Microsoft To Teachers: Using Pens and Paper Not Fair To Students

Freshly Exhumed writes: Pens and paper have no place in the modern classroom, according to Lia De Cicco Remu, director of Partners in Learning at Microsoft Canada. "When was the last time you used a piece of chalk to express yourself?" De Cicco Remu, a former teacher, asked the Georgia Straight by phone from Toronto. "Kids don't express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text." Given the Microsoft Study Finds Technology Hurting Attention Spans story posted to Slashdot in the last few days it would seem that Redmond's Marketing and R&D people are at cross-purposes.

Comments

tl; dr

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the post about the attention span study, but, you know....

chalk?

[senatorpjt]

Well, not technically, but I'm a software developer and I use a whiteboard almost every day. I suppose the real problem is that when I want a digital artifact, I use my non-Microsoft phone to take a picture of it. Maybe all they need to do is develop a set of markers whose ink is only visible to their own cameras.

Re:Stupid

[Monoman]

They are trying to sell the MS Surface Hub - https://www.microsoft.com/micr...

I'll stick to the whiteboard for now.

Microsoft study is the tip of the iceberg.

[Jaywalk]

It doesn't take long on Google to come up with a potload of studies with the same conclusion:

• Research on In-Class Use of Laptops and Other Devices: Effects on Students' Learning and Attention
• Classroom Laptop Users Distract Others As Well As Themselves
• You’ll Never Learn! Students can’t resist multitasking, and it’s impairing their memory.

My wife is a teacher and every couple of years some numbskulled administrator comes up with another brainstorm that boils down to thinking that throwing some more computers into the mix will fix everything. Of course computers are going to be part of these kids' world, so they need to learn about them, but figuring that kids learn better just because a computer is in front of them is a wrong-headed notion that's not borne out by the research.