Why These Parents Want Schools to Stop Issuing iPads to Their Children (nbcnews.com) 48
What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? "He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles," reports NBC News.
His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time." Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize classrooms....
[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out of having access to YouTube and several other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to give tablet computers to everyone became a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students could bypass security protocols and that few teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on them in class...
Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class, pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were asked to sign a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a listening session.
In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..."
One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time." Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize classrooms....
[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out of having access to YouTube and several other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to give tablet computers to everyone became a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students could bypass security protocols and that few teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on them in class...
Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class, pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were asked to sign a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a listening session.
In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..."
One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Without Controls (Score:1)
Re:Without Controls (Score:5, Insightful)
He's right, you know. We don't get the next generation of hackers without giving them parental controls to figure out to disable!
Although, there isn't much knowledge needed to factory reset an iPad. You can learn that from a TikTok video.
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Then either the I.T. staff are garbage, or you got the next Mitnick.
If factory resetting doesn't get provisioned through your image servers to right back to the setup you had installed on it initially it's the I.T. departments fault. If the altered OS is allowed back on your network / VPN after a factory reset and not having your access software on it... again I.T's fault.
So go ahead kid, factory reset that ipad.
Whoops, caught immediately because you can't log in to your portal to do your homework / tests.
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I think that they are also greatly overestimating the quality of the IT support that most schools have.
When I was in school, I already knew how to set up PC's and Macs in high school better than they did. I was basically 2nd level tech support for my school library, because I could figure out his tech problems before they bothered to check it.
Even if my iPad hacking attempt failed, I could probably just turn in the broken iPad, give them some lame "I don't know what happened to it!" excuse, and let their IT
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These will make excellent teaching devices for the kids learn, in short order, how to bypass said controls.
Kids will do what you let them.
Kids will do what they can get away with.
Goes further -- edtech obsoletes schools (Score:2)
as suggested by me from 2007: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
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 activ
Re: Goes further -- edtech obsoletes schools (Score:1)
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... [alfiekohn.org]
What if kids can learn altruism from youtube, from channels such as Matt's Off Road Recovery and Matthew Parker Mobile Mechanic, and picking up garbage from Steve Wallis, stealth camping?
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https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... [alfiekohn.org]
What if kids can learn altruism from youtube, from channels such as Matt's Off Road Recovery and Matthew Parker Mobile Mechanic, and picking up garbage from Steve Wallis, stealth camping?
In the first place, alternative schooling practices and structures are a prerequisite for the kind of education you're promoting. In that environment iPads and the like can be valuable and useful tools. But in an underfunded public school system, where there's little opportunity for one-on-one guidance and where teachers often have second jobs just to make ends meet? Not so much...
Second, as much as I hate to admit it, there's a LOT of common curriculum that's necessary for kids. All that stuff can be both
Thanks for the Alfie Kohn link on alternative ed (Score:2)
Indeed, educational videos on-demand to reflect current interests and needs via YouTube or elsewhere are another example of how compulsory schooling is increasingly obsolete.
Thanks for the Alfie Kohn link. He is an amazing insightful compassionate writer whose words have shaped some of my beliefs. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Pat Farenga, and Grace Llewelyn are some other writers who have shaped my beliefs on education -- as are stories from sci-fi writers like James P. Hogan (e.g. "Voyage from Yesteryear"
Tablets are a mistake obviously (Score:5, Funny)
Kids should be given REAL computers, like apple II's or commodore PET's to study on.
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Username checks out. I have fond memories of programming TI graphing calculators in BASIC during downtime in class. A few other students did this as well.
My Dad showed me how HTML worked when I was in middle school, and later a classmate bugged me to pick up PHP. I learned it from the docs online, and that was really fun. Even set up a simple website and hosted it through our cable line.
Is native programming possible on tablets or smartphones? It'd be a shame if kids couldn't program these devices. Bu
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Native is not, but in theory there are programs and such like scratch.
But the classes themselves probably don't teach it by standard, treating the devices more like a glorifed television rather than something to learn how to use properly.
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Kids should be given REAL computers, like apple II's or commodore PET's to study on.
They tried, but quarreling parent groups couldn't agree on whether to teach the kids that they were coding with 3 registers or 259 registers.
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Kids should be given REAL computers, like apple II's or commodore PET's to study on.
Ah, 8-bit 6502 Zero Page programming with no distracting usable video or any decent sound.
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Kids should be given REAL computers, like apple II's or commodore PET's to study on.
We managed to start there. And come out with a tad more than a I Learned to Code for a Day! t-shirt.
Tell the kids to learn how to navigate that turtle around the screen instead of having AI explain what type of species it was.
Damn right my lawn is mowed by Terrapin Logo.
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Deserves the Funny, but it's also too true in a sad way. In those days the machines were basic enough that you could actually figure out what was going on. Now they are entirely black boxes at every level and from every perspective.
Glad I graduated before this (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm really glad I graduated before smartphones and tablets were commonplace in schools. If memory serves, I had a feature phone starting junior year of high school but didn't use it much.
This seems contradictory, especially because it seems screen time is not carefully limited:
While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices... often Chromebook laptops or iPads.
Good on these parents for pushing back on the excessive amount of screen time during school.
All of that said, I did use the computer a lot, but that was after school. I was into programming but also browsed the web, played games, and chatted on instant messenger. Not sure how comparable that is. I always finished my homework.
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I had all of my high school formulas programmed into my TI-85 25 years ago, which was probably considered cheating at the time but was super effective.
I can only imagine what I could get away with now if I had a Chromebook with ChatGPT to use in class.
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Ahh yes, teenagers, the same intellect but no wisdom to properly apply it. You could probably do really well for yourself up to the point you learn life's choices do in fact have consequences.
Never got the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, don't fuck with the system. (Score:2)
When the thinky works is handled by some necessary few and a whole lot of technology, we still need people to do the shitty, unskilled work. I don't want to do it, so I'm glad people fail out of the bottom. If your skillset is knowing how to ask an AI to do it, the clock is ticking.
* Ingredients: 65% sarcasm, 30% wary sincerity, 5% other
Re: Hey, don't fuck with the system. (Score:2)
Asking chatbots to do stuff is the revolutionary training that kids need!
The skillset which will bring you the most money, power and respect absolutely IS asking someone else to do the work. If you know how to build something, you will be stuck building things for minimum wage all your life, but if you know how to ask someone else to build something you can become the next steve jobs or pol pot.
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Well, yes. That's some of the "necessary few" I refer to. :)
Re: Give them old Kindles instead (Score:1)
Re: Give them old Kindles instead (Score:1)
So paper does seem to be (Score:2)
What I am wondering is if you have a stylus and also probably one of those gloves to keep you from smudging the screen how does that compare.
One thing I do know is that if you are really going to learn things you have to use them in a effective way. Basically you need projects that use the data and the learning. But having students do that versus just testing them on problem
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Big tech has it's tentacles so deep into education it's not even funny. There was absolutely nothing wrong with how we were educating folks in the 90s and early 00s. We had plenty of computer classes. They were all electives but they were offered. We had two programming classes (both in C++ I think), Cisco networking, and Office 2000. Office 2000 class should of been mandatory for all students.
I imagine big tech sold this as making everything "easier" for teachers and students...right.
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It's complicated (Score:2)
Youtube videos can be educational, far better than a single teacher could ever do. They can also be a total waste of time.
AI tutors have the potential to personalize instruction far better than a large class of students of varying talent and interest.
Curious, talented students can greatly improve their learning with tech.
Lazy, unmotivated, talentless students simply use it as another way to goof off.
It's not the tech, it's how the tech is used.
I guess... (Score:4, Interesting)
....the school's router needs some limitations then.
Cant disagree with the parents (Score:2)
Skills (Score:1)
I would have killed for a Chromebook decades ago so that I could write essays in class (not on paper) in way that allowed for useful editing and reflection.
Other than that, I strongly prefer books on paper and taking notes on paper.
As a parent, my ability to control and monitor my children when they are using school issued devices is diminished. It's also a big lift for tech savvy parents to limit what kids can do on computers or devices.
My kids don't know the passwords to their iPhone/Apple accounts. App
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I took some online courses over the last 2 years, which included lessons in which the instructor gave instructions aided by a PowerPoint slide. I found that the best way of absorbing the lessons was taking screengrabs as soon as a slide was complete, filing it as a PDF (unless the images were adequate) and rewatching the entire session after collecting all the slides and this time, paying closer attention. That turned out to work best for me
I would reserve paper for actually working out problems, where
Correction needed in both directions (Score:2)
First,mandatory screen time needs to be limited. If they want text books in ebook form, great, but they'll need a way to restrict school issued pads to school work during the school day.
On the flip side, I have more than once heard a parent complaining that homework is being given that requires a computer to complete where a school doesn't allow chromebooks to be taken home. That's equally absurd. Not every family can afford to give each kid a computer, and sometimes computers break. It's not like parents c
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Why? We've been requiring typed essays since before anyone had a computer at home.
I grew up in a poor area, and I was the only one in my school that had a computer at home for most of my school years (a few of other kids got one in my last few years). And for most of my school years I didn't have a printer - and this was before you could just take a file to school or the library and print it out - so I typed assignments that were required to be typed on a t
Avoiding trouble is easy (Score:3)
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That makes FAR to much sense.
Besides, the point of all this technology in schools is not to help the kids or the teachers. Nope, it's there to make big tech folks rich with a lucrative pathway to government money.
We all know we don't need all this extra technology where books, pens and papers were sufficient as recently as the late 90s. Have a computer lab on campus if they need to go type up a report. Make a typing/office class mandatory to finish HS as well.
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Parents could make a difference if they cared enough to show
Slow feedback loop (Score:2)
That's probably when Ai has matured and is really changing the world. Of course, loud opinions will sound again, urging for change! Who t
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We shouldn't be giving kids iPads and Chromebooks in school. Every year there seems to be a new article about how kids have trouble getting jobs because they don't know how to even use Word on a Windows laptop. The basic corporate standard. We need to bring back the computer labs. Teach kids what they -actually- need to know.