Debbie Truong writes in the Washington Post about parents who object to teachers’ reliance on iPads in the classroom. Twenty years ago, the burgeoning industry asserted that Ed tech would motivate students and lead to higher test scores, but that promise was never filled.
Meaghan Edwards had just finished reading children’s books to her son’s third-grade class when the teacher announced that students could have free time before lunch. Instead of playing cards, talking with friends or reading more, the students pulled out their iPads.
“They were zoned out like little zombies,” recalled Edwards, whose children attended school in the Eanes Independent School District in Austin.
The school system is one of many coast to coast that have spent millions of dollars on initiatives aimed at putting computers or tablets in the hands of every student, sometimes as early as kindergarten.
Do kids learn more when they trade in composition books for iPads?
The largest school district in Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools, announced last year plans to provide Dell laptops to students starting in third grade. Less wealthy school systems have issued bonds to purchase devices, borrowing millions of dollars for laptops, iPads and Chromebooks.
But some parents in parts of the country where the programs are in place want to scale back, saying the devices are harming the way young children learn.
From Northern Virginia to Shawnee, Kan., to Norman, Okla., parents have demanded schools reduce or eliminate use of digital devices, provide alternative “low-screen” classwork and allow parents to say they do not want their children glued to glowing screens. Some families have even transferred their children to schools that are not so smitten with technology.
Maryland health and education officials released guidelines on using digital devices in school that include reminding students to take eye and stretch breaks and that encourage educators to offer collaborative learning assignments on and off the devices.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A great chapter from a great book, “The Juggler’s Brain,” from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2011) is an excellent examination on why (over)reliance on tech, especially when said usage has been shoved down everyone’s throat by reformers, is such a misinformed policy and practice.
SETDA (Gates-funded) –
an organization of state ed department employees, from all 50 states, who promote digital learning
Their golden moment has arrived. Most schools closed. Digital learning a necessity. Many homes do not have internet connection. Some do not have computers.
Some parents have this dilemma: in the gig economy, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid.
If a parent stays home because the child is home, how will they pay for food? Rent?
And, of course, service workers and many others don’t have any sick leave or health insurance, so they can’t take time off if they are sick, and they can’t see a doctor for a test.
so few legislators and sitting school board members grasp the fact that many citizens do NOT equally access the Internet every day
Anecdotal comment here: When I was in-between jobs several years ago, I did some subbing at a progressive independent LA high school school, where “question authority” is practically the school motto. Usually the gig did not require me to actually teach, but usually just to supervise while students worked on assignments teachers had left for them. When they finished, they were allowed to go online to “work on other homework.” I was unpleasantly surprised at how compliant the students were. As long as they could use their phones, laptops, or chromebooks, they were a substitute teacher’s dream. Or make that nightmare.
My kids had the 1:1 IPad pilot in their MS. NOT IMPRESSED! It got to the point where I refused to have it come into our home and admin was not happy about that. Yeah, our district spent a huge chunk of change for the infrastructure, but at the end of class, every teacher told the kids to submit their work and move on to their next class and there were always the spinning wheels and assignments lost in the ozone. Because the IPads had very little security features, they wouldn’t work in out “locked down” house…so submitting homework was a crap shoot. Lunch time in the cafeteria was very quiet as most kids were playing Fortnite and turning their brains into mush.
So STOOPID a policy isn’t? Anecdotally (via a hisch tutee), laptop transmittal not much better, at least an assnt/ semester gets lost in the mechanics of quirky sw, then student has to ‘prove’ they sent it “on time”– 8pm the night before due!, etc. And not OK to print out & hand in (!), cuz teachers hooked into a data-collecting program. DOH. Probably started as a way to save teacher data-entry time, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy for excess data-collection, & excess importance given to qty vs quality in grading. At least paper slowed things down to a low roar.
So frustrating having to keep track of all the assignments posted into Canvas. Whenever there was a 0 posted, I would ask to see the assignment and my kids would always show me. Then I had to send email and argue with the teacher. If my kids could show me the assignment, then it was done….why would they do it and then not turn it in?
Bethree5,
Gradescope is designed to handle handwritten assignments turned in on paper. It saves grading time by grouping things for you, saves data entry time by linking the assignment to the LMS roster and writing your scores to the LMS gradebook, saves handing work back because the graded work along with the rubric is emailed to the student. No more carrying papers around, multiple people can grade different questions on the same assignment at the same time using the same rubric if that is what is required. No carrying papers around, no passing papers between people.
Gradescope does what computers are good at, sorting and data entry, and teachers do the evaluation of the students work and determine the rubric.
Well frankly that sounds terrific, TE—I don’t get how it can deal w/handwritten pprs, but that’s just me, low-tech, & as a PreK special it’s out of my ken. But I love the feature of being able to group the questions that a lot of kids got wrong. From teacher POV that can help you zero in on an area you didn’t teach well enough, or even just a test/ hw question you didn’t frame very well. If it’s a minor issue, you can just (as you describe) transmit an explanation via computer; if it’s more substantive you can choose to devote some classtime to it.
I see this virus as a gap stretcher:
The “have” schools will be able to go with the remote learning opportunity vs under-resourced have-not schools.
The health crisis, furthering techno-instruction, will be weaponized against the quaint idea that human teachers are needed.
But here’s a way to flip the script on charter school encroachment. Deny all newly proposed charter schools space in existing germ-filled public school buildings (and also deny them free real estate elsewhere) so they can offer their students the wonderful experience of learning in isolation at home. Quarantining cuts down on costs of transportation as well.
I had the same unfortunate thought as well. What is it the opportunistic disrupters say? “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
It is unfortunate that some districts believe that they are in a tech arms race with other districts in order to keep pace with technology in surrounding districts. Technology can be useful tool in education. Turning over too much instruction to computers is reckless and irresponsible. If we look at evidence, parents have good reason to be concerned about health, well-being and privacy. It seems that too much technology leads to a diminished learning return on the time invested.
Teachers in districts should have input into what technology purchases will enhance instruction. They best understand the needs of programs and students. In many cases technology is purchased by administrators that then impose its use on teachers and students without really knowing if the product is needed or even remotely useful. We need a more reasoned approach to purchasing and using tech products in our schools.
“parents have good reason to be concerned about health, well-being and privacy…
Teachers in districts should have input into what technology purchases will enhance instruction. They best understand the needs of programs and students.”
Just the fact that these two commonsense and obvious points are ignored in so many districts should make everyone skeptical. Things that don’t make sense always suggest that one follow the $.
EdTech is all about gathering student data. Almost every decision is based on marketing. The merchants rely on the fiction that personalized learning can be accomplished by algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Selling products and, control of the population to quash uprisings- data gathering to identify who might be likely to break the law.
Yes. Data gathering is the purpose, not a side effect.
In my previous school, we had an AP who thought of herself as way ahead of the curve, and this woman was in love with any tech that came along. When I left, the plan was to go with an all-digital curriculum and all-digital homework. A nightmare. Good enough schooling for Prole children. This is just what Gates was after when he paid to create a single set of national “standards”–one bullet list to key depersonalized education software to. A decade and a half ago, I heard him give a speech in which he said that the two big costs in school were facilities and teachers and that these could be replaced and/or dramatically reduced by using computers to deliver instruction.
It’s just serendipity, of course, that he is in the computer business.
BTW, in that school, I saw the same scenario play out over and over:
New software introduced. Lots of hype about how it was going to vastly improve education.
The software is loaded up. There are some initial problems with onboarding and with the software not working with the network or with the machines. These are pretty rapidly solved.
The kids love the software for about a day.
Then, after the novelty wears off, they would rather have all the hairs of their body removed, one by one, with tweezers than fire up this software again.
No gains.
The only product I saw implemented that had any value was ZIPGrade, which enabled automatic scoring of objective-format test/quiz items.
And, this has been reflected in the lack of success of these programs, which continue to attract investors despite a long track record, now, of utter failure.
The Net is extremely useful for research and for access to obscure texts. There are some isolated programs that are useful for doing statistics problems (e.g., MatLab), and there’s Mathematica software, and there are some programs for doing labor-intensive stuff like concordances. But that’s just about the entire extent of the usefulness, in education, of software.
Bob,
Check out Gradescope: https://www.gradescope.com/ .
It is revolutionary. It allows me to grade, record, and hand back 400 pages of student work in about 2 hours. It does not do the scoring, but it can group the same answers together so the grader can score 60 or 70 answers at once, typing the explanation about what went wrong only once. It uses the students hand written name and student ID to link to the LMS roster with 95% accuracy (you do the remaining 5%, its easy), and after grading is done it writes the scores for each student to the LMS grade book and emails a student a link to their graded work as a pdf file.
Inferior grading, easily fooled and gamed by human beings. 95% accuracy is a fallacy. Believe it if you must.
Make that ‘accuracy is a fallacy’. Forget the 95%. You’re giving the students no reason to communicate expressively, and giving them inappropriate scores. The timesaver solution is lower class sizes, not artificial grading.
Thanks, TE. I will check this out.
Left Coast Teacher,
Gradescope does absolutely no grading. It groups similar answers, it allows you to group similar answers. The faculty member does the grading, the software does the data entry.
The 95% accuracy is not a fallacy. If you read carefully it is a 95% in identifying the name of the student, as I said. If the software correctly matches the handwritten name of 95 out of 100 students to the class roster, do you think it a fallacy to say that it does it 95% of the time?
Grouping students sounds like something that I personally wouldn’t do at all, let alone having a computer program do it for me, but okay, whatever works for you. In addition to trying to avoid misusing tech by giving my students’ personal information to privatize tech companies, I also try to avoid giving my educator peers unsolicited opinions when they’re not welcome. I try, anyway.
Private, not privatize, autocorrect.
Left Coast Teacher,
It is not grouping students, it is grouping answers.
For example, if I ask for students to give an example of third degree price discrimination, I might get some students who write “student discounts”, some who write “senior citizen discounts”, some who write “bulk discounts” and some who write “membership fees at Costco”. The software will read the answers and divide them up into four piles. I review the software’s categorizations to make sure they are correct and I group answers that the software can not group.
I would merge the first two piles into a group of correct answers. I mark the correct pile as correct. I mark the bulk discounts as incorrect, including an explanation about why bulk discounts are an example of second degree price discrimination. I write the explanation once, but every student who wrote bulk discounts gets the full explanation, no matter how many students put that wrong answer. I mark the membership fees at Costco as incorrect, including an explanation about why membership fees are an example of a two part tariff. Again, only typing the explanation once no matter how many students put the wrong answer.
I will grade this question for 250 or more students in about 10 minutes, and give each of them far more feedback about why their answer is incorrect than I would grading by hand. It also protects me from unconscious bias because I do not know who’s answers I am grading
Interesting. I suppose that since I am used to reading essays instead of correct/incorrect answers, I associate the students’ work with the students a great deal. After getting to know them, I can hear their voices when I read their work. Their work is a representation of themselves. If I grouped the essays, I would feel like I was grouping the students.
Let’s say I read a couple hundred essays this weekend, as I will, and find one hundred students doing the same kind of erroneous thinking, or using the same kind of writing style I think is a poor choice. I won’t write the same comment on a hundred papers (although I do have ink pad stamps for some things), instead I will teach a lesson about it, and give the hundred students a chance to revise for a higher grade.
The process takes time. I think it’s worth it. My students always know they’re writing to communicate with me and only me, the teacher to whom they are endeared and want to express themselves. And their answers are for me and only me, not for a corporation to use for data analytics.
Thank you, LCT.
If I were a student and knew my teacher was not going to read my essay, but would turn it over to a machine, I would be insulted and would not do my best. It would be like having a conversation with a computer, not a person.
LCT,
I am the first to admit that Gradescope grouping does not work as well for essay answers as for short text or mathematical questions. You don’t have to use it. Still I think you would find it easier to read the 200 essays on a screen with the rubric you wrote along with the comments you wrote on the right hand side of the screen, handy and uniform. You can also, of course, give individual statements and point adjustments to each essay.
Then the computer does what it is really good at: it adds numbers up and with the press of a button all 200 scores are entered in the grade book. Press a second button and all 200 essays, along with all your type written comments, are returned to the students.
How long would it take you to enter 200 scores? My issue was always trying to figure out if alphabetizing my 300+ finals first and then entering was faster than scrolling down the screen and finding each name and recording it in the grade book.
Dr. Ravitch,
I certainly hope that it is clear by now that the ONLY thing a student wrote that is not read by the instructor of the class is the student name and ID number. For those of us who teach large classes, this is a game changer. Students are able to give free form answers on sheets of paper using a pencil and faculty can grade and return them quickly with more feedback then before.
If I were a student and knew that you were using a computer program to grade my essay answers, I wouldn’t be motivated to write much or well.
I might even use Professor Les Perelman’s BABEL Generator, created at MIT.
Tech is not a game changer, unless losing the game is your goal. When students write on paper with pens, they write better and learn more. When they submit paper instead of clicking ‘submit’, they know I am keeping their deepest thoughts and convictions private, so they write better. When I read their work on paper, I am able to concentrate better and remember more about my students.
If I read 200 essays or research reports on a screen, I skip more, get frustrated more easily perhaps due to the screen shining in my eyes, and by the end of the day, find myself seeing blurry double, with a headache. If I read screens for hours a day, for years, I will have to retire early because I will lose my eyes. I want to mention that there is plenty of medical and educational research supporting everything I just wrote, or to include a link to maybe a documentary or an article in the New Yorker about it, but in my experience, technophiles gloss over research or claim there is research debunking the research I cite (while never providing the research).
Usually, doing things the way my teachers and professors did is better. Taking the time to do things more slowly makes us better at doing those things. Quality over quantity. Often, progress is made by returning to a more natural world.
LCT, the reason you won’t get a response from TE is that I have blocked his replies. He can’t reply without insulting me, so I delete his responses.
One more thing. You say Gradescope isn’t looking at the students’ work, but signing up for the product is free. Remember, when something is free on the Web, you’re not buying the product; you are the product.
Thank you, Diane.
Just so there is no misunderstanding, TE. You have no right to ask about my private life. If you want to know my views, read the blog and my books. Your comments on my personal life, my “lived experience,” or anything that I consider private will not be posted. Nor will your insults.
I wish you hadn’t had to endure that, Diane.
This is, as Diane says above, the tech disrupters’ Golden Moment. What a horror.
My daughter has been working with chromebooks since grade 5. They are like other tools. They cost something. They get you some things and lose others. Each advance in technology going back to the wheel has had the same effect: you lose something, you gain something. Often something you lose is vital to your world. Always something you gain crates a different world. If that world is not careful, it will lose all it values.
Roy,
I think one of the best examples of this was the invention of the printing press. By making the written word widely available, it diminished the value of memorization, something vital to the world at the time. The spoken word was also devalued relative to the written word. On net, do you think that making the written word widely available increased the state of society or decreased it?
There are still companies—funded by the Arnold, Broad, and Gates Foundations— getting my administrators to push “flipping” and “blending” my curriculum to favor tech. And there is still a vast majority of parents and students who love me for not falling for it.
The Post article mentioned the idea of getting students ready for a digital economy. First, the economy is not and never will be digital. Second and more importantly, let’s keep in mind the true purpose of k-12 education. It’s not coding; it’s civic-minded democracy. Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, Mann, Dewey… all knew it. Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos… intellectual lightweights who don’t know it.
I was in a district where there was a giant push toward technology simultaneously with the removal of school librarians. This set up a situation where students were using technology all day long, with no person on staff who was an expert in privacy issues and information literacy. The dangers of this to student privacy and both students and adults’ lack of digital literacy is staggering. The internet is not a neutral source of information and using it at school gives a false sense of security to both students and staff. Equipment rapidly breaks and gets outdated requiring new expenditures at the expense of other vital needs in schools like arts, librarians, and all support staff. What a scam!
Tech is also a double edged sword – for all the good which comes along we also have to manage the not-so-good. Teachers can use a variety of media to make their class interesting. In parallel they also have to ensure that kids explore their creativity and keep their social skills. The purpose of education is to bring out the best in our children.