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'Beware Silicon Valley's Gifts To Our Schools' (nationalreview.com)
schwit1 shares a National Review report: After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results. Take Facebook's efforts for an example. The company -- under fire for privacy breaches worldwide -- is peddling something called "Summit Learning," a web-based curriculum bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Last month, students in New York City schools walked out in protest of the program. "It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, told the New York Post. He spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. Teacher interaction is minimal. "You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained. No outside research supports any claim that Summit Learning actually enhances, um, learning. What more studies are showing, however, is that endless hours of screen time are turning kids into zombies who are more easily distracted, less happy, less socially adept, and less physically fit. Standing up to the Silicon Valley Santas and asserting your family's "right to no" may well be the best long-term gift you can give your school-age children.
*Disclaimer: I used to be a technology director for a school district.
Throwing technology at a social / political problem isn't a panacea. Never has been and never will be. The tech adds very little benefit to the learning process unless the teachers actively incorporate it into their existing lessons. Where many get it wrong is using the tech as a replacement for textbooks and paperwork and nothing else. Yes it's less paperwork to manage, and that's good for the teacher in multiple ways, but it harms the student when done incorrectly. Case in point: Auto-graded assignments.
Yes, many teachers would be up in arms over the idea of taking away auto-graded assignments, but most of those assignments are poor quality by necessity of the auto-grading system. I.e. Most are Multiple Guess. There are a few systems that accept fill in the blank answers, but many of those are very specific about what answers they will accept, and often just encourage the teachers using them to move to Multiple Guess only as a time saving measure. As for why Multiple Guess is bad: If you know the answers will be on your test, why bother studying beyond being able to pick the answer out of a group? The answer is always given to you, and even if you don't have the slightest clue as to what it is when presented with the choices, the answer can be lucked upon by the simple roll of a six-sided dice. This is one of the reasons younger generations cannot deal with complex issues in the workforce. They expect to be told exactly what is expected of them, and if exact instructions are not given, they often cannot come up with an answer on their own due to lack of practice and / or knowledge.
Another problem is the funding that tech eats up. Many school districts have their own budget for IT that is separate from their general fund. In some cases a school may not be able to afford safety equipment for science classes, but has plenty of money for the latest iPad or Chromebook. In other cases, the school may choose to replace working tech with the new shiny, even though it will cost the school more in the long run to support and maintain it, for nothing more than trying to one-up or emulate neighboring districts.This encouragement of tech being a separate budget drives funds away from areas that need it. Causing deficiencies in other areas of teaching, and in some cases can be dangerous. Like not being able to afford having a nurse on staff during the day. Or failing to pay for proper security.
Worse is when said school cannot afford the more expensive new shiny and buys it by the truckload anyway. In some worse case scenarios a school may not have a technology instructor, but is inundated with tech and clueless teachers / leadership. In those cases the tech is always a waste of money, because the students gain very little from it due to the clueless teachers' / leadership's inability to integrate the tech correctly. This last bit also causes the students to pick up bad computing behaviors as security and proper use always gives way to making something work during class.
Finally, most of these efforts made by the various companies are designed to lock-in the students to their products at a young age. Most of these schools won't be teaching technology as a general subject. Most of the time a task or goal that must be completed on tech is explained to a student as a series of menus or button presses. If you've ever encountered a student that could not make a slideshow presentation with anything beyond obviously cut and pasted bullet points in no particular grouping, or a student that couldn't manage their own files, this is why. When students are trained to specific programs / devices, they are fundamentally challenged when moving into the real-world outside of the classroom. As they go from being "experts" to "novices" simply by choosing a company to work for that uses a competing tech vendor as their primary provider, or by the vendor's latest revamp changing too much for them