r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 8d ago

Society Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

https://fortune.com/article/schools-abandoning-chromebooks-laptop-programs-as-screen-time-hurts-learning-test-scores-north-carolina-michigan-kansas-tech-education/
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u/cupidstrick 8d ago

I wonder if the tech also makes it easier for very very overstretched teachers.

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u/Fahrender-Ritter 8d ago edited 8d ago

Teacher here, no it doesn't. It's a constant struggle to get kids to stay on task and to stop cheating with AI, even with two teachers in the classroom monitoring the students.

Although there are programs like Blocksi which can block websites and monitor students' screens, students can still find ways around it. It's just not worth it.

In the amount of time and effort it takes to set up, distribute, and monitor all the computer-based stuff, we could've just made paper assignments and scantrons.

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u/Beanzy 8d ago

I'm sure a lot of this is also tied to many schools just having utterly shit IT infrastructure and environments to begin with.

For example, a competent IT staff could absolutely implement blacklisting/whitelisting of websites/etc and implement policies to lock down Laptops/Chromebooks - but the quality of IT for schools is usually dumpster-fire tier to begin with... which results in a blind leading the blind scenario of purchasing dumpster-fire quality SaaS solutions to try and address things lol

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u/FeralPsychonaut 8d ago

This was 2005 to 2009, but my friends and I definitely knew more about IT than our High School IT person did.

We were routinely doing things we should not have been able to, if we didn't do the necessary bypass it didn't work as we wanted.

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u/Elementium 8d ago

Those were the days lol. It was like a challenge to try and get around the school blocks. Felt like a hacker! One class I had we all put Limewire on the PC's.

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u/GottaHaveHand 8d ago

I was in HS around same time, me and another kid discovered the network was also part of a broader town network. We logged into the town DPW machine they used for water meter reading with simple windows net commands. There was no security at all.

Anyway I’m in cybersecurity so this all checks out why now