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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 a

by 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.

by mlyle 2y ago

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.