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There's been a big backlash against screens in my high privilege/high achieving community. My dyslexic/ADHD daughter did a trial day at a private school with a
by mrkurt 7y ago
There's been a big backlash against screens in my high privilege/high achieving community.
My dyslexic/ADHD daughter did a trial day at a private school with a "no screens in classrooms" policy. It was awful for her, because she's grown comfortable using text to speech, dictation, and other tools to do cope with the friction in her brain. My other kids benefit in different ways, they've all learned to do independent research way earlier than I ever did and know how to find answers to pretty much anything they think about.
None of our kids have access to Candy Crush or other gamble-games, though, so they tend to have healthier screen habits than their friends. All the quotes from parents in the article make it sound like they're helpless. I think that's an indication of just how bad tooling and education for _parents_ is.
- faizshah 7y agoI agree that there's many beneficial things technology can bring to the classroom in moderation. But even when we didn't have chromebooks in every class, everybody in my grade used to go to great lengths to figure out how to play flash games, runescape, minecraft etc. on the school computers. I'm sure current students are even more sophisticated in distracting themselves now that chromebooks are assigned to each student.
- mrkurt 7y agoI consider "getting around technical restrictions" to be a big part of learning about technology! Fortunately I'm better at restricting than my younger kids are at finding workarounds. My oldest got pretty good, though, but she's has to learn to learn to manage her own distractions anyway.
- jseliger 7y agoAlmost all of these policies have exceptions for disabilities. Most technology seems to be used to detract from learning: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... rather than enhancing it. Obviously there are exceptions, like spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes. But focus and concentration seem to be in short supply, relative to technology.
- mrkurt 7y agoI don't think it does my daughter any favors if she's the only one using an iPad in a classroom, it just makes her obviously different in a way that'll create resentment. She also benefited long before she was diagnosed, I think a lot more kids _can_ make use of screens than are diagnosed with a disability. My general belief is that gadgets are great for kids with the right boundaries, and what we're lacking is (a) parent / teacher experience managing those boundaries and (b) tooling.