Reader Eric Brandon posted a comment about the Zuckerbergs’ funding of online education. As I have noted in many posts recently, the U.S. Department of Education and many vendors are promoting online education, online testing, and other ways to increase technology in the classroom. He writes that reading on paper is better than reading online. This has been my own personal experience. I have long been an avid consumer of NAEP reports, for example. I used to study each page with care. Now that the NAEP reports are available only online, not on paper, I find it difficult to find information unless I know exactly what to ask for. I have also had trouble reading on e-machines. I sometimes flip 40-50 pages by mistake and have trouble returning to the page I wanted. But more important, there is something about the online experience of print that is not as satisfying as reading on paper. Maybe ten or twenty years from now, no one will read anything on paper and comments like mine will be lost and forgotten.
Brandon writes:
There is….strong evidence that reading on paper is better for students (and their eyes) than reading on screens. I find that I get a bit lost when reading a book on an e-reader when compared to a paper book. I can’t remember what I read and where to find it as well.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
And a very exclusive Silicon Valley school does not allow computers in the classroom.
Machine learning and robot teachers for the masses; paper books and human teachers for the wealthy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I want paper. I have been trying to navigate the new national standards in the arts in order to analyse these. I have a map-size version with ugly and confusing folds and I have the internet site with no general search function. I have no way to get a coherent print version, one suitable for my own key word searches.
More generally, there is a difference between the seeing text and images under reflected light (as in print on paper) and seeing text on a screen via tranmitted light.
I think the case for “no more paper” has not been made, least of all for testing.
My middle school students prefer paper books because if they read on their phones, they are interrupted too often.
I agree that using a paper version of a test is more user friendly. In reading comprehension good readers go back and reread in order to clarify, sequence discover relationships in text. Computers do not lend themselves to this type of use. Even in math using scratch paper helps learners solve problems. Technology is less personal than paper and pencil. Not only is it less reliable due to outages and lack of availability, it discriminates against poor students that lack computer resources at home. Students without keyboarding and scrolling skills are at a distinct disadvantage. The only reason to use computers for testing is to ease the acquisition of data for the testing companies; students do not benefit at all. If the goal is to evaluate students, and not appease testing companies, the students should be given the best opportunity to submit their best effort via pencil and paper.
Tom Vanderark, the guy behind the robotisation of learning, thinks DreamBox (for math) is wonderful. I don’t ! Here is a sample:
https://howardat58.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/dreambox-example-online-ed.png”
there are at least two fundamental errors, and also, after two tries it says “I must help you now” and does the problem for you. If kids are goin to be subjected to this sort of garbage they will get really bored, learn nothing, and end up trashing the computer.
I did look at a lot of the sample programs.
I have observed my students take tests both ways, and paper/pencil is so much better. They guess on online testing, and they do much less figuring. It is so sad that they take these online guessing tests right to 50 percent of our evaluation. Future teachers, Run as fast as you can in the other direction. Our new, young teachers are horrified and are already thinking of retraining. This toxic, battered profession deserves no one.
And how overwhelmingly sad to watch as wealthier, tech-savvy students zip ahead with the technology put in front of them, while so many less-tech-savvy, low-income students struggle to understand their role in this computer testing game.
Sad Teacher: actually the children of the heavyweight rheephormsters don’t have to give up anything, physical or digital. They get to have it all.
Check out the upper school library at the school Bill Gates, and now his children, go to:
Link: https://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=122223
Also worth looking at the middle school library too.
Not to mention all the arts “stuff” and athletics “stuff” too. *Physical, not digital!*
Thank you for your comments.
And remember that there’s one thing all the billions and billions and billions that Gates and the Kochs and Broad and the rest have can’t buy them even a smidgeon of what you have—
To be able to honestly look in your bathroom mirror and know that the person staring back at you is trying, under difficult circumstances, to do the right thing.
Keep on keepin’ on.
😎
KrazyTA, Thank you so much for your kind comments. They mean so much to me. I retire next year, and I am so blessed. I was in the best years of education, and now as I retire next year, I am in the worst years of education.
I worry about the young teachers. They are horrified, and I just don’t think they will stick it out like we did in our last years. I hope they don’t. I hope they retrain and find a career which will make them happy. The abuse of education, as it is now, is just not worth it. I told my husband that every bit of stress that I have right now leads back to my job, where they have created impossible circumstances to work with our students. Teachers have to absorb all of the testing results, and the paperwork of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System is designed to burn you out and take you away from what is important in your classroom: your students and their instruction. It is just not worth it anymore.
Thanks again for your kind comments. My husband said that my kindness, my love of children, and my expertise in my subject matter will never be replaced. It is just sad that none of this is appreciated anymore.
This doesn’t make any sense to me – but somehow, the fact that kids do worse on the PARCC on the computer is a justification to continue roll-out of a 1:1 initiative in Baltimore County so that everyone can take the PARCC on the computer. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/02/03/parcc-scores-lower-on-computer.html
Like!
It’s not just that paper is better in general, it’s that the test designers go out of their way to develop an interface that is about as completely unusable as it’s possible to get. Reading passages that scroll in weird ways and only a fraction of a selection is shown at a time, having to flip back and forth between the reading selection and the questions in awkward ways, having boxes the size of a postage stamp in which to write an essay, etc. No business would ever tolerate such a ridiculous program for their workers – it would slow down productivity too much. I can only assume that the test interface is intentional – it’s not like we haven’t had 30+ years of developing computer application interfaces and we just don’t know what is or isn’t user friendly or how to design a user friendly system.
Agree. Cheap design in the service of data gathering, not optimal design for students.
I recently previewed Amplify’s online ELA curriculum for middle school. Has some fancy tricks, but overall it’s nothing compared to a charismatic and knowledgeable teacher. And, like the textbooks it replaces, it suffers from having to conform to the myriad checklists the state issues to a publisher (those based on the Common Core standards being the most ridiculous and deforming). One of the huge advantages of a human teacher is that he can subvert the checklists. A digital curriculum is literally a slave to the checklists. A human has some freedom. Education technology is far from supplanting a good human teacher.
Disruptive innovation for the masses, artisanal non-innovation for the elites:
http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2013/06/if-disruptive-innovation-is-so-great.html?m=1
Personally I find I do much more reading online than I ever did on paper– at least when it comes to blogs like this one, and news. I find today’s textbooks (talking for-Lang texts like “Allez,, Viens” & “Ven Conmigo” horrendously difficult to follow with all the sidebars & interrupting pop-up blurbs– give me a sober ’60’s primer or grammar any day, or my staid for-lang bedside novel. Online reading allows me to X out distracting ads & adjust font-size to my eyesight.
However I’m onboard with limiting screen time for emerging readers, & am aghast that the ed mainstream pushes tech in classroom without the least hint that tubeview could be harming eyesight & growing neural connections. Happy to say I teach for a chain PreK that downplays & discourages all learning via computer or DVD!
“horrendously difficult to follow with all the sidebars & interrupting pop-up blurbs– give me a sober ’60’s primer or grammar any day,”
I ended up putting together a custom text for our 11th grade, with just the literature we usually teach plus a few other pieces I hope people might find time for. No pop-ups, charts, highlights. Just the lit, ma’am.
We already have bots colonizing classrooms: it’s called TFA.
I took a proofreading course in NYC from a graduate student at Columbia University. She told us to always print out materials to be proofed. Voila! Errors were found on the printed page much easier than on the screen. It is much easier on the eyes.