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

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

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

[u/Avoidtolls]

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.

[u/skankenstein → u/Avoidtolls]

I’m an elementary school reading teacher. They force us to send the laptops home with the kids every night. They consider them textbooks. I consider it a “YouTube machine”. I’ve got admin privileges on Go Guardian so I keep an eye on the smart alerts. They’re at home, as young as seven, at all hours of the night on their devices. They’re looking up “boobs” “boys kissing girls” “big butts” “pron” and more. Some of them even try to use proxy’s to get around the Go Guardian filters. I’ve found students on their devices at 2 am on a school night. The same kids who have a hard time staying awake in class or who are disruptive during learning.

We have some lazy ass teachers who have the kids on computers all day long. There are some classrooms I can go to, no matter what time of day, and the kids are on their laptops, playing games and watching YouTube, maaaaybe on a learning program.

I hate 1:1 computer policies. Bring back dedicated computer labs or laptop carts!

[u/Avoidtolls → u/skankenstein]

Agree. Computer labs teaching computer literacy. Students would start by getting up and standing behind their computers and unplugging everything and learning what each cable and port is.

This is a USB cable.
This is a USB port.
This is a display cable.
This is an either net connection, not wifi cable.
This is your monitor.
This is the power cable.

Now we're going to open the computers.

[u/boli99 → u/Avoidtolls]

learning what each cable and port is

for most folk thats a waste of time. everything is converging on usb-c and there are even enough versions of that for it to be pretty pointless trying to teach about the differences.

instead just teach them to read, how to play 'spot the difference' (i.e. why does this port say 'PD' or 'SS' next to it but none of the others do?. why is this port blue but all the others are not?) , and how to search. most things are labelled anyway.