Reply to DCI: Too much focus on tablets/devices?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ok, DCI is middle and upper school.  By the time your kids are in 6th or 7th grade they will be dealing with a tsunami of technology and social media.  Even if they don't personally have smartphones, their friends will.  Just accepting that this is happening and helping to guide kids to use technology appropriately can be a huge benefit to the kid and to the parents.

Second, if the kids don't have their own devices, a lof of school time will be spent pushing around carts of laptops and students powering them up and down.  Worse yet, a computer lab that kids go to to do work-- waste of time.  When kids carry around their own devices they incorporate them into the curriculum.  Teachers plan for computer use and it's fairer for all kids, esp those who couldn't afford a computer and internet at home.

It's for these reasons that most private middle school programs are all moving to 1:1 device programs.  This is the future.  And for any of you with kids who have organizational problems, ADHD, executive function issues, etc., you'll see that technology will make everything much, much easier.  No more lost assignments, no more loose papers, multiple folders, books, etc.  It's all on one device.

It's also more environmental.  Why print out a finished assignment for the teacher?  Just email it.  It won't get lost, the teacher can annotate it and email it back.  Less paper and ink used.

My DC was in a private school for middle school and used an ipad throughout.  Many parents were skeptical and some were downright upset, but in the end the parents overwhelmingly supported the program for the reasons above.  And after a while the ipad wasn't the coolest thing ever.  The kids got used to it and it stopped being the focus.

I personally think DCI is ahead of the curve.  [/quote]

Not all experts agree with your assessment. Children with organizational and executive function issues often find paper easier for organizing thoughts and computers and tablets distracting.  It is too early in this experiment to declare 1:1 devices educationally sound practice. Hate to be cynical, but with the $$$ to be made by tablet manufacturers, consultants and software designers it may be hard to get any objective research out there.  Not much money to be made from pencils and paper[/quote]

This is exactly where I land too.  There is a quote in the other thread from either Steve Jobs or the CEO of another successful tech company, and the fact that increasingly the CEOs of tech companies and other higher ups (read: also the richest folks on the scene) are sending their own children to tech-free schools like Waldorf.  They know more than most about what the research on their products show.  There are studies that show decreased executive functioning and reading retention and problem-solving with increased time on devices.

When I started law school, even though Nexis and Westlaw were completely dominating legal research, my top 15 law school forbid all first year students from doing any legal research online.  They cited actual studies (both internal to the school and in the field) that showed that a student's overall ability to use superior legal reasoning and craft their arguments in the best way suffered when from the beginning we used online research.  They wanted us to understand how the law library was organized, how to trace the trail of decisions, and how to find what we're looking for without just typing in a few words into a search engine and having the computer do our work for us.  They insisted that this approach made us better law students and lawyers.  Several other top law schools in the region (this was in California) espoused the same reasoning.  Then, in 2nd and 3rd year of school, we pretty much used nothing but online legal research.  But I grew to understand why the school took that approach, and we all benefited from it.

None of this is "anti-technology".  But it's also not a "technology, all the time, and pretty much only technology" approach that my family is looking for.

The bottom line is, there is enough evidence out there for us to be concerned, but not enough for anyone to be certain either way of what the impacts of all this screen time will be on children, be they 2, 8, or 16 yrs old.  Just because most of their peers will have tech devices does not make it healthy or a good choice, just like most of my kids' peers have plentiful access to t.v. but my kids don't.  That is our families choice, it's a sound choice for our family, it's supported by evidence and it also works best for us.

We don't have enough info to be sure with tablets as THE PRIMARY SOURCE AND TOOL FOR LEARNING that that is a) NOT harmful, or b) is actually BETTER.  We just don't know, but we know there are reasons to be concerned it's harmful.

I was all in for my kids to be an experiment with the rest of DCI's design (the whole language angle + IB) (1st kid would start in 2 years), but I'm not willing for my kids to be an experiment for constant exposure to a tablet and the internet.  I have no worry that whatever access to technology my kids do have - wherever they go to school - that they will be behind, even if they ended up at a mostly no-tech school.  Not worried.  But I don't want them getting behind or being negatively impacted by too much exposure in the name of them supposedly getting ahead.  [/quote]

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