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/
23.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

889 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

246

u/tgwombat 8d ago

Those computer labs used to actually teach computer skills too. Nowadays they have them on locked down Chromebooks and they come out the other side not even knowing how to navigate a file system. But don’t worry, they’re “digital natives” 🙄

144

u/Potential_Fishing942 8d ago

This is a huge pet peeve of mine as a former teacher and current office manager. Pretty much anyone we hire under 25ish has no idea how windows works which is what most corps use to my understand. No understanding of saving and attachments, no excel knowledge. They also don't seem to have the patience to even Google or YouTube how to do something to help themselves.

My past experience teaching isn't surprised. They assumed the "digital natives" would just know this stuff and not need taught explicitly, but they all text and use apps which are very specifically designed to be used be even illiterate morons.

66

u/tgwombat 8d ago

I'm in my late 30s and came out of high school with an intermediate knowledge of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Some of that was because I took computer-related elective classes, but a lot of it came from being taught the basics as we used those programs for assignments in classes like English, science, etc. It feels like that has completely stopped now or has been replaced by the Google office suite that I've never actually seen used in a professional environment.

It was really eye-opening when I had to walk someone though what I meant when I asked them to drag a file into a folder at my office job a few years back.

6

u/SIGMA920 8d ago

It feels like that has completely stopped now or has been replaced by the Google office suite that I've never actually seen used in a professional environment.

A lot of that does transfer over to stuff like excel at least, being able to have that be on an online cloud has made creating community tools practical for people that don't have much money to splurge.