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I’d want to see extensive research on the benefits of Ed-Tech products before they are unleashed on classrooms full of actual students. “Making things easier f

I’d want to see extensive research on the benefits of Ed-Tech products before they are unleashed on classrooms full of actual students. “Making things easier for teachers” is often not the case and simultaneously creates costs for training and support at these institutions along with the exponential growth required to administer these new roles. And then of course are the students themselves. How do iPads compare to textbooks? Do we trust LLMs to grade essays? How effective has multiple choice testing ever been? There is surprisingly little thought put into bringing tech into the classroom. Most of the drive seems to come from a fear of being left behind, as if learning to use a consumer electronic device is somehow synonymous with learning how to maximize productivity with a computing device.

victorbjorklund 2y ago
do you also demand extensive academic research for benefits of tools for developers, business etc? Yes, there is an issue with tools and software that creates more problems that they solve (just as in business) but that doesnt mean all technology is bad.
- tdeck 2y ago
  The environment of a school is much more rigid and authoritarian than many workplaces (e.g. everyone must use this exact thing in this exact way all together right now), and students don't usually have much choice in their school. The tools are often taxpayer funded as well. Not to mention the fact that those affected by ed-tech are often minors. So I think it's reasonable for there to be some extra scrutiny surrounding a lot of ed-tech.
  - victorbjorklund 2y ago
    plenty of employees cant pick and choose their tools. Many working in service jobs etc have to use exactly what their employer tells them too.
    - tdeck 2y ago
      Very true but at least in theory those employees don't get arrested for not coming to work and can choose to work somewhere else.
mlyle 2y ago
Yah. I am a teacher and I'm deeply skeptical of ed-tech. There is no substitute for doing the work (as the teacher or as the student). I like that I have an automated gradebook and communications tool. I like that I can e-mail students and accept work done outside the room via Google Docs. And it's pretty great to be able to present slides from me or students, or occasionally look at a Desmos or Jupyter notebook. Khan is neat to get an instant read or to allow students to hear a topic explained a different way than I do. Playing a game in Gimkit is a way to break up the monotony of a class. I privately advise students they might want to consider Anki as a way to increase their long term retention of information. Even though I've named a lot of technology, these things are about 10% of what we do. Even when I'm teaching about technology, a huge portion we do is pen, paper, careful thought, and discussion. I know students aren't trying to game; I know they've produced their own work; I know they've not become over-reliant on a crutch. And beyond this, the fundamental reason why a classroom works is not some assumption of my authority or my use of grades for leverage: it works based on the social connections formed in a classroom between the teacher and students, and between students with each other. Too much time on screens interrupts this. Of course, I'd love high quality research to help guide me in making better choices in the room, but actionable educational research that has good enough methodology to be believed is rare.
- sevensor 2y ago
  I hear a lot of complaints about edtech from the teacher I’m married to, and this is a common thread in how it fails: it tries to automate away the classroom experience rather than empower the instructor. Most teachers, good ones anyway, don’t want to spend less time teaching, they want to spend less time fussing around with bullshit like marking late assignments complete in two different systems and responding to irate parent emails to reassure them that the assignment actually is marked complete where it matters, just not in the system they’re looking at. Not only do a lot of these systems try to automate the wrong thing — instruction — they totally fail where it counts by making more work for the teacher.
  - mlyle 2y ago
    Yes: I like your way of describing this. I think it's because of this: Bloom showed that students instructed 1 on 1 did about two sigma better than those learning in a classroom environment. There's a huge temptation here, to think that technology can claw some of those 2 standards back through individualization and differentiation. As a result, everyone wants to build systems that do instruction and try to directly improve outcomes. But kids won't work hard for a computer's approval.
sirspacey 2y ago
There have been many startups that have been just this. They all have died except for a very few. Most of my edtech founder friends were motivated to serve and transform education because it didn’t work for them and they realized it didn’t work for most students. Codeacademy is a good example of a successful one. Companies that succeeded, in some cases enabling inner city school children to perform on at a college level, died. CiteLighter is a good example. There have been countless ones in math. The reason the bad edtech products win is because they are built to survive the incredibly disjointed buying groups who all have, explicitly, their own agendas when it comes to anything in the classroom. If students & teachers could decide where their classroom’s tech budget went, there would be a revolution in education in half a generation. But they are dead last on the list today.
nicolas_t 2y ago
One of the schools near us gives an ipad to every children from 1st grqde. Needless to say this instantly disqualified the school in my mind. I’m not anti-screen, I think it’s good if my son uses a computer at home with things like kidpix, scratch, castle of dr brain, etc… But I think devices at school at that age are a potent distraction and I do not trust a school to be thoughtful about the usage of tech (the school I mentioned thinks it’s also a good idea to have some instant messaging app in grade 1 betweeen all the kids).
gamerDude 2y ago
I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your position, this excuse is also used for only allowing pen and paper for math in highschool by teachers. It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons: There is opposition to doing the research because teachers/parents don't want their students to be the first. It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers. It's expensive and mostly controlled by the big granters (ex. Gates Foundation). Results are often looked at via testing measures (which if you look at assessments, sometimes they were proven by having 400 white kids in an affluent school use, aka not representative). And so, we have a bit of an issue. Almost no one teaches math via a spreadsheet even though most adults do. It isn't researched on the implications. Data science as a class to qualify for credit to get into college is greatly contentious because it isn't proven. Even though it is clearly important to our current era. In addition, teachers are human and so they don't necessarily teach with the 100% best proven methodologies day in and day out. So I think it's important to realize that education is human. It's flawed and messy and isn't aligned to the best methods already. Sometimes you get lucky with a teacher that works for you and sometimes not.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  My wife is an active, publishing education researcher who is currently doing in-classroom research related to technology. It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers. IRBs won't let this happen in actual classrooms. The allowed approach is typically extracurricular summer schools where everyone is aware of the research component. But this is only for a certain kind of quantitative research. Qualitative research doesn't necessarily need nor benefit from a control group as it can be carried out in situ. Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom?
  - gopher_space 2y ago
obscurette 2y ago
> How do iPads compare to textbooks? I've worked briefly in school where kids had iPads since 1st grade and in my opinion it was a catastrophe. Most obvious problem is simple – it's very difficult to get kids concentrated on anything. Tiny working memory and control over cognitive load makes it especially hard for kids to learn and no distraction helps. And iPad with especially funny, "engaged" and other material meant to be helpful created a tons on these – "Look, how colors change in the animation!", "I wonder what I can do with fingers on screen?", "Can I scroll slower and faster?", "Copmetition! Who is the fastest scroller!", "What math?".

victorbjorklund 2y ago

do you also demand extensive academic research for benefits of tools for developers, business etc? Yes, there is an issue with tools and software that creates more problems that they solve (just as in business) but that doesnt mean all technology is bad.

tdeck 2y ago
The environment of a school is much more rigid and authoritarian than many workplaces (e.g. everyone must use this exact thing in this exact way all together right now), and students don't usually have much choice in their school. The tools are often taxpayer funded as well. Not to mention the fact that those affected by ed-tech are often minors. So I think it's reasonable for there to be some extra scrutiny surrounding a lot of ed-tech.
- victorbjorklund 2y ago
  plenty of employees cant pick and choose their tools. Many working in service jobs etc have to use exactly what their employer tells them too.
  - tdeck 2y ago
    Very true but at least in theory those employees don't get arrested for not coming to work and can choose to work somewhere else.

mlyle 2y ago

Yah. I am a teacher and I'm deeply skeptical of ed-tech. There is no substitute for doing the work (as the teacher or as the student). I like that I have an automated gradebook and communications tool. I like that I can e-mail students and accept work done outside the room via Google Docs. And it's pretty great to be able to present slides from me or students, or occasionally look at a Desmos or Jupyter notebook. Khan is neat to get an instant read or to allow students to hear a topic explained a different way than I do. Playing a game in Gimkit is a way to break up the monotony of a class. I privately advise students they might want to consider Anki as a way to increase their long term retention of information. Even though I've named a lot of technology, these things are about 10% of what we do. Even when I'm teaching about technology, a huge portion we do is pen, paper, careful thought, and discussion. I know students aren't trying to game; I know they've produced their own work; I know they've not become over-reliant on a crutch. And beyond this, the fundamental reason why a classroom works is not some assumption of my authority or my use of grades for leverage: it works based on the social connections formed in a classroom between the teacher and students, and between students with each other. Too much time on screens interrupts this. Of course, I'd love high quality research to help guide me in making better choices in the room, but actionable educational research that has good enough methodology to be believed is rare.

sevensor 2y ago
I hear a lot of complaints about edtech from the teacher I’m married to, and this is a common thread in how it fails: it tries to automate away the classroom experience rather than empower the instructor. Most teachers, good ones anyway, don’t want to spend less time teaching, they want to spend less time fussing around with bullshit like marking late assignments complete in two different systems and responding to irate parent emails to reassure them that the assignment actually is marked complete where it matters, just not in the system they’re looking at. Not only do a lot of these systems try to automate the wrong thing — instruction — they totally fail where it counts by making more work for the teacher.
- mlyle 2y ago
  Yes: I like your way of describing this. I think it's because of this: Bloom showed that students instructed 1 on 1 did about two sigma better than those learning in a classroom environment. There's a huge temptation here, to think that technology can claw some of those 2 standards back through individualization and differentiation. As a result, everyone wants to build systems that do instruction and try to directly improve outcomes. But kids won't work hard for a computer's approval.

sirspacey 2y ago

There have been many startups that have been just this. They all have died except for a very few. Most of my edtech founder friends were motivated to serve and transform education because it didn’t work for them and they realized it didn’t work for most students. Codeacademy is a good example of a successful one. Companies that succeeded, in some cases enabling inner city school children to perform on at a college level, died. CiteLighter is a good example. There have been countless ones in math. The reason the bad edtech products win is because they are built to survive the incredibly disjointed buying groups who all have, explicitly, their own agendas when it comes to anything in the classroom. If students & teachers could decide where their classroom’s tech budget went, there would be a revolution in education in half a generation. But they are dead last on the list today.

nicolas_t 2y ago

One of the schools near us gives an ipad to every children from 1st grqde. Needless to say this instantly disqualified the school in my mind. I’m not anti-screen, I think it’s good if my son uses a computer at home with things like kidpix, scratch, castle of dr brain, etc… But I think devices at school at that age are a potent distraction and I do not trust a school to be thoughtful about the usage of tech (the school I mentioned thinks it’s also a good idea to have some instant messaging app in grade 1 betweeen all the kids).

gamerDude 2y ago

I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your position, this excuse is also used for only allowing pen and paper for math in highschool by teachers. It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons: There is opposition to doing the research because teachers/parents don't want their students to be the first. It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers. It's expensive and mostly controlled by the big granters (ex. Gates Foundation). Results are often looked at via testing measures (which if you look at assessments, sometimes they were proven by having 400 white kids in an affluent school use, aka not representative). And so, we have a bit of an issue. Almost no one teaches math via a spreadsheet even though most adults do. It isn't researched on the implications. Data science as a class to qualify for credit to get into college is greatly contentious because it isn't proven. Even though it is clearly important to our current era. In addition, teachers are human and so they don't necessarily teach with the 100% best proven methodologies day in and day out. So I think it's important to realize that education is human. It's flawed and messy and isn't aligned to the best methods already. Sometimes you get lucky with a teacher that works for you and sometimes not.

williamcotton 2y ago
My wife is an active, publishing education researcher who is currently doing in-classroom research related to technology. It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers. IRBs won't let this happen in actual classrooms. The allowed approach is typically extracurricular summer schools where everyone is aware of the research component. But this is only for a certain kind of quantitative research. Qualitative research doesn't necessarily need nor benefit from a control group as it can be carried out in situ. Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom?
- gopher_space 2y ago

obscurette 2y ago

> How do iPads compare to textbooks? I've worked briefly in school where kids had iPads since 1st grade and in my opinion it was a catastrophe. Most obvious problem is simple – it's very difficult to get kids concentrated on anything. Tiny working memory and control over cognitive load makes it especially hard for kids to learn and no distraction helps. And iPad with especially funny, "engaged" and other material meant to be helpful created a tons on these – "Look, how colors change in the animation!", "I wonder what I can do with fingers on screen?", "Can I scroll slower and faster?", "Copmetition! Who is the fastest scroller!", "What math?".