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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would love to know whether people think that EdTech is more harmful during the elementary years or middle school years. I accept that screens will be ubiquitious by 8th grade, but trying to decide what to do up to that point. We pulled DS out of public school during early elementary school in large part due to EdTech. He's now in a religious private and learning with pencil and paper.[/quote]

By 6th sixth grade our public schools use Chromebooks for some subjects.  Obviously they use pencil and paper for math and paper back novels to bring home but some of the content on Chromebook is superior to just reading a textbook.   One example I did with my son was from, not PBS but a similar type of programs on world geography.    After studying the countries within each continent the studies ended with a program that had 
15 to 20:minute summarizations of each country.  This was followed by questions on the summary they just watched.  There was no skipping around, no cheating, no copying.

There are some quality educational productions offered. I don’t understand why so many want to go back in time. A lot of projects they do are printed out and on Chrome.

And cursive needs to be abolished.   I was trying to read my doctor’s note on a referral and couldn’t.  It was chicken scratch cursive.   Very few adults are good at making cursive legible.   [/quote]

Exhibit A lol[/quote]

Explain instead of a “lol”  like a teenager.    Use your words.   Explain why you think a pencil and book are superior?   [/quote]

DP but one reason I think books and pencil and paper are superior is that studies have shown that the physical act of writing things down longhand helps commit them to memory. This makes sense to me, as I've long used longhand note taking to help synthesize information, even though I obviously used computers in all kinds of useful ways.

Typing notes and information out on a computer could also help students commit the information to memory, in not quite as well, but that's largely not what EdTech has students doing. It mostly has them answering multiple choice questions via a touch screen in an app. This is the worst possible situation because even when the student learns material this way, they are not engaging with it in any way other than reading it on the screen. This is especially bad for things like vocabulary and foundational math (or any math), where it's very important for students to internalize the material so they can build off of it in the future.

Earlier tonight, my DC asked me what the word "fester" meant. I asked her in what context, since it can have both literal and figurative meanings. She went and grabbed the book she had been reading that used the word, and was able to flip quickly to the page with the word because she remember the the physical location of the word on the page, in addition to remembering the part of the story it was in. She read the sentence to me and then we talked about what it meant in that context and also how else it can be used. The next best thing for her to do would be to physically write a sentence or some notes about the word, in the margins of the book or in a notebook. This is how deep linguist knowledge is built.

Compare this to how a student might engage with that word in a reading comprehension app. They will read the passage on the screen containing the word. Later they will be asked to select one of several meanings for the word from a multiple choice list, and the app will provide the sentence where the word was used in the question (since there is not a good way for the student to page back through the app to find it themselves). Many students will answer the question correctly using context cues. Others may get it wrong and the app will let them know what the correct answer is. But this experience is not deeply engaging and a relatively smart student could complete the exercise correctly without ever really understanding the word, and is unlikely to pull it up from memory later.

That is the difference between EdTech and using books and pencils and paper. One checks a box and the other actually engaged students with the material. One is better than the other, and it's very obvious which one that is.[/quote]

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