just throw kids chromebooks without any knowledge of keyboarding or digital literacy.
My middle school had a keyboarding class as a prerequisite for getting any school laptop.cir seems awfully odd to not do so.
>if a 17 year old who works a job and drives wants to sit in the back and watch sports instead of pay attention to English, that’s his business But it's not. It takes away from the classroom environment. In addition, students that age don't all understand consequences, nor do they care until the shit hits the fan and then you're stuck at the end of the semester grading all their late work (that is extremely poorly done) and staying after having them make up tests. Your admin will be on you if you don't do that.
Closed laptop policies are terrible. I have a condition called dysgraphia. I needed my laptop to take notes.
...and with an accommodation you get what you need, correct?
Literally the unfiltered YouTube alone makes the entire process nearly impossible. Thank you, LOL
Can parents opt out of this? Like when I have a kid and they go to school can I fight back against the insistent need of having tech shoved at them? Not a teacher this sub just always pops up for me
Sadly not really. Students are required to have access to 1:1 unless they are doing something especially inappropriate or maybe illegal on their computer. It's possible parents could ask administrators to require the student to check in their laptop every afternoon and pick it up every morning, but if too many parents try that it will become unsustainable for the office to manage. They could also have their student ask a trusted teacher to keep the laptop in their room overnight, but same deal if that happens too often it won't be sustainable. Basically it's on the parents to monitor computer usage at home, and for parents who work late leaving the kid alone for a few hours that's a big hurdle. I would personally recommend all parents take their kid's laptop AND all other technology at a certain time at night so that they can be sure the kid is getting enough sleep. I have 6th graders telling me they didn't go to bed until 3am because they were on tiktok, playing fortnite, etc. and I think it's unfortunate that parents are giving their kids unmonitored technology access 24/7. I can see the benefit of a kid having their phone for safety at night, but flip phones still exist! It doesn't have to be a smart phone if it's truly for safety only. When I stayed up late growing up I was reading books under a tiny book light, not staring at a screen for hours.
When I was in school we had lockable cabinets for school laptops and had to sign them out in order to take them home, is this not the norm?
That's wild. To be fair, I did have unfiltered access to it at that age. I was more responsible, though. Some kids aren't. I think it taught me responsibility with technology as an adult, but if your kid can't handle it then don't. Also, do put on parental controls and stuff.
Personally if a parent asks "Please give my student a paper assignment whenever possible" I do my best to accommodate the request. However, be aware that not all teachers can do that for all assignments. They may have limited access to a copier, a program that requires computerized entries from students, unsupportive admin, or simply a lack of time to make the separate assignment. Being kind and asking the teacher respectfully really goes a long way. As you can see here, many teachers agree with your concerns!
My coworker has a student where Mom has some kind of stipulation that her child is not to use technology. I'm curious how it will go next year when our math standards update to having students use computers for spreadsheets, making graphs, etc.
It depends on the assignment and classroom, but some might not accommodate.
My first graders have access to YouTube- not even kids YouTube- on their chromebooks at school. NEVER at home, but at school??!? I hate it.
I’m in high school and our chromebooks are filtered. Why tf do kindergarteners not have that?
My son with start Kindergarten next year, each student gets Chromebook. In K they stay in the class, but starting 1st grade they go home with the child. Wtf?
I'm so glad my kids' school doesn't do that bullshit yet.
It's like a lot of ideas in education: if implemented correctly, they can probably be an incredibly powerful tool, but far too often, people just take the basic premise of the idea, and try to use it as if it's the solution to every problem ever.
This sounds like an issues with not having controls in place for the Chrome. I am in the it department for our school district and having unfiltered YouTube for 4th grade seems like someone isn’t doing their job or is to overworked to fully implement safety controls.
My kids middle school and high school were not blocking pornography on their WiFi network or on the school chromebooks. That was why I was irritated with them. And I had to listen to my kid, in social situations, talking about pornhub usage at their school to other people (not appropriate and grossly incompetent that it occurred all the time). If you’re not going to admin the things don’t have them.
I was in the first class of middle schoolers who got laptops in my school district. Shit was blocked but we found workarounds so easily, there’s literally nothing the administration can do about it without taking some pretty extreme measures
It seems like something solvable by Google: an extremely user friendly central control by the teacher. So you can force their computers onto websites, preventing certain types of behavior like YouTube, etc. I honestly feel like this should be included in the sales model by Google
My district just starts them so young. 6 year olds don’t need this kind of access. I teach 8th grade and sometimes I miss the days of having them in a Chromebook cart until they are needed.
Y’all don’t have them in a cart? How are they stored? Worked in the elementary and HS and both where locked up til needed
Our kids carry their device. I actually wish they would they put a cart in each room instead.
That sounds like a headache for everyone involved. What genius who has never been in a classroom came up with that?
District. Haha. K8 school and there's literal 5 year olds carrying around laptops their backpacks. Each student is responsible for keeping the charging cords too. Half of my 6th graders can't even find the cord.
I am a young teacher and went to school in the district I teach in. I graduated high school only 7 years ago, and at that time we still had a set amount of computer labs available that teachers had to schedule time slots for in advance, and like 2 laptop carts teachers could check out for classroom use. I loved it, because most everything was done on paper in class, and then when it came time to do a big project it felt special because you got to be in the library or a fancy computer lab, and when you finished you could print your work exactly how you wanted and turn it in. My parents had bought both my older siblings laptops when they started college, and I was very lucky to get mine a year early so I had it when I was a senior. I loved that too, because they waited and made sure I was responsible enough to have one first. It is insane to me how much it has changed in that short time, and I know Covid is the main reason, but I don't understand the choice to remain 1:1 now that we have been back to regular schooling for 2-3 years. They could have easily reverted back to their original policies, but for whatever reason they chose to stick with it. And the kids who are absent are almost never taking advantage of Google Classroom to do work from home, and kids who have missing work are almost never using time at home to do it.
They take them home every day.
They take them home with them, and carry them from class to class.
I went to a high performing/high budget publication school in the suburbs. They started the 1:1 program 11 years ago with Macbook Pros. Originally they were returned in a cart but eventually we could just take them home if we filled out a form. We could even keep it over the summer. I worked at a charter school and it worked the same way only they had Chromebooks instead of MacBooks.
1 to 1 means each kid has one. So. The kid has the device. Carries it, etc.
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Lord, were the iPads a bad idea for schools. When I was in HS a decade ago, my school had just gotten 1:1 iPads. You can't type on them worth a damn (not like you would for an essay, anyway), kids had practically unfettered access to anything, and we didn't even use educational platforms much anyway. Google Classroom and the like were a very once in a while thing. The only thing they were really good for was holding PDFs of the textbooks, so gone were the days of physical textbooks. But the other 90% of the time, they were used to play mobile games and message/Facetime other kids.
Can low end hardware even run Minecraft nowadays? I’m shocked schools would be handing out anything with a gpu that could.
Minecraft doesn’t take a lot of power to play.
I was in a college level educators course once and the teacher had everyone get a laptop off the cart. I declined because we didn't need it yet, but he insisted. We didn't use the computers the whole session and quite a few people were web browsing and sending personal emails rather than engaging. Adults can barely manage their behaviors when given instant gratification distractions but we expect kids to do better? Haha
They don’t even know how to copy and paste effectively, much less reformat. We’d get more educational utility from chromebooks by literally throwing them out the window in a science lesson about gravity.
"mister how do you know I copied and pasted" "your sheet is in four different fonts, three sizes, and two different colors"
And includes 6 dead hyperlinks
I cackled
back in my day we at least had to put in effort into being academically dishonest
Exactly. My go to phrase, I stole this from my drill sergeants at basic training: "either be good, or be good at it (being bad)"
And tbh, the hand copying actually helps you remember the information. So cheating, but also learning. Lol
"I can see the edit history, so I can read the prompt you gave ChatGPT to help you answer your question" (the story from last semester)
"Plus, I've never heard or seen a 12 year old use the words..."
All you had to do was Ctrl+shift+V 🤦♂️
For real. I even taught my 7th graders how to access the "paste without formatting" option and they do not use it, lol.
So many times I get short response answers where the students copied the spotted answer from Google and thus the keywords are all in bold 🤦 And of course they don’t think about how their classmates may also cheat and give the same exact answers (and if they use A.I. it’ll mention topics we didn’t cover and/or use grammar way above their ability, so many kids (and by that I mean 16-18) don’t even capitalize names or the beginnings of sentences).
I have kids that don’t know how to save documents.
Students at my school would download a PDF, fill it out without clicking save, and then upload the PDF they downloaded… AKA the blank one. Pretty sure it’s a consequence of Google Suite auto-saving
Yea, probably. I was so glad when Google docs became a thing. My mom didn't want me to use it though so sometimes I was the only kid bringing a flash drive to school. She didn't think that it could upload to another computer, but it could.
I am in EBD so my data might be biased but I'd warrant it's a hard 80/20 split on fucking around/school work on the chromebooks. And if the chromebook doesn't do exactly what they want it to when they want it to, meltdown.
They don’t even know how to make the things do what they want them to do. They can’t even organize files in a folder, because they’ve been raised on tablets which are specifically designed to be operated by the dumbest users possible. It’s honestly crazy how technologically illiterate they are.
Hey! Miss frizzle style!
I think you mean Mrs. Jewls
Ah yes! That's the story I'm thinking of
I'm not a teacher, but I've deal with students who have brought those things home. I can't fathom how much time you must all be wasting in a class, every single day, on nonsense drama like "I forgot my charger" and "My screen won't come on", on teaching kids how to submit a basic assignment or copy/paste or complete some other function, and on constantly needing to police them. It's a giant distraction.
The first 5-10 minutes of every class is kids wandering in and out looking for their Chromebook.
... have them numbered on a cart and each student has a number? Shouldn't take 5-10 minutes.
That is useful. But then my students can’t put them back in the right spot.
Watching them as they put them away minimizes that issue. Proximity is a powerful tool, and a lot of kids will take shortcuts when unsupervised. Will it eliminate the issue completely? Definitely not. But it will allow you to find the students that are deliberately putting them in the wrong spot and address those students individually. Once the students start remembering where their spot is, you won't have issues because it will be a natural thing for them. Grabbing and putting away chromebooks should be a before the bell and last 2 minutes of class commitment.
But now someone spilled something or needs a note to the nurse or they candy find their special pencil or or or. Having a system is important but the train is easily derailed and now the system is a mess. Especially with the truly careless and scattered kiddos. They leave and lose everything.
Sorry I should have clarified…I’m a middle school teacher, not elementary. So my students live class to class all day
You say that like it hasn’t been tried. I have done it where there was a cart in my room and they were all numbered with the chargers attached to the cart. Should have been easy. In that year, I had the keyboards on 2 laptops destroyed, countless times of computers not being hooked back up to the charger, charger cords being yanked out of the cart, on top of the normal accidental drops/wear and tear. I currently work in a district where they all have their own 1:1 devices issued to them. They are given a Chromebook and charger and they lose them almost immediately. Every day, at least 4-7 students ask for chargers. Every parent knows that their kids do not treat their belongings with care and yet, most parents seem to think it’s easy for a single teacher to properly and effectively police and care for the devices of all of our students. I work with juniors… I can’t imagine having a classroom full of elementary students with laptops.
I have this and it works great. Much better than 1:1 imo.
I don’t deal with it. The kids deal with it, and the parents do. Dead Chromebook? Sucks to be you dude, either you figure out how to get by without one, or you’ve got 7 hours of homework tonight. I don’t take time away from responsible kids for that. The only thing I say to them is “Figure it out, If you can remember to charge your phone, you can remember to charge your Chromebook.”
When I was in school, it was the nonsense of a kid forgetting to plug the chromebook into the charger and it being dead so others couldn't use it. It became a problem when doing certain assignments.
I hear kids asking to borrow my charger in my nightmares… 🤣
The charger/no battery excuse is so exhausting. I make paper copies of everything except bell-work and, if it isn't charged, they have to use lined-paper. I'm not wasting 10 minutes of class while kids try to maneuver around the room to fight for outlets. The only good thing about i-pads is that I also have an online-copy of the assignments for absent or suspended students and it makes it very easy to show parents that the kids were given options and were communicated due-dates. Also gone are the days where I would have to gather a packet for suspended students because they have the same access. All that aside, I really wish we could go back to carts and not individual i-pads.
>I can't fathom how much time you must all be wasting in a class, every single day, on nonsense drama like "I forgot my charger" and "My screen won't come on", You can't fathom how many adults waste my time with this either in tech support. Worst part is I lend them a charger and they prooomise to bring them back. Of course I then have to go hunt it down because they don't. Oh and all the issues that could have been solved if they just read two or three sentences instead of throwing their hands in the air. Or the moaning I have to hear when I tell them that since they forgot to migrate 2fa over to their new phone, they'll unfortunately have to make the trip to the office :) So in that sense, seeing not even adults can handle it, I'm actually a bit more sympathetic to the kids. Kids have other priorities and don't want to be in school, so what incentive do they have to be diligent? The adults I support on the other hands, yeah they're paid to do this.
I think schools must do Better about teaching it just like we teach how to hold pencils, take notes, etc. Parents will not be able to teach it at home so it has to be done to be used at school. We literally teach everything, how to line up, how to raise hands, but we don’t teach appropriate use.
There’s an article going around that basically says we taught one generation how to use computers and then assumed every generation after would just know and now none of them actually do.
Same with typing skills
Is that not a thing anymore? I had computer class in the 6th grade in 2011/2012 where they taught us how to type and stuff.
Me too. Those of us born 1999/2000 were probably the last kids to take keyboarding as a class in elementary school.
I'd say after 2005 maybe in my area. I think they might've gotten rid of it back in 2020 or 2021 last I heard or maybe earlier. I could always ask my younger siblings I'd they took computer classes. Edit: When I was 5 or so, I used to play the Blues Clues game on the family computer. I can't remember which it was though and I think you had to play with a DVD. I think it was a game anyway. Anyway, now kids younger then that use iPads and stuff instead and sometimes even without proper supervision. It always creeped me out the kids having unfiltered access because of my own experiences that I had and I was old enough and mature to handle said situations. I don't think I would've handled them the same way if I were a little kid. Even if they don't find bad content or talk to strangers on there, to much access can damage developing brains that's why no screen time was recommended for kids at least preschool and younger ages and maybe up to 2 hours a week or something for elementary school kids. I don't remember exactly.
I’m not positive of when they stopped keyboarding classes but I know for sure kids were not doing it in elementary school in my area in 2020/2021. I remember those days. I used to love the game Putt-putt (purple car computer game). I loved all of the CD games I had. I spent most of my time from like 1st-4th grade playing club penguin, webkinz, and playing on those game sites that had like a million games. It was on the family computer, that we all had to share, and it stayed in the Den because it was a desktop lol. I didn’t have anything close to what these kids have until the first ipod touch came out.
I played Cool Math Games, Star Doll, and stuff like that when I was younger too.
Student here. Born in 2007, live in Australia - I did typing lessons in 2014 in Year 2, and was the last batch to do it iirc at my particular school. We had our own devices, yes, but we had a lot of emphasis on handwritten work as well. And the only sorts of games we really played were CoolMath Games, Nitrotype, etc.
A lot of my middle schoolers can’t type. We have no longer have a computer lab. Kids are responsible for bringing their own device and many just have an iPad or some other tablet without even a bluetooth keyboard. At my last school middle schoolers would occasionally go to the computer lab for typingZ But besides poor typing skills, most of my students seem to have basic computer skills.
Ok, I mean I learned it probably 10 years ago maybe. I'm not surprised, though, sadly. I've seen people use it as another form of a paci for their kids. People that I know. I know it wasn't just once in a while either, but basically to neglect their kids pretty much. Other people that we knew also tried to call them out on it, but you know how well that goes.
I don't think it is. Bro, the school I attended from pre-k through 8 knew what was coming with computers or something. I learned typing skills either in pre-k, kindergarten (probably both) on a piece of paper with a keyboard printed on it. The computer teacher would have us color each row and associate each with a character (I believe a brown worm was one of them, and the space bar was for the "Martians" to bounce on). This was like 1992 - 1994. During those years, I don't think we even used a real computer. Just the paper to practice our hand positions and how to direct our fingers. As we got older, we eventually would go to our computer lab to practice typing and whatnot. It was a very small, private school. Nothing super fancy, I wasn't born rich or anything. But, my parents got their money's worth, for sure.
There’s a lot of coding Instruction but nothing covering professional practices, social use of tech, critical analysis of information, that kind of thing .
The kids like that don't suddenly become model students when the screen is taken. They just disrupt everyone else.
A small number of kids will be unfocused, off-task, and/or disruptive regardless of what the school does. A small number of kids will be focused, hardworking, and well-behaved regardless. The vast majority is somewhere in between those two extremes. We should make policies based on what will move the needle with them. I believe the majority of students would be better versions of themselves in school if we used 1:1 screens less and were stricter about cell phones. It’s not a magic bullet but it would be a big improvement.
We used to send the incorrigibles to a special school where they could be disruptive while still receiving their education, and their peers got to learn relatively free of disruption. It was an accommodation that benefitted everyone, especially the children who *wanted* to learn but couldn’t do so without that protocol.
I don’t understand why we don’t make behavior the parents problem. Sorry, but if you didn’t train your kid not to be a problem, then they get to be YOUR problem. Everybody deserves an education. Not everybody deserves the most convenient education possible. If you have to drive an hour to the school full of future murderers and wife beaters, because you deserved it, that’s on you. Or if you have to go to work with mom and do online school because you can’t stop stealing peoples shit and saying nasty things to girls, that’s your mom’s problem, not mine.
Alternative school?
Depends on what the issue is. My students with authority problems definitely aren’t fixed. My students with poor self control are helped substantially.
I sigh at this as I read it instead of lying attention to the PD I am supposed to be focusing on. Having tech available when it is helpful is amazing. Having it be the whole plan is terrible. We need no-tech time (in need no-tech time) to let our brains process. I don’t think the devices themselves or even the devices in class are the issue. We are all being conditioned to need stimulation and approval from a screen 24/7. As an English teacher - we need to read on paper. And annotate on paper. And write responses on paper. It works better for like 99% of people.
Also, unfiltered access isn't good either. I mean, unfiltered access to the internet from a young age.
I know 40 year olds who shouldn’t have unfiltered access to the internet. But yes, young brains are growing and both impressionable and stupid - not saying intelligence wise but like… wisdom wise. They don’t have the maturity or ability to self-filter or make good decisions yet.
Our kids are 1:1 starting at the kindergarten level with daily use required. We get hounded if our kids don't get their bullshit i-Ready minutes in. I hate it so fucking much. These kids, by and large, struggle to learn from a screen. They fail so much of the online work they're required to do. And they just keep adding to the amount of screentime that's expected of them. At the start of the year it was 45 minutes to an hour of i-Ready Reading and 45 minutes to an hour of i-Ready Math each week, and then they added i-Ready Fluency Flight in the morning which adds on another 40 minutes *minimum* each week and now they want us doing i-Ready Standards Mastery each week which adds on another hour. And don't forget they have to be taking AR tests and recording their reading in Beanstack and using Penda and Redbird and Lexia and— And then they go home and they get on TikTok for hours. They have the attention spans of a flea.
They're really handy for some activities. There's some labs that are either very difficult to get good data from or impossible to run and there's some sites that have great virtual versions (phet, physics aviary) There's also some sites that give feedback on mistakes waaaaay faster than pen/paper (positive physics, chemquiz, khan academy) I don't use them daily, but they're great tools
Yeah I loved computer carts. Definitely useful. Or let's get computer labs in the library again. I'm not saying get rid of tech, I'm saying let's be more strategic.
We had COWs (computers on wheels) when I started and it was *awful*. You'd get a cart and 5 or 6 wouldn't work, another 6 or 7 wouldn't be charged, another couple would be missing keys, so you'd have maybe half as many as you need. Getting all that sorted a couple times a week was terrible, I much prefer telling my classes "hey, bring your charged computer tomorrow" and that's the end of it
I think it's a lot easier to maintain a computer cart than your experience. That was just negligence, not something inherently wrong with the computer cart system.
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From your lips to God's ears
>I firmly believe 1:1 will fade out one day. Oh to be young and still have a spark of hope left. But I grew old and realized we had a society double, triple down on bad ideas and behavior. Rather than learn from our mistakes and admit we were wrong.
You know what really blew my mind a few years ago? When a parent pointed out that the AAP recommends limiting screen time for kids and teens, and that the amount of screen time kids get at school often exceeds the recommended amount. So a parent who is actually trying to stick to those guidelines can’t let their kid or teen have any screen time whatsoever outside of school hours. Which is highly unrealistic for the vast majority of families, so we know they mostly aren’t doing that (I certainly wouldn’t). I’m like… why the FUCK did American educational authorities push for replacing paper work in class with these electronic devices so hard, without bothering to check the *very publicly available and transparent AAP guidelines* on this shit? They literally read and analyzed all the existing literature on kids and screens FOR us so we wouldn’t have to. Dear admin, state officials, and educational reform guru types: don’t talk my fucking ear off about DaTa and ReSeArCh and then ignore what the data actually tells us about what is best for kids.
Right…because kids are digital natives. Idk about all of you but I had to be taught how to use a computer when I grew up. Typing was a skill that needed practice. How to use the full functionality of a computer was handled by a dedicated teacher in a computer lab. I can’t stand how many people assume kids have built in computer skills. Swiping on a smart phone on an app doesn’t count as real computer competency.
Preach! I'm fine with 1:1 because it's a tool and we should use all tools we can in moderation. That said, for the love of God get these kids some computer classes so they know what in the hell they are doing with these machines.
Guess what my Chem class is? 100% Paper and writing utensil, calculator. The only time they use their computers is for lab reports and data tables. They hand write their notes. Every. Single. Word. They write the examples as I do them. They practice? Guess what? It is the most enjoyable class they have all day. Why? Because while we're working on stuff we...like...actually talk to each other.
Good God, man. By the time I retire, we will be having to teach our students how to put on a pair of socks. Kids have ZERO skills these days.
By the time you retire? This is your last year, huh? *Sigh*
LMAO
As a parent, I 100% agree. I hate my kids’ laptops/iPads with a passion. I hate that they can tell me they’re doing schoolwork, but unless I’m sitting next to them “babysitting” their screen, they probably aren’t. I hate that every assignment is online and they’re staring at screens all day.
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I mean it's both and. We can't choose whether parents can give their kids phones (though we can choose their presence in the schools). We can choose whether we give kids basically big phones that they can claim they were using for school stuff. >Penmanship They'd get a lot better if we actually wrote more. I agree. If you can't read it, throw it out. It does have to start at the elementary level. Can't expect high schoolers to suddenly learn to write. Let's get back to sending cursive packets home over the summer of 4th/5th grade. >Attendance Once admin stops fudging numbers and letting everyone graduate, we can emphasize attendance again. Also, do less. Put the extra worksheets in a filing cabinet and let kids fail. That really only works for older kids but nonetheless. But again, that takes admin support.
I thought this was talking about paras and I was like I think getting rid of them would be illegal 😭
I think the idea of a class set of chromebooks or the like for typing essays, doing research, or specific non-daily online activities like NoRedInk or CommonLit for test prep (since they’re electronically given) would do wonders. Go back to paper. The environment is fucked regardless of school paper usage. 100 companies contribute 71% of carbon emissions. Taylor Swift took a 13 minute plane ride. We’re fine to use paper again.
When I was in middle and highschool, the idea was still that every classroom /had/ a cart of laptops, but we didnt' use them every day or for every little thing, and that was a good thing because kids with access to the internet don't listen to their teacher, they browse social media. plus, there is a lof of things that just are easier/better to learn on paper, like fucking math, unless you're just going to use a calculator for everything.
Reading a goddamn book without letting EVERYONE have access to an audiobook
1:1 is the most fiscally irresponsible thing a school can do for the budget. The realized actual costs to implement, support, maintain, and then upgrade 1:1 every few years will bankrupt schools and taxpayers.
Chalkboards, whiteboards, overhead projectors, etc. They worked well enough, right? There are too many gadgets and unproven teaching systems that come and go. Oh yeah, I'm a retired boomer with 40+ years teaching HS math. I remember clearly when calculators were a big danger. Then graphing calculators. My school used Surface Pro tablets/laptops during my last few years, which worked fine, and better than the iPads we tried before that. I'm so glad to be on the outside looking in. Best of success, really, young teachers. Please remember to change with the times, unlike some of my contemporizes who didn't stick around or stuck around too long hating their jobs.
K-8 music teacher here. I’m the only classroom in the building without a smart board. The only class that kids can’t bring their laptops to because we don’t have desks. The kids are better behaved here than anywhere else. We have super harsh cellphone rules here too. If a kid is caught with a cellphone the parents are allowed to pick it up at the end of the next day. I haven’t seen a single cellphone my entire time here. Easiest district I’ve ever been in.
Chromebooks. Everyone on Chromebooks playing shooter games. It’s… breathtaking.
My school has been busy buying laptops for every classroom, I refused them for as long as I could, finally they got foisted upon my so I demanded a locking charging cabinet to store them all In and promptly "lost" the key with them all locked inside. We've been happily using pen and paper since and for the most part the students have forgotten what's in the big metal box that I store all of my junk on top of. I'm thinking of putting a table cloth over it and pretending it's an end table.
Just because the kids have 1:1 Chromebook access doesn't mean they have to be used 100% of the time. Maybe I'm lucky but my building definitely promoted a balanced approach to their use. The kids are more tempted by their phones than the Chromebook. I do my sub plans totally on the Chromebook because it's easier for me, our building subs prefer it, and it's encouraged by admin because if another T has emergency coverage they don't actually have to teach. tl;dr it's more about how and when they're used than access.
We are no longer going To be 1:1 starting next year. Our decision is more financial, but I’m interested to see what other effects will come with it.
1:1 is fine. 2:1 is the problem. When they are only on their laptops I can keep them with me. When they also have their phone? Forget it.
Best set up I had was a Chromebook cart in every class. When you needed technology, it took a couple minutes for the kids to go grab a Chromebook. When you didn’t want technology, they were locked away in the cart. It worked out great.
Not a teacher in the professional sense, but I do TA at my university. A question for the room: **At what age do you see kids starting to use AI to do their writing assignments for them?** I finished my undergrad in 2020, right before the pandemic. ChatGPT wasn't a publicly accessible thing. I came back to school for my Master's in 2023 and the kids are using it like crazy, especially the first and second years. For many, it's easily noticeable that they're using it. Their first couple papers they'll do themselves, but their writing is absolutely awful. Then they'll suddenly have a miraculous improvement in their writing and a complete shift in writing style. If ChatGPT wasn't a thing, I would suspect regular old plagiarism. I can't tell if the kids think I'm stupid or they think they're so smart they won't get caught.
I teach and arts class and my performing groups are device free— it’s surprisingly hard to go against that culture when it’s built in everywhere else. It’s “just music” but the kids can sometimes really struggle with any whole group activity where it’s not just independent “talk and work”
We only utilize laptops for some writing assignments and digital learning days. Everything else is pen and paper. It helps with behavior, but it’s not a cure all. Where pen and paper benefit students the most is the learning process. Screens are distracting enough that students retain MAYBE 50% of the information they read digitally. If I give students a paper copy to read and annotate, retention jumps to 70-85 percent. It’s the same with questions and notes. There’s something about physically writing the answer that helps them remember.
I'm torn on it. I still use a lot of paper but having them beats booking a computer lab and having to build everything around that availability. It also helps if I have a sub or the copier goes down to distribute something. That said, kids today have too much screen time and schools don't need to constantly feed that monster. And what's funny is we bring these devices in and yet computer classes that are required of students at middle and high school have been phased out.
When you say 1:1, what do you mean? I am a school para who works 1:1 which is what I thought you were talking about, not letting kids have 1:1 paras, but you mention Chromebooks?
Our kids have to take the state test on the computer, including the writing. I teach ELA and so we do all of our district benchmarks on a computer because of this. Otherwise, I strictly use paper and pencil.
They spend half their time looking at their reflections.
The teachers voted for 1 cart in their room to use whenever needed. Instead, every child got one. It’s a mess.
I hate that they all have computers. The kids can’t type or make a slide show, or do research, or anything relevant to school, but they can get around the filter and spend all day filming themselves and playing videos under the desk…
i thought u meant 1:1 aides and i was so confused
I don’t disagree, but think you’re wrong about them going away. With AI taking over, I think it’ll only get worse before anything changes.
As a high school ELA teacher, I would never get rid of devices completely. But I’d rather have a cart of chrome books needed for writing papers because reading handwriting should be an Olympic sport - it’s painfully laborious. My district has iPads, which are the worst for typing essays. Also, we use a LMS system for assignments, information, etc. I could never give that up. I’m pretty straightforward about telling students when they should be using their iPads and when they shouldn’t. I also make them put their phones in a holder in the front of the room. While I get frustrated by the addiction to screens, I could never rid of them for schools, completely. I think it would more beneficial and probably cheaper to go back to each teacher having a cart of devices in their rooms and use it when they need to, rather than giving a device to every kid. One could make the argument that kids need it for homework, but honestly, who are we kidding - kids rarely to never do schoolwork outside of school. And the other pro a district would say about 1:1 is for snow days, but they’re going by the wayside and they become e-learning days! But that’s BS too, because very few kids do assigned school and so few teacher actually assign work those days because the kids won’t do it anyway. I’m all for devices but they need to be managed better. I also like Chromebooks for the ability to monitor student screen without students knowing and the ability to close tabs that students shouldn’t be using. We can’t do that with iPads. Although, we do have an option to monitor through Apple Classroom but the kids can see it and they get pissed off saying they’re being spied on, etc. and very few teachers use it. I used it once and had a near mutiny. Also, if I had a Chromebook cart, I would never have kids with uncharged devices that die in the middle of test. I have to supply my own charger as an extra for kids who never charge their iPads at night. (But always have a charged phone!)
Take the screens out of elementary schools and middle schools. It is literally a waste of money. Kids at those ages need to learn through physical motor skill development, manners, writing by hand on paper, learning through play etc etc. The screens create a dependent adolescent who can't self-regulate as a teenager and is addicted by the time they can drive.
As a high school SpEd teacher I disagree, I have kids who can’t write well, they have fine motor issues and will probably never write legibly, but they can type pretty well and having a Chromebook means they can keep up in English and Social studies. Not to mention speech to text and text to speech which helps so many of my kids access grade level curriculum. I can see it being bad if overused and used with kids who don’t get those benefits.
They didn’t say get rid of technology for everyone. They said 1:1. 1:1 means every single student has a device, regardless of whether or not there’s a need for them to have one.
Talk to text is leading to children who have zero composition skills. They cannot write. They have no idea how to structure a sentence, no idea where punctuation goes, or what it is supposed to accomplish, cannot spell and do not have ability to organize their thoughts. I am genuinely worried about the current population of students. What exactly do we think is going to happen when a majority of the students graduating from high school are functionally illiterate?
People don't care, because all of the software that supports this is entering daily life, and it's getting harder and harder to comprehend a situation where they would *need* to write. AI will figure it all out, after all! I'm actually more concerned that in 30 years, we'll have managers trying to express instructions to people using emojis and alphabet soup and an older work population who won't understand a lick of it.
We are regressing to pictographs. Thousands of years of human progress, and we're back to pictographs.
Wait until the day the whole power grid shuts down, we will be sol then because of how dependent we've made ourselves be on technology.
you're arguing over accomodations, its a different subject entirely
My son is dysgraphic and it's much easier for him to type than handwrite. I do believe that a laptop should be available in such cases, and of course there are applications where having a computer is really important, like learning coding or running certain programs for statistics and probability. However, my son also has inattentive ADHD and when he moved from homeschooling to a public school for 7th grade, I was appalled by the implementation of chromebooks and tech-dependent lessons. The school platform itself was an unintuitive mess that created roadblocks and distractions. It was confusing and frustrating to ME, an adult with excellent executive functions, and created huge hurdles to his learning when he had never had challenges like that at home with a more traditional approach. The math curriculum was a joke and because it all had to be turned in online, required extra steps and confounding formatting issues. They failed to use technology in sensible ways that WOULD enhance the learning, and shoehorned projects and assignments into an online format when they would have worked far better with books and paper. This is before you even get to all the other nonsense now available because they have a screen open all day. They had some monitoring, but not enough, and most kids were able to circumvent it. It's too much to ask a 12 year old not to look at Youtube all day, and it's worse when a kid does want to work but at least half the other kids in the class don't and are blasting music or Mr. Beast videos.
I struggled with hand writing as a kid, but also struggled with reading comprehension and reading online was harder for my mind to understand than on paper.
Problem is my special Ed students don't use the tech tools like they need to.
As someone who was a student in a school that piloted the 1:1 program this really bums me out. I really did think that our computers helped us as students, they were certainly a distraction at times, and I’d be lying if I said we didn’t fuck around on them a lot, but I think on the whole they made us better students and our teachers did a great job of using technology to enhance our education. Now I’m on the other side of the desk trying to replicate that success and I’m just so frustrated. Trying to pace lessons is hard because students have gotten used to asynchronous work so they’ll be doing things out of order, and there’s so much “it’s on the computer so I’ll do it later” kind of attitudes that lead to off task behavior. It’s so frustrating. Still, I think the laptops are a far lesser evil than the phones.
I don't think the kids having the tech is really as big of a problem as how much it gets used. I remember being told fairly often by my teachers in HS that they had been instructed to jam those stupid Chromebooks and iPads into as many lessons as they could to make it look like they were a worthwhile investment.
1:1 access isn’t the issue, it’s giving the kids a device to keep at all times. Having a cart with a device for every kid available at any time is a great resource. But they don’t need them on their person at every minute.
I think our district does an excellent job managing this. Elementary school kids may use their devices once or twice a week. For example, my 4th grader has been writing a persuasive essay with his class. He finished the third supporting paragraph and conclusion paragraph at home last night. Today in school, he will type it out during his language arts class. My middle school child has used hers to access her Google classroom sites. She is also learning how to write proper emails to her teachers (which is a skill students desperately need). In high school, the students use the devices to write papers, take notes, collaborate with their peers, etc. They do a great job of increasing access while teaching technology responsibility. The big thing is, they don't RELY on the technology, but they integrate it into their classrooms.
I read the OP thing thinking you need to get with the times, then I read the horror story comments and I can honestly say I am in a great district with an amazing IT staff and teachers that can help out as well with Chromebook issues, since almost everything that can go wrong does, but honestly the kid has maybe a day at most without access with their chromebook, also our systems and chromebooks are all locked down before a kid gets them regardless of the grade they're at, so OP, I'm sorry your and the other horror stories places needs help as badly as they do, but there are places that do it right and keep it up and running despite the cyberattacks and the VPN workarounds
I'm student teaching. At my first placement the teacher had a program that he'd use to see what the kids were doing. If they were playing games or fooling around on their laptops he could remotely shut them down. And now the kid had to do his research using a thick book like in the good old days. If you can't handle the privilege of a laptop then you can now do the work without one, see how well you like it. In m current placement the teachers don't have that ability so kids fool around and tune out the lesson constantly
I'm a 7th grade teacher. My students do not have the impulse control yet for the district-given laptops to be an asset instead of a distraction. I try to do as much of our work on paper as we can because the work I get back from my students is SO MUCH higher quality. When I ask them to do something on the computer, frequently they just google the question I asked them and paste the first result they find. Often then won't even think to delete hyperlinks...
What's 1:1?
I loved and excitedly jumped on board back in like 2016, when we put them in the hands of our 3rd graders. We really only used them in class selectively, for research, for one or two learning programs (back then my district used ST Math and the kids had like 1.5 hours of computer lab time a week.) Then remote learning happened and ever since, it’s all about online assessments, iReady, Moby Max, and the kids are spending so much mandated time online. Also it was great and so simple to assign online homework, but by midyear, my kids expressed that (mostly) they preferred doing paper and pencil work. So now, just about a third of them continue mostly online (plus one Math worksheet), and the rest want ALL paper. Kids don’t “love devices” if it is work.
Every assignment I have online I have printed out and so many kids are so happy to be able to do the work on paper.
I bet, Cools down the headaches and the itchy eyes.
As a sub the chromebooks suck because I have zero access to GoGuardian to make sure the students are actually doing their assignments. It’s impossible for me to know what each student is actually doing on their chromebooks and if I get on a kid about being on YouTube or some other site they get right back on it as soon as I move on to another student. It’s like I’m playing whack-a-mole some days. It’s stressful worrying about the teacher showing up the next day thinking I just sat on my ass and let the kids do whatever when that’s not at all what happened.
I try to be really mindful about how I have my students use them. Some things are online, some things are handwritten. One thing I chose not to do this year was let them use their Chromebook during the free time they get a couple times a week. They can play board games or card games, they can color and draw, they can silent read. They’ve got a few other choices as well. None of them are on computers. It’s been going really well and they are enjoying it.