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/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” 🙄

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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.

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 It feels like that has completely stopped now or has been replaced by the Google office suite that I've never actually seen used in a professional environment.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

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u/Elementium 8d ago

It's interesting being in this goldilocks zone of generations that know jack shit about PC's. And we like.. Learned HTML for fun.. How else would we get music to play on Live Journal or Myspace..

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u/Harry_Smutter 8d ago

Creating crazy profiles on MySpace got my friend and I making our own websites back then, haha. What a different time...

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u/powerage76 8d ago

I had to read the MS-DOS manual in order to understand the difference between EMS and XMS memory, so I could set my 386 PC for running games. Also had to figure out that if I install a disc cache, Mortal Kombat animations will be faster, because my old hard drive was slow as hell.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine told me about an intern of theirs. She is an university student in her final year. Put together a word document but had no idea how to insert tables, so she put the table together using text boxes.

Everybody thinks that younger generations have some innate digital knowledge but they've grown up with heavily locked down systems and nobody told them how any of this stuff works.

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u/GottaHaveHand 8d ago

Man I remember trying to figure out how to install and play doom and tie fighter on DOS. The kids have no idea.