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Teachers Union: Computers Can Negatively Impact Children's Ability To Learn
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "A teacher's union in Northern Ireland is asserting that children spending too much time on computers are impairing their ability to learn. The asserted excessive computer use is being blamed for an inability to concentrate or socialize. As one teacher puts it, '... these gadgets are really destroying their ability to learn.'" This has been a topic of debate for as long as kids have had computers.
And sitting in a boring classroom for hours on end enhances their ability to learn?
Is are kids learnding?
The summary makes it sound like computers in the classroom are the problem. That's not what the article says at all. The teachers' union is accusing out-of-school exposure to "instant gratification" digital devices and games for ruining attention-spans before kids are old enough to go to school. The article claims youngsters are aggressive and inattentive due to past conditioning by games and always-on entertainment. It doesn't even mention computers or tablets in school. Misleading title & summary.
Yeah, they're all about pimping the US Common Core standards in Northern Ireland.
Schools do not know how to use computers for primary school students. They simply don't have the curriculum and they're unwilling to take general-purpose PCs and turn them into specific-purpose PCs that don't let one get off-task. They're also addicting and kids that aren't using PCs but see PCs in front of them are jonesing for their next fix.
I grew up in the tail-end of the era of the Apple II in schools, and the beginning of the Macintoshes, before wide-spread TCP/IP networks and before Internet connectivity. The Apple II was well-suited to educational use, as the student could only run the program that they were given the disk for. They couldn't distract themselves from the educational goal. They had one program and one program only, so they could either use that program or do nothing. PCs running DOS had a similar situation, though that was usually more because of DOS being hard enough to use that if one exited the game one generally didn't know how to go about distracting one's self.
Then the Macintosh and early Windows came around. Now they could do some other things in addition to the assigned program, but admittedly there weren't a whole lot of other things to do, so it was fairly easy to keep students on-task.
Then the local area computer networks came about, and if a campus had multiple tasks on their computers, then the students could often figure out how to do those other tasks not for the curriculum for the current class, and suddenly it became that much hard to keep on-task. It became possible to share things with other kids without the teachers catching on, or possible to mess with other kids. Proto cyberbullying if you will.
Then the Internet came along with the browser and general-purpose computers with hundreds of preloaded programs and at least tens of thousands available through the Internet, and now it's almost impossible to keep kids on-task. They can do anything, and with 9,999 wrong choices but only one right choice, that one right choice simply gets drowned out.
Primary school kids need to learn how to read, write, perform basic mathematics, and to learn how to find information the old-fashioned way. They need to learn what an index is, and how information can be sorted and archived, and how to sort the information that they want to present. Learning these skills manually will teach them how these skills work when they can do them electronically or with some other form of automation. Technology as classroom aids in elementary grades needs to be limited to special-purpose machines, like things that help present curriculum, or help in classroom discussion to let the teacher or the students aid their point, or if they're used for things like testing to make grading easier, they need to be locked down so that they only do the function that they're called upon to do at that time.
Once the kids get to secondary school, then start introducing the general-purpose machine. Let them learn how to use a productivity suite, or how to do research electronically, or how to use programs to aid in science education. At least at that point it's possible for the skill to actually still apply to the person's life once they reach adulthood where it might have to be applied.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My thoughts exactly.
This sounds like round 36 of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music." Teachers indulging in future-shock is just plain trite. Boring classes have always been boring. Kids like me have always had trouble slogging through them. If the kids have trouble paying attention to something that isn't exciting, then, for the love of all that is good, be more engaging. The only way to stop boring people is to stop being boring.
If computers actually impeded the ability to learn, I'd still be coding in BASIC.
What is really important here is:
us /. nerds, being geeks who are almost always involved with computer technology of some sort, in capacities professional, hobbyist, or both, immediately become defensive and insulting toward anyone who talks about technological devices in a negative way.
Never mind the claim, immediately condescend and attack anyone suggesting that electronic devices may not be the optimal solution for every situation!
Bonus: the teacher's union angle! The few right-wing of us (which is me, actually) can immediately jump on that one too. These fucks don't care about kids! There's no way professional teachers know anything about teaching kids! Because they are a teacher's union, they must be speaking on behalf of the anti-ipad wing of the Kremlin!
There is no way that parking a kid in front of a screen for several hours a day can have any ill affects, you socialist pinko union teacher!
THL phish sticks
Bullshit.
The primary conduit for learning, especially in the younger grades, is being shown a skill, being shown the particulars of how that skill works, and then practicing that skill until it's mastered. You don't need computers to learn how to add or divide or to solve for a variable. You don't need computers to learn how to form sentences in language. You don't need computers to learn how to interact with the same people day in, day out in a fashion similar to how one will interact in the workplace once out of school. And you'll learn a lot more about the natural world by actually observing the natural world as opposed to just reading about it or conducting fake virtual experiments though a poorly written educational "simulator".
Ironically the one place that computers would be perfect is in social studies. History doesn't really change, only interpretation of it does, and computers as a conduit to access databases of historical information are perfect and would allow for one to read about differing positions on the reasions for historical events.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Fundamentally it comes down to why one uses an aid.
I went through basic math operation, single-variable algebra, and double-variable algebra with no calculators permitted. Once I had that foundation and was proven strong in my ability to do simple arithmetic I was then allowed to use the calculator to do the simple arithmetic required to do trigonometry. Once I had mastered geometry and trig I was allowed to use the calculator to do that rote math to make learning the mechanics of calculus easier. Once I learned basic calculus I was allowed to do the basic calculus on the calculator to make it easier to learn more advanced calculus.
Applying that skill to computers, I learned a lot of how computers work in my teenage years, and I've kept up, on and off, with further developments. I can apply my knowledge of how things have worked in the past to know how to ask the right questions or how to do the right research for how they will progress to work in the future, and how systems in-general work. I know how a particular task works in Linux, or how it did work in Linux in the past. Knowing what the task is I know how to figure out how it works now, or will in the future, or how it works on Cisco IOS, or how it works on BSD, or how it works in Windows. I certainly look up the answer, but I also have to know how to look up that kind of knowledge, and what questions to pose to a search engine to actually find out what I want to know. You have to know how to think before that really works effectively.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You should be able to work it out the long way, or know how to find the information necessary and then work it out the long way. But reading and writing is where there's a way that you can use computers to compel children to want to learn how to understand the written language. Otherwise it's really forcing them to learn something they don't want to learn, which starts their bias toward schooling.
"Computers are the new primary conduit of communication and learning for this generation."
As a teacher I am amazed at how inept most kids are with computers. I did a simple ctl-c and cmd-tab and ctl-v. Just a simple copy and paste. Students looked at me as if I had just done voodoo.
These are not students new to computers. They were high school seniors who have had 1-to-1 laptop program since 7th grade.
The amount these students do not know is amazing. I taught a college level class as an adjunct. The college students could not use the computer.
The best part of the computer is writing papers. I get longer and better edited papers that are word processed.
Of course the students can get on facebook, games, and other such toys. Real work not really.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Maybe the reason those kids aren't paying attention is because they are learning stuff elsewhere and feel you're just wasting their time.
Or maybe it is, as the union suggests, because they realize how lame school is by comparison.
Or maybe kids are paying better attention now then they have in the past, and the union is falling for the golden age fallacy.
From http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/10_02_05.pdf
The limited evidence available also indicates that home computer use is linked to slightly better academic performance.
I'll take that limited evidence over the "no evidence" supplied by the teachers union.
And that teacher is right, and things will be going on around them that they completely miss on, because they're just participating with a huge navel-gazing culture that doesn't do anything.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The difference between all distractions before the Internet and the Internet-connected computer is that for the first time, one has absolutely limitless possibilities for getting distracted without end. The TV show ends and the credits roll. The comic book runs out of pages. The dancer gets tired and the dance hall closes.
The limitless possibilities are addicting. It's almost impossible to stop. Hell, I'm a grown man with a good job and here I am arguing on the Internet in the middle of the night, I've got the defenses to fight this to a greater extent and I even struggle with it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
to see this, just look in any cafe. Several people around a table all checking their phones. Social interaction has definitely changed, in some ways for the worse. As for learning, other posters have mentioned engagement. The top students will not need to see "exciting" stuff to learn because they love learning and being challenged. The middle to low students will need to be entertained because that is what they are used to - TV, facebook, youtube, etc etc. Unfortunately this is the way of the new world. At the school where I work, the Phys Ed teachers tell me about children who have never climbed trees or chased/kicked a ball, and have terrible gross and fine motor skills - another symptom of technology not doing them a favour I suspect.
I don't agree.
Memorizing facts such as the times tables is a tool in its self. Facts allow us to problem solve in real time without the need to calculate all the constituent parts used in the decision making process.
Memorized facts are one tool of many that allow is to solve problems and learn new things.
Never happened. True story.
Also as an IT guy, I find his comments pretty accurate. I work somewhere that employs a lot of recent college grads, and anything that doesn't involve going to their email or into our main software package (which better look exactly the same with all the icons in the same place) might as well be ancient magic to many of them.
For example, when it involves a computer, many of them don't seem able to go through a thought process like "X isn't working. X needs to be turned on through Y, I should check Y and see if X is turned on."
Maybe you think you're some kind of genius because you learned the very obscure Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v shortcuts, but... you're obviously not.
You joke, but i've had users treat me like i'm a goddammned wizard for simple stuff like that many a time, it's actually a bit disheartening.
Computers cant impact a childs learning as much as a bad teacher, The teachers union does more to keep bad teachers employed than anything else.
I'll take the risks of my child using computers more than a completely worthless teacher that should have been fired years ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The only thing the Teacher's Unions are terrified of.. is that they're going to be replaced.
..don't panic
I'm the IT director for a school that teaches kids with dyslexia and non-verbal learning disabilities (Asperger Syndrome). Technology is a hugely beneficial tool for these types of kids.
Language based learning disabilities make it hard for kids to learn other subjects. A student that can not read at grade level is hindered in all other subjects. Text to speech and speech to text technologies can help a student complete history and science classes while they remediate their reading and writing skills in other classes.
Google Apps has a ton of educational apps that are reducing our need for textbooks. Stuff like Geogebra and Plotly are free online and have almost eliminated math textbooks for our school.
Show me a teacher that says technology is a worthless teaching tool, and I'll show you a lazy teacher.
Computers much like books alone can not teach a child. These things must be integrated into the curriculum and it is the teacher's responsibility to guide the instruction and keep kids on track.
Technology isn't the problem - lazy teachers are the problem.