'Kids Are Spending Too Much Class Time on Laptops' (bloomberg.com) 54
Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions equipping classrooms with laptops, yet students have fallen further behind on essential skills, Michael Bloomberg argues. With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading.
Bloomberg notes technology's classroom push came from technologists and government officials who envisioned tailored curricula. Computer manufacturers, despite good intentions, had financial interests and profited substantially. The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them.
Studies confirm traditional methods -- reading and writing on paper -- remain superior to screen-based approaches. Devices distract students, with research showing up to 20 minutes needed to refocus after nonacademic activities. As some districts ban smartphones during school hours, Bloomberg suggests reconsidering classroom computer policies, recommending locked carts for more purposeful use and greater transparency for parents about screen time. Technology's promise has failed while imposing significant costs on children and taxpayers, he writes. Bloomberg calls for a return to books and pens over laptops and tablets.
Bloomberg notes technology's classroom push came from technologists and government officials who envisioned tailored curricula. Computer manufacturers, despite good intentions, had financial interests and profited substantially. The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them.
Studies confirm traditional methods -- reading and writing on paper -- remain superior to screen-based approaches. Devices distract students, with research showing up to 20 minutes needed to refocus after nonacademic activities. As some districts ban smartphones during school hours, Bloomberg suggests reconsidering classroom computer policies, recommending locked carts for more purposeful use and greater transparency for parents about screen time. Technology's promise has failed while imposing significant costs on children and taxpayers, he writes. Bloomberg calls for a return to books and pens over laptops and tablets.
Active beats Passive (Score:4, Interesting)
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I thought kids were spending too much time on mobile phones instead.
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Bingo!
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Re:Active beats Passive (Score:5, Informative)
My 6th grade kid gets all his homework on his school issued laptop. It's just worksheets. Nothing is interactive at all. I don't see the point of using a computer at all, other than saving paper.
Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools (Score:3, Insightful)
From an essay I wrote in 2007: https://patapata.sourceforge.n... [sourceforge.net]
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to
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My 6th grade kid gets all his homework on his school issued laptop. It's just worksheets. Nothing is interactive at all. I don't see the point of using a computer at all, other than saving paper.
It's done to teach your child how to be a good office drone.
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My 6th grade kid gets all his homework on his school issued laptop. It's just worksheets. Nothing is interactive at all. I don't see the point of using a computer at all, other than saving paper.
As a taxpayer, I don’t see the point of using a “teacher” in this equation. Other than saving taxes of course.
Start to reduce the lesson to “just worksheets”, and see how long it takes to reduce the teacher to a talking head on a screen. A talking head that doesn’t even have to exist in meatsack-space.
Easy way to get rid of the political activists pretending to be educators too, which has become a significant problem.
Technology doesn't belong in education (Score:2)
Active learning is as old as dirt. It's why we had to take turns going up to the blackboard to solve math problems. And had to take turns reading in front of the class. And why the teach asks a question, and then students raise their hand to answer it.
The vast majority of children do not fare well in dark lecture room with a teacher droning on and on to the hum of laptops. Or in my day, the hum of the overhead projector.
When all you have is an abacus... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Laptops as a replacement for books and paper are inherently inferior. They have capabilities that could be used which could make them superior in those areas, but if they aren't used, ...
I suspect that computerized "flashcards" can be superior to the pasteboard ones, but it's because of an improved interactive element. It's probably roughly equal for writing a short essay. Partially because of spellcheck and such. OTOH, there have been studies that say that even so writing on a computer is less learning
We've known this for over a decade (Score:5, Interesting)
Every year it seems two or more studies come out showing writing something down is superior to typing for retention of the information. From 2024 I found three [npr.org] such [popsci.com] articles [scientificamerican.com].
Oxford Learning had this article [oxfordlearning.com] from 2022 indicating handwriting is better than typing.
Back in 2017 the same thing [psychologytoday.com] was reported.
And a decade ago, this study [jowr.org] showed a higher word recall when you wrote something down rather than typing it out.
Not sure what the issue is.
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Plus if you are bored you tend to doodle on that paper, which is an open creativity also good for opening the minds potential. When you are bored on a laptop you youtu
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20 years ago, when I was in school, the teachers told me you learned something better by reading it, writing it, and speaking it vs. only doing one of these. It sounds like a similar or related effect.
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Every year it seems two or more studies come out showing writing something down is superior to typing for retention of the information.
Provided that you don't have dysgraphia. Not having to concentrate on the physical process of writing was a godsend when I got my first computer. I discovered for the first time in my life that I actually enjoyed the creative aspect of writing. Plus, I could finally remember things when I no longer had to put any mental effort into turning my thoughts into "written" words.
Different people learn differently. While paper and pencil may be an improvement for the majority of students, some students may perf
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You're describing a kind of writing that involves taking information out of your brain and putting it down on paper (digital, or otherwise). I tend to agree with you there. The process of physically writing doesn't add a lot. I wouldn't get anything out of having to physically write out this comment.
But in some cases, writing is an important part of getting that information into your brain in the first place. If a teacher issues an assignment with the question "What are three events that contributed to
We've known this in industry, too (Score:2)
At a certain company long long ago, managers had a mainframe-based planning app that looked like a sort of spreadsheet.
The company did a study to see how much it improved the manager's team's productivity...
Oops! Use of the tools was correlated with declining productivity.
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Not sure what the issue is.
If you’re not sure what it is yet, you haven’t been paying attention to the (cough, insider) investment portfolios from lawmakers.
For ALL the studies you cited, none are older than the concept of computers in the classroom. Which has been replacing traditional tools since the 80s when Apple was in the classroom instead of Microsoft. That’s almost fifty years of ignoring studies proving they’re inferior.
(Lawmaker/Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc al) ”I keep hearing you use that wor
Return to Education (Score:5, Interesting)
We saw this very clearly in the pandemic where schools e.g. in the UK were opened specifically to provide daycare to frontline workers. Things like streaming kids to allow teaching to be better tailored to differing student abilities is frowned on as "elitist" for academic subjects but yet it is fine for sports teams who select the best players instead of using a random draw. Overuse of technology might not help but the real problem is that we no longer treat schools as establishments where education is the primary goal.
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The reason that standards are falling at schools is not really due to technology but because education has become a sideline for what schools are used for. Today schools are there to provide daycare and social support, the education of kids is a secondary to that.
Always was. Computers in the classroom have always been used more as babysitters so that the teachers don't have to teach.
Don't get me wrong, you need some written assessment so that you know what the students are actually absorbing, but time spent on working on problems is time not spent taking in new information, so it has to be a balancing act. Switching back and forth more often between working and absorbing makes school less boring and more likely to keep students' attention.
I'd love to see an experi
Variety over Uniformity (Score:2)
I'd love to see an experimental education program where they start over from scratch, thinking about ways to make the curriculum as interactive as possible, with science learned by doing rather than by reading
The problem with that approach - which has been taken with programs like "discovery maths/science" - is that finding things out by interaction is much, much slower than reading about it. If you think about it this is how science progressed but it took the best minds on the planet 300 years to go from Newtonian mechanics to the Standard Model by this method and school kids do not have that long. Plus creating e.g. a Higgs boson is not something you can do easily let alone know that you have done it.
Indee
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The reason that standards are falling at schools is not really due to technology but because education has become a sideline for what schools are used for. Today schools are there to provide daycare and social support, the education of kids is a secondary to that.
Always was. Computers in the classroom have always been used more as babysitters so that the teachers don't have to teach.
This. There are ways to use computers effectively to supplement teaching, but all of these ways require teachers to spend more and not less time. The problem with computers in education is that they make the minimal requirements of teaching much easier. Once the computer is programmed, the teacher doesn't have to do much more in terms of conveying material to be learned or in terms of adminstering and grading homework, projects, and tests.
There is also another really evil aspect to this. Because tests a
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I believe kids are also showing up to school already behind, and not by just a little. Our kid went to a Title 1 elementary school where you have a lot of parents working multiple jobs and the kids were raised with the iPhone as the babysitter. Some of the tales from incoming Kindergarten classes were horrid and trending downhill as he finished there. We are talking kids showing up that were barely verbal and just screamed a good part of the day, one step away from being feral. Many studies have shown t
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I believe kids are also showing up to school already behind, and not by just a little.
My sister was a primary school teacher in the UK (she's now teaching secondary) and was amazed when she started that they had problems with kids arriving at school who were not potty-trained!
I don't know what answer is
We already know of one solution to this - return to a society where one parent works and the other stays home. You can still have gender equality in such a model since there is no reason today why the mother cannot go out to work while the father stays home. Indeed, if AI starts to reduce the need for labour while mak
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It's OK, just give the kiddos a participation trophy for coming to the glorified day care. They'll at least feel good about themselves.
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The reason that standards are falling at schools is not really due to technology but because education has become a sideline for what schools are used for. Today schools are there to provide daycare and social support, the education of kids is a secondary to that.
Don’t overlook or dismiss the problem of politics in the American classroom, because the political activists pretending to be educators sure as hell haven’t.
Duh (Score:2)
Schools started handing out laptops like candy but failed to adjust their curriculums to actually take advantage of the laptops. They mostly just converted pen and paper to digital and left it as is. That was always going to lead to failure. It's not even hard to do it right, but people who are making the decisions to get the laptops in the first place, don't know jack shit, and most schools don't have even halfway decent IT staff.
welcome to corporate life kids! (Score:1)
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So true. Most white collar jobs will have you looking at a monitor and interacting with apps there much of the time. You may have to write some things down on paper by hand on occasion but it will be seldom. Might as well get used to it in school.
The way things are going, in the near future you'll just be interacting with an AI that does the majority of your work. As time passes your participation won't even be needed.
Glad Bloomberg had the guts to say it (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the ideas about how tech would improve learning were hype-filled, speculative baloney. It's a testament to how hard it is to resist this kind of bs that schools are as deep into "educational" technology as they are now.
Another negative effect that Bloomberg didn't name but that I see with my daughter and the children of my friends and family- platform fragmentation. Most classes I took 30+ years ago were based on a textbook. Whether the textbook was good, bad, or indifferent, it was coherent. You read a chapter, did some exercises and then moved to another unit. If your teacher assigned some extra source material, s/he would photocopy them and give them you. Those were generally supplemental to the textbook, so if you didn't understand that extra material you knew you could go back to the textbook and try to figure it out. And a parent trying to help could read back through the textbook and refresh their memory enough to try to be helpful or could at least help coordinate with the teacher to figure out where the student was getting lost.
Now that textbooks are relics, teachers pick instructional material and exercises from a dizzying array of platforms. Some of these are licensed by school systems, so students have to go through some sort of SSO thing to get to them. Others are third party that require account creation, and still others are free stuff on the internet. It is very difficult for students to keep track of all of this even when the teacher is disciplined about posting/linking all the material in the primary course management system. For parents it is essentially impossible to follow what is going on.
And on top of that students are very good at figuring out how to use their computer for non-class uses, regardless of the filters on them. My daughter often emails me or my wife multiple times in a day. This is not good for her or us - she needs to just be in school and not communicating with her parents all the time.
I could not agree more with Bloomberg's idea of getting computers out of classrooms, except for very specific uses.
it's all sad, i can conclude... (Score:2)
"...With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading..."
bold mine...
An immigrant I hired a few years ago, who had to learn English from scratch, was surprised that his workmates, who'd spoken the language since "age zero", could not write a two paragraph composition of what may have taken place the night before!
And I agreed with him, sadly...and for those that attempted at a report, it was full of slang, grammatical errors and would hardly qualify for the least grade in my opinion.
We're going down folks...
So obviously (Score:3)
The answer is to buy them iPads, right? /s
"Changing needs" (Score:2)
One should always be careful when a smiling salesperson wants to sell you dependency on their product, but this is even worse than that.
I've heard multiple times that knowing how to write well is obsolete, the robots can just do it for you. If I were one of those shitty, insecure people who try to cut down others ability to co
Surely we can use both (Score:2)
I agree that working things out on paper is a major part of learning that laptops may have supplanted. Let's bring it back!
Nevertheless, I see a use for laptops because they offer access to other resources, including videos, animations, and interactive simulations of experimental setups.
While we're on the subject, let's not allow laptops to replace all lab experience with videos, animations, and simulations. You still need to handle test-tubes, measure objects rolling down inclined planes, and so on. Laptop
Not news (Score:2)
That 's because parents and teachers spend too much time on devices.
It's called reinforced example.
All the rest is just side effect.
Here's the thing. (Score:2)
Bloomberg notes technology's classroom push came from technologists and government officials who envisioned tailored curricula. Computer manufacturers, despite good intentions, had financial interests and profited substantially. The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them.
Yes, technologists do say exactly this. i think it's a fundamental disconnect between what school should be for, and what we've turned it into in this country.
School should teach us the whys, the hows, the what fors. There's a reason they used to have us do manually written "show your work" equations for even advanced math. Because that "show your work" work meant you were actually training your brain. Do something manually enough times, and it starts to become a part of your brain's natural processes. It w
Testing The Wrong Metric (Score:2)
Are you testing fish on how well they can climb trees?
Kids today are fucking geniuses even compared to when I was a kid. If you think otherwise, you're asking them the wrong questions. The problem is, testing methodologies are lagging behind by literal decades. This was something I recognized while I was a kid a few decades back learning tech on my own, but its even worse now.
Just one point of reference: I literally learned how to use an abacus in school only a couple years apart from learning IPv6 on my ow
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I literally learned how to use an abacus in school only a couple years apart from learning IPv6 on my own. Now, which skill do you think is employable, or even remotely useful today?
Math?
Helicopter Mom or AI Nanny Spouting PC (Score:2)
they're holding them wrong (Score:2)
The problem with computerized learning is that most of it is stupid. They are just finding ways to do the same old shit but on a computer. The potential benefit of the computer is new learning experiences, not warming over the same old bullshit. Now you get the same old bullshit plus you have to manage the computers, it's senseless.
We should be gamifying learning to make it engaging. Learn stuff in context, then solve puzzles or otherwise achieve goals with what you've learned. That's something that the com
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I completely agree. I was part of a research project in that area about 20 years ago. My key learning is that preparing non-contact-lecures is hard and needs a lot more time and experience than preparing regular lectures or you fail. Most interesting insights I got from an Italian professor of architecture with 30 years experience in distance-education (on paper). His estimate was lecturer effort 3x for initial coruse creation compared to regular lectures and that is probably the same or even higher when th
Good teachers are dropping out like flies (Score:3)
I know multiple teachers that have left education for good. There are multiple reasons:
The first one is that everyone thinks they know better on how to teach kids than they do. The districts, the principals, the parents. Do you like people coming in and telling you how to do your job? Neither do they. It gets political. What ends up happening is the teachers are forced to teach the same curriculum and adhere to the same standards.
They are measured by ridiculous testing standards. Imagine coding if your boss wanted you to code exactly the same way every other coder in the state did, you can't do better and you can't do worse.
What we are getting is teachers that don't care and are robots, how do you think the kids are going to learn if they have that kind of teacher? How do you think education is going to end up as a whole if all teachers are robots? Do you remember an influential teacher? Imagine eliminating the teachers that cared about you and helped you progress the most.
They are asked to work crazy amounts of time and teach a crazy amount of students, Most teachers I know grade 10-20 hours a week outside of school hours, yeah they get summers off but it's still a high workload.
It starts earlier than school laptops (Score:1)
A couple of issues ago, "American Annals" published an evaluation and comments on research dealing with delayed cognitive development in children who were essentially left to smartphones to be their babysitters. Their language and reasoning capabilities were noticeably hampered by the lack of human interaction.
They seemed to be developing their own form of AI and it isn't pretty.
The duh-i-could-have-told-you-that department... (Score:2)
... is more like it. Laptops are the teacher's equivalent of using a TV as a babysitter.
To be fair, it's how work is done these days too (Score:2)
If schools is supposed to train kids for the adult world of work and life, this is in fact how adults do work. They gather in conference rooms with their laptops, typing things that may or may not have anything to do with the subject of the meeting thy are attending. So you could argue it's good practice for the kids.
I question this (Score:2)
Studies confirm traditional methods -- reading and writing on paper -- remain superior to screen-based approaches... with research showing up to 20 minutes needed to refocus after nonacademic activities.
So the solution would seem to be one of appropriate management and restrictions, and not one of "computers are bad - we must go back to pencil and paper".
Obviously, having the entire Web at your disposal all the time to distract you and to substitute for actual research - along with a word processor which corrects your spelling and grammar with no thought required - is probably detrimental to learning.
But simply being able to type instead of having to write long-hand - and to correct your mistakes or re-wor
The Pandemic Factor (Score:1)
"test scores hover near historic lows"
How much of this is due to pandemic disruption? A little? Some? A lot? We'll never have absolute certainty about this.
Reading and Math? (Score:2)
Who cares? Our kids lead the world with their scores playing Banana.
If you can't do anything without a computer... (Score:2)
It won't be long before the computer doesn't need you to do anything.
Pen and paper or curriculum (Score:1)