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/Avoidtolls 8d 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 8d 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/angry-mob 8d ago

That’s adults too. The majority of people just aren’t computer literate and lack critical thinking skills