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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.
I've never considered the sales and marketing people to be the smartest part of any organisation. They have a limited scope of action and limited deliverables. Calling this out is right. I wonder if they also think children should stop learning maths as we all have calculators - or more likely that we all have calc.exe.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
chalkboards and whiteboards are entirely reasonable in lectures and are still used in modern settings in business all the time.
Go into a lot of meeting rooms and you're gong to find a whiteboard which is basically the same thing as a chalkboard.
This notion that you have to use technology for everything is goofy.. and frankly I suspect they might be trying to sell us something rather than giving good advice.
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Indeed it is not fair to deny children the virtues of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Every kid should have the right to express their ideas through these masterpieces of technology while communicating with others through Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Skype on their Microsoft Surface.
Think of the children! What will happen to them when we are constantly punishing them by moving a pen on a paper? Maybe they will start taking notes on real paper instead of Microsoft OneNote, the horror. Think of what will happen when they are forced to work with those life-threatening paper books! They could consume information without the safety of Microsoft Windows!
Please safe our future generation and give out children Microsoft Everything!
At least the lumber, plastic and ink industry don't collude with each other and the state or have a capitalist billionaire visionary with a crypto-communist penchant. As far as I know anyway.
It has been well established for many years now that both learning and using "cursive" writing (I know it as "joined" writing) is important for the development of young brains.
For example: http://davidsortino.blogs.pres...
This is irresponsible marketing, and with continuing cuts in education, stands a very good chance of not being challenged by educators before politicians base policy on it.
What a complete crock of excrement. I am amazed at the stupidity of these people. I wonder if they have ever used a whiteboard or had to take impromptu notes in a meeting. We as a society are dumbing down the curriculum to such a point that many kids today are no longer required to be able to do basic arithmetic with the excuse of "They will have access to a calculator, so it's not important." Spelling requirements are just as bad with multiple choice spelling tests along with the excuse of "They will have spell checkers available so they only need to recognize the proper word from a list." Current educational "standards" along with the recent trend of large corporations trying to indoctrinate new customers are brainwashing society's children. This blatant push by the Microsoft sales and marketing team is just one more example.
I saw the post about the attention span study, but, you know....
We still use a lot of whiteboards at work to collaborate on ideas. It's not chalk on a blackboard, but still serves the same purpose of displaying a drawing or diagram for multiple people to view and make comments.
To be even handed, Apple takes exactly the same position. To view a real clusterf--k, check out the FBI criminal investigation into iPad purchasing at the LA Unified School District.
Why is Snark Required?
This is really anti-education. While handwriting isn't something as important as it was in the past, it is very important. While you can write on a tablet, I have yet to find one that is as decent as writing on paper. It's bad enough we let students graduate who can't read, but are we going to start letting students graduate without knowing how to write either?
Be seeing you...
I've never considered the sales and marketing people to be the smartest part of any organisation.
Then you haven't actually tried to do what they do and certainly don't understand it. My guess is that you'd fail rather badly if you tried. Companies like Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble and the like didn't get to the size they are because they had idiots in the sales and marketing departments. I've worked directly with some of the marketing folks at Proctor and Gamble and they are exceptionally bright and very good at their job. Sure there are plenty of idiots out there too but saying all sales and marketing people are dumb is just as idiotic as saying all engineers are brilliant. Both statements are demonstrably false.
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.
I am a teacher that has been highly into technology as a hobby from growing up with computers around me. I consider myself to be very literate in technology - much more so than my fellow teachers most of the time. I've watched districts roll out technology as the savior of classrooms multiple times, and have shaken my head as the technology has failed due to poor understanding of the infrastructure needed to pull off the new 'greatest thing ever!' The fallacy here is related to the other article referenced, kids attention spans are shrinking. So are adults! Technology has some wonderful uses, but at times it's getting shoved into the classroom as the savior of education - when it's not necessarily.
Add to that what happens in the real world and you lose power from a major storm like we did Friday. Our IT department must not have everything properly isolated on UPS supplies or something, because it took all weekend and until late yesterday afternoon before they got our phone and internet system back up. Last I checked our Microsoft Exchange server is still down. If we depend totally on technology in situations like that we'll be even more out of luck. Our attendance systems were fun yesterday...
I've been a mathematics teacher for nine years. And with the utmost sincerity, let me say this: Shut the fuck up.
Take your baseless opinions regarding educational matters and keep them to yourself. Microsoft has had as much success running schools as they had selling MP3 players. Note taking has been proven time-and-time again to be a very effective and powerful mnemonic device for learning. Studies have also shown that note taking with a pen/pencil and paper is more effective than note taking with a laptop. Furthermore, I can ask my students to have a notebook and pencil the first day of class, and for those who forgot or cannot afford it, I have plenty of spares to give them. I cannot expect the same out of a laptop or other digital device. Until you have research clearly demonstrating that any digital device is superior for learning development and comprehension, stay out of my classroom.
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.
You assume Microsoft thinks short attention span is a bad.
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Kids don't express themselves in chalk?
She doesn't have children. I have chalk pictures all over my driveway.
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Writing is not just about expression - it teaches fine motor control, attention, patience. To say it's obsolete would be laughable, if it wasn't such an utterly sinister proposition.
Try to do calculus problems without pen and paper. Would Microsoft suggest using MS Word Equation Editor?! Just give me a minute while I swallow my vomit. Ok, I'm fine now.
I'm a LaTeX aficionado. I do quite a reasonable amount of math type-setting. I use LaTeX because the output looks amazing, and because I can use my keyboard alone, instead of having to click on menus and buttons. However, it is still an order of magnitude slower than good old fashioned hand-written problem solving.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It's not about what they know, it's about their credibility in opinions such as above. In this case, Microsoft is simply pushing their agenda instead of really looking out for students. I'm all for exposing kids to technology the right way. It's not about replacing chalk, pen, pencil and paper with electronics but using electronics where it makes sense.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Actually, ironically, one of the best reasons to use pen and paper is for maths. It's rather hard to express matrices, vectors, integrals etc. in a text message. You need LaTeX and a graphical display and its a lot slower than pen and paper. An equation editor is even slower.
They draw dinosaurs, flowers, spiderman, farm animals, hopscotch, race tracks, cities. The driveway and sidewalk are fully engulfed my mid-spring and only 'reset's when it rains. Kids at play. With chalk. MSFT sales people are free to come by and observe.
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.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
While using "technology" ( streaming video ) to deliver training for the certifications I'm pursuing, I have found that taking notes via pen and paper is what helps me to retain it. I have tried using a laptop and the info just doesn't stick.
ONLY by writing it down manually do I remember it.
No matter how I try to emulate it with tech like a pen / tablet combo, it just isn't the same.
I think this bias comes largely from IT workers who have to deal with rank and file marketing employees who are often clueless when it comes to a lot of technology.
And I assure you this bias works the other way around. Finance and accounting people think that IT workers are utterly clueless morons when it comes to money. Sales and marketing people thing IT people have no concept of what their customers actually care about and no idea how to talk to another human being. Everyone tends to think their job is the hardest and that no one else really gets what they do.
I'm sure I too am biased because of this, but it also seems like your low-level IT employee has more practical intelligence than a lot of low-level marketing employees who seem to trade on good looks and social skills versus any specific practical skill or insight with marketing, at least at the undergrad-only level of education.
Their error is generally that they think their abilities in IT actually mean they are smarter when in actual fact they are at best only smarter in certain ways. They also frequently mistake lack of interest with lack of aptitude. All the sales people for my company are degreed engineers and very competent ones at that. People go into sales and marketing because they find it interesting and challenging (and yes financially rewarding) and you know what? They are right. It is challenging and it can be interesting. Sales is an exceedingly hard job - much harder than most IT jobs in my opinion. I think this because at different points in my career I've done both and I'm roughly equally competent (read mediocre) at both. I'm both an engineer and an accountant by training and to be honest, the most difficult things in business are rarely the technical stuff. Not that the technical stuff is trivial - it isn't by any means. But the most difficult jobs involve managing and selling to people and those who can do those things well are hugely valuable.
They is a very good reason: emergency communication. If my child gets in a car crash I want them to be able to call me without having to hike to the nearest shop to borrow a landline. In the same vein if you know you are going to have to work late you can call your child and let them know to try and get a ride/generally coordinate in the face of unforeseen circumstances. I agree that smartphones are wholly unnecessary.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"