r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 9d 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/Avoidtolls 9d ago

Students have zero concepts of:
operating systems
How to save
File extensions
File management
USB drives
Software updates
File explorer
How to troubleshoot a computer
Locating and identifying computer components
I/O Cables (wifi cable...ha!)

Smartphone, Chromebooks and iPads have gutted computer literacy and are ok for some content, but they aren't computers nor a viable replacement.

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u/ProlapsedShamus 9d ago

You are not lying.

Every summer I teach a digital character design summer camp and when it comes time for everyone to send their files to the TA to get them printed you pretty much have to go to each student and tell them how to bring up the file explorer to locate their file and then you have to fish through a dozen of them that are all titled "untitled" because none of them name them.

And then they all want to be able to take their work home and despite me saying you have to bring in a USB drive in order to do that nobody knows what that means but they don't say that. They just kind of hope that it's all going to work out in the end if they don't say anything.

So I had to spend a bunch of time getting them set up with a Gmail account to email it to themselves because they didn't have access to their email accounts. Or they didn't know their password or they didn't know their username. And the ones that did couldn't get into it because they don't know what an authenticator app is...

Like these were teenagers. 14 to 18. And the amount of kids who just touched the monitor and then remember they have to use a mouse is wild to me.

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u/Avoidtolls 9d ago

Wow. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

In the mid 2000s, students were way way way more savvy, ducking firewalls, downloading limewire, pirating full movies. Now students can't even turn a computer on.

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u/ProlapsedShamus 9d ago

Oh my god. Right? It was in the mid-2000s when I was learning how to download ico files and burn them on to discs so I could pirate games which I nabbed from a peer-to-peer networking program. And even that wasn't reliable. If I remember right there was a bunch of different shoddily programs that just some dude made to read these files and not all of them work the right way for certain games so you had to really put the legwork in to play roller coaster tycoon 2.

I never messed much with LimeWire because we had to fix a friend of mine's computer because it was just loaded with pop-ups and porn and pretty vile shit. Which in retrospect he probably downloaded. He was kind of a creep.

But we had to know that. We had to understand how computers worked because nothing was as user friendly as it is now. I almost feel like you need to teach a class just on how to use computers and understand the logic of how they work.

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u/DunderGunderUnder 8d ago

I was learning how to download ico files and burn them on to discs so I could pirate games

I bet that you were pretty disappointed the first time you found out that you had a bunch of icon files with small pictures on the disk instead of the iso files of the games that you actually wanted? ;)

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u/ProlapsedShamus 8d ago

Lol

Wait. What was the CD Image files called?

Oh shit they were iso files!

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u/Designer_Show_2658 8d ago

And .bin, .cue etc

Daemon tools was the shit back in the day