There's a reason Steve Jobs limited his kids access to technology: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

In fact, it has opposite effect to what is intended. It gives the child an avalanche of distraction, when what they need is simplicity. I would say the same about mobile phones.

I'm not sure I've thought this through very deeply at this stage but I do have a deep distrust of formal education. I learned by playing with stuff until it broke and skim reading chunks of books I didn't have the patience to finish.

Also - the classroom is full of distractions of other kinds. Move here, do this, listen to this, copy that. There's a huge amount of busy-work at school that is only tangentially related to learning. Technology might not be a magic bullet but it's no worse than some of the nonsense kids are put through.

It's a pretty ancient edifice that exists in the current form due to societal, intellectual, bureaucratic, political and corporate inertia. All of that is backed by the terror parents feel that if they "get this wrong" the child will be unable to get ahead in the world (at best) or intellectually/socially ruined (at worst). This is further exacerbated by parents who, far from appreciating just how long it takes for real learning to begin (and how much of it is always self-guided), think the key to raising bright children is Mandarin in infancy.

Additionally, almost all technology will be superseded by AI in the future, which means that training young kids in technology is literally preparing them for unemployment. At best, kids trained in tech will be used as flesh-and-blood beta versions of future AIs. I would go as far to say that exposing kids unnecessarily to technology is a form of child abuse. A very rounded education is preferable to being unemployed and tech-literate, bitter at the AI that is doing the job that you trained for.

And the problems with computers in the classroom are not limited to grade school! Nobody should use a laptop in class. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

A similar one can be seen in the arts:

"That's an amazing photo. You must have a really good camera!"

which you see here and there. As opposed to:

"That's an amazing painting. You must have really good brushes!"

(Disclaimer: I'm a photographer and I do know that the quality of the lens and sensor is going to play some role in the output, leaving aside things like Photoshop. But my point still stands.)

Bad educational technology can get in the way of teaching and learning. Errors/bugs and confusing UX can cause lengthy delays in the classroom.

Teachers can easily spend 15 minutes running around playing IT support when students are using a new technology – out of a 50 minute class which was scheduled in 5-minute increments.

That doesn't mean it needs to be "beautiful, seamless" software like we tend to idolize. Or the most featureful or innovative. It can be, but getting bog-standard basics working without confusion or errors is far more important. I certainly agree with the author on that.

(Source: previously cofounded an edtech startup, spent time in many classrooms observing these things).

The one thing you missed is that plenty of teachers won't spend the 15 minutes. The first time an edtech feature doesn't work in their classroom - usually because the teacher is using it completely incompetently - they just stop using it altogether. It took the school almost a semester just to get an english teacher to stop making the students use paper notebooks because she resented the tech so badly.

And you can see where the resentment comes from - lots of teachers do NOT tend towards technical literacy. A lot of them are older and underpaid, and they aren't going home and plugging away familiarizing themselves with contemporary tech to "skill up." The reason "kids can't use computers" is no doubt because plenty of their teachers can't either.

I'm just offering up a possible reason that someone wouldn't want to learn. I strongly believe that most of the current "hate on learning new computer systems" is due to programmers and designers more than cranky users

The $315B figure is there just to have a click bait title. He just assumed teachers only use 30% of the features from the solutions is used, thus 70% of the money is wasted. But in the real world that's not how it works. The same goes for enterprise market, where feature availability is important. It doesn't mean that every business will use every feature but vendors have developed this multitude of features over the years to address specific needs. It doesn't mean that if you don't use every feature you are throwing money away. You are not expected to use 100% anyway.

I wasn't familiar with K2 Audiovisual before reading the article, so the "free unlimited training" angle doesn't resonate; however, the base argument being made is sound. Our tools need to support the work we do; if they are a distraction or impediment then they will be ignored. I freely admit that there are some interesting edtech tools being developed, but too many of these tools introduce significant redundant labor, user friction, and/or force me to change my goals/processes to fit their vision of what school is supposed to be.

I have strong feelings on where I think things should go, but I'll just say that there is a lot of low hanging fruit in just helping teachers accomplish the things they already know how to do.

There are a lot of teachers out right now saying, "I know [Kid A] would benefit from [extension/scaffold/resource Y] - but there isn't time to make that from scratch". Teachers know they should be personalizing their curriculum, assessment, and instructional performance for what each kid needs. They will typically even know how to accomplish it.

They are logistically constrained from doing so and most edtech tools aren't offering solutions to the kinds of workflow problems that teachers face everyday.

Edit: I have been drilling down on some ideas with another HN member (andrewwhartion). Principally, focused on teacher workflow tools. Email is in profile.

I've been thinking about trying to build tools that let teachers create educational content (incl. formative assessment, etc) and share that content with each other.

Does that sound like what you have in mind? If so, would love to chat.

Curriculum content (or Planning, more generally) is a part of it, but so is lesson performance and assessment. It's a closed loop that should be feeding back on itself. Right now, I'm interested in how teachers could move from a 'creation' to a 'curation' mode of working to give them greater freedom to focus on the high touch elements of the job.

Shoot me an email. I'd be happy to chat more.

Like germinalphrase mentioned, I think the best place for tech in education is to "[offer] solutions to the kinds of... problems that teachers face everyday" and to make the existing successes even more impactful (e.g. when a student does well, provide ways for teachers, parents, and students to celebrate together).

Teachers know their kids and their struggles best, the tech just has to help them do what they do.

If a kid brings home a bad report card - Parents often blame the teacher. Obviously, their kid is great, the only reason they are struggling is because of negligent or poor instruction.

If a kid brings home a behavior citation (i.e. teacher/administration called home and said their kid was poorly behaved) - Parents may or may not recognize themselves as a contributor to that poor behavior.

But for the teacher, it doesn't really matter. If there is one poorly behaved kid in the class, it's going to make it harder for that teacher to instruct every single kid.

It often seems that the problem isn't a glut of "bad teachers", it's that the structures placed around the teachers all too often seem to be set up for them to fail. It's no surprise then that 40%-50% of teachers quit the profession entirely within five years http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/16/kappan_ingersol...

I'm not knowledgeable in the industry, which is why I'm asking. I know that for most industries, standards and structures are in place to protect damage from the worst people, but can definitely inhibit the best people.

Hearing what they use them for just makes me think that Apple needed someone to dump last year's leftover iPads on. It's really dumb stuff. They don't get access to the internet. They get a handful of stupid "learning" apps to use and a social network type thing that can be summed up as "instagram where mommy and teacher watch and control everything".

The devices are so locked up that inquisitive kids ignore them, dumb kids never figure them out, and everyone in between just kinda lugs them around because they have to.

I am beginning to think that tech capitalists have milked the general market and are now turning to the next juicy targets of education and healthcare.

Most schools have 3D printers, VR headsets, iPads. We need to teach kids about technology they will be using in 10 - 15 years time when they hit the job market.

We can't send kids out into a career without having used an iPad. Some kids don't have access to tech or the internet at home, now you want to take it away at school? Shame on you.

Other than 'app developer', what actual careers involve using specifically an iPad, let alone a generic tablet?

> Most schools have 3D printers, VR headsets, iPads Tablets sure, not necessarily iPads. 3D printers and VR headsets?! I'm talking about primary school, kids aged 5-11 - it would be rare for even secondary schools in the UK to have 3D printers or VR headsets. You used the word 'blimey', so I assume you are either English or taking the piss?!

Most kids get enough of tablets at home nowadays. Christ, all too many parents plonk their kid in front of a tablet and leave them to it for hours at a time.

I'm not saying tech doesn't have a place, it absolutely does, but sometimes the real, tactile world is the best place to learn - like for 5 year-olds learning basic maths, reading and writing.

The further into my tech career I go, the more I like a bog standard whiteboard and a notebook and pen. They let me focus on thinking about hard stuff, instead of thinking about how to use some oversold software.

The whole thing must have been a huge rort. I can only think of a handful of times I ever used the damn thing for anything beyond what I could have used a significantly cheaper scientific calculator for. The return on investment was terrible I can't help but think the same thing with Ipads in schools nowadays. What does an ipad buy you over significantly cheaper noname brand android device?

Amusingly enough I was not allowed to use the graphical calculator at university because programmable calculators were banned from examinations due to concerns about cheating. I used a cheap $10 casio calculator all through my engineering degree at uni...

Tell your partner to look up QR codes, we put different ones up around the room. QR code takes them to a web page with info on it. We use different codes (or URLs) for differentiation - smart kids get wikipedia or something hard, stupid kids get a simpler page or a video.

Does she use kahoot quizzes on them? Or socrative? Both work well.

I would still strongly prefer a proper laptop, but it wasn't as much of a hinderance as I initially expected.

Still, like a lot of stuff coming out of Computer Science in the 60s, Papert et al. are a good place to go for raw inspiration channeled into consumable, actionable ideas.

Even this low bar often trips up EdTech companies. Why is my lesson planning webapp still broken on mobile after 5 years? Why does my digital grade book require some many clicks to do anything? Why does Google classroom still not have a student view for teachers?

Do companies actually think marketing like this works? (Worse: Is it possible that they're right?)

The move now seems to be to teach coding via apps with friendly graphical interfaces, 10 years ago it was based around learning MS Office apps.

I've worked in tech for nearly 20 years and the most important skill I learnt was to touch type. Then HTML, which lead me to simple scripting, and onwards.

I'm not sure of the logic of teaching 11 year olds to code when some of them don't know how to copy and paste.

I've worked at 2 edtech startups and have a few teachers in my family, and my personal observation has been that technology is best when it removes friction in the areas of classroom control, assessment, communicating with parents, and organizing presentation materials. For the part where teachers figure out how to engage students and get them over conceptual humps, it seems like teachers are way ahead of any technology.

The canonical technology fail in edtech is to dump computers or robot kits into the classroom with no training. I have been in a number of classrooms where stuff like that winds up piled in a very expensive corner.

Also useful and sort of technological: https://donorschoose.com

It really doesn't require any new software or particular teacher training, only that the text be made editable, which is very much not the default now.

I don't have a non-university link, but the article I remember is Bill Bernhardt, "Reading and writing between the lines: an interactive approach using computers", Journal of Reading March 1994. (on jstor as a pdf composed of noneditable bitmaps)

While you could teach practical skills such as

- how to process images, audio, video

- how to code

- math beyond silly games featuring anthropomorphic neotenized animals

- workshops for chess and go

- use one of the awesome open source software for chemistry, geometry, astronomy, etc...

Only use for computers is for people to write documents, search online, print and... waste a lot of time on games, social networks.

Those aren't practical skills that need to be taught to secondary school students. They need to learn mathematics, writing, reading, literature, science, etc. They don't need to learn how to code, they don't need to learn how to make memes in Paint or youtube videos of themselves playing minecraft, nor how to play irrelevant (if fun) games like Chess.

>Only use for computers is for people to write documents, search online, print and... waste a lot of time on games, social networks.

We certainly were not allowed to be on social networks or games during computer lab time whe{re,n} I went to high school.

>Then, test taking could use more automation. Lots of teachers do their test taking by hand... Grading tests without an written answer is very easy to implement.

That's simply not true. Test taking is done in written form for good reason. It's possible to draw diagrammes, to write emphasis, use italics, etc. without learning some arcane editor or (worse) syntax when you're meant to be doing a test.

Marking tests without a written answer might be easy to implement, but that just encourages more fucking shit tests like they have in the US, where there are few written answers. EVERY test should be ENTIRELY written answers.

Then no matter what activity you pick in life, being self-sufficient with regards to presenting and illustrating your ideas or doing some basic marketing is always valuable.

Same with code. Even if you do not plan to be a programmer, having a basic understanding what programming is can help you in interdisciplinary settings.

Written questions and diagrams are a good idea. But tests can be constructed in many ways. For alternative based questions grading with computer can be more productive and less error-prone, freeing the teacher to focus in more important tasks such as preparing lessons.

I couldn't agree more with the author's assessment. A bit of an extension beyond just training in new tools: we need to help adults in schools understand the value technology can provide in their daily lives before we can expect to see the true potential out of the complex technologies schools are spending billions of dollars on - looking at you blended learning and [fill in other buzzword technologies].

If an adult in a school doesn't appreciate the value that basic everyday tools provide (I'm talking things like calendars and organized email), it's a huge mountain to climb to get them to trust what technology can do to assist their work with kids. It's quite shocking how many great educators fall in this bucket. Then add the labels of 'laggard' and 'luddite' to these people instead of truly understanding them and forget creating any trust and change.

It's a Maslow's thing, honestly, and so much is being spent on things way too far up the pyramid. There's so many low hanging problems to go after first to save great educators time and simultaneously build trust in the power and magic of technology. Right now we're burning all our political (and real) capital on the promises of 'edtech' without truly solving the needs of the people in the seats using them. I fear where it will end up, and the missed opportunity it represents.

Source: I've been working with all types of schools throughout the US, with heavy exposure in NYC.

The solution to education problems isn't throwing money at it. Or at least spend it on teacher salaries, right?

At a ballpark a 30 student class might be ~12,000$ per student, but a starting teacher salary is on average ~45,000. Pay the teacher 120k (including benefits) and that's still only 1/3 of the total cost. (NYC pays over 20k per student and pays teachers $54,000 - $119,000 annually.) http://www.teachingdegree.org/new-york/salary/

Are there any countries that do pay teachers very highly?

Luxembourg teacher salaries begin at 73,700 euros (79,920 USD), http://www.wort.lu/en/luxembourg/starting-salaries-of-73-700... Germany hits second place.

[0]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...

[1]http://study.com/articles/Average_Salary_With_A_Bachelors_De...

1/2 of all teachers quit the profession in the first 5 years. So, the on the ground benefits tend to be worse than you might think. 9 and 1/2 percent don't even last their first year. Turnover in teaching is about four percent higher than other professions. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-do...

PS: High school also pays much better on average in large part because you need to deal with high school students.

This of course assumes that standardized testing is actually a good mechanism for measuring outcomes.

Which IMO is an extremely dubious assertion.

A lot of people who opt-out of the public school system at great personal expense do so because they agree with those damn teacher's unions on this very question.

> Why here?

Simple. Because I don't care if my burger sucks but I do care that my kid doesn't get a good early education.

A preschool teacher could triple their salary without leaving the middle class. Depending on the size of their family they might even be living in poverty while working full-time.

People teach for a lot of reasons, but even the most enthusiastic and altruistic person is going to bulk at that kind of a sacrifice. And understandably so.

How do you propose to measure outcomes of education without testing for ability to recall and utilize the knowledge and skills taught?

>A lot of people who opt-out of the public school system at great personal expense do so because they agree with those damn teacher's unions on this very question.

I left school. I don't know anyone who did so for dislike of standardized testing. Instead most found the value of that education to be low compared to work experience.

>Simple. Because I don't care if my burger sucks but I do care that my kid doesn't get a good early education.

Why not double pilots salaries in order to prevent plane crashes? Double doctors salaries to prevent mistakes? Politicians should be paid the most under this model, imagine the utopia we'd live in if the president made a billion dollars a year. Every study I've seen has shown increasing wages doesn't have a real impact on performance. If we aren't allow to test it how do we know if we raised it too much or too little?

Consider to raise teachers salaries you have to tax the local community, thus lowering the take home pay of the parents of those children. Thus worsening the home life of those children and worsening outcomes. You have to strike a balance and emotionally throwing money at teachers won't resolve anything. We need proof that outcomes are improving or declining.

I'm not.

But you have the burden of evidence backward! If you want to use metrics like standardized tests in this manner, then it's your job to prove to me that standardized tests are reasonably good metrics.

Why? Because forcing schools to optimize for counter-productive metrics is actively harmful! Better to have no idea how to measure than to measure the wrong thing, use that metric to make high-stakes decisions, and thereby actively harm true outcomes.

> I don't know anyone who did so for dislike of standardized testing

I mean parents who send their kids to private schools or home-school. Lots of them loathe standardized tests. Google will help you find the manifestos.

> Why not double pilots salaries in order to prevent plane crashes? Double doctors salaries to prevent mistakes?

Eventually you hit a saturation point where the return on investment becomes too low to justify the additional expense.

20k aint that point.

> Instead most found the value of that education to be low compared to work experience.

Well sure, if you happen to work in a trade where formal education isn't necessary. Nothing wrong with that of course! Most parents want to give their children the option to do something else, at least in their early formative years. I've no problem with my kid going to a tech school or even dropping out for on-the-job training, but I don't want to lock them into never being a doctor/lawayer/scientist before they hit puberty.

> thus lowering the take home pay of the parents of those children. Thus worsening the home life of those children and worsening outcomes

Do you have any evidence for this claim? Sounds extremely unlikely to me.

>But you have the burden of evidence backward!

Then claim

>Eventually you hit a saturation point where the return on investment becomes too low to justify the additional expense. 20k aint that point.

Do you have evidence of this claim? How do you know? Please show sources.

>Do you have any evidence for this claim? Sounds extremely unlikely to me.

You don't believe poorer kids have worse outcomes in life?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528796/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2998067/Bright-pupil...

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-children-in-poo...

https://newrepublic.com/article/123093/rich-kids-better-poor...

Of course! There are really two claims in my argument that I need to defend:

1. Pay is effecting the number of highly skilled people who enter the field. (Also that standardized testing is effecting the number of high skilled people who enter the field, but that was a bit of a tangential point I think?)

2. high skilled teachers provide better educational outcomes.

I THINK you're asking for evidence of the non-parenthetical portion of 1, so that's what I've provided. If I mis-interpreted your request for evidence, definitely let me know. I have cited good introductory essays for each of these three claims I've made.

So, here's evidence for the claim that pay is effected teacher quality.

This article from WaPo is a pretty balanced perspective (despite the clickbait title), citing some major names on both sides of the debate. It doesn't contain any of the data or analysis -- just competent summaries -- but it does link to the actual research if you're interested:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/08/...

From there you can follow bibliographies and get a pretty decent picture of the landscape.

One key take-away that resonates with my experience, both interacting with STEM teachers and tutoring college kids: "Generally speaking, the small fraction of the most cognitively skilled college students who elect to become teachers has declined for decades (Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004)". Other research does the work of tying those choices to various things, most notably pay.

> You don't believe poorer kids have worse outcomes in life?

Of course I do.

What I don't believe is that local school districts are anywhere remotely close to taxing people into poverty.

Your claim was NOT that "poor students perform worse", which is what all your evidence backs. Your claim was that education budgets are such an enormous drain on household incomes that they make an appreciable difference in quality of life. I think that's probably bullshit.

I don't know if this is true - but that math major is probably a lot more likely to go work for an accounting firm at 60k a year rather than put up with the stress of teaching at 40k.

Finally, I actually agree with you on the pay vs. proof of outcomes thing. The problem is that we lack reliable ways for measuring teacher efficacy. I have worked in both urban and suburban schools. I'm not a better teacher in the suburbs, but I sure as hell look a lot more effective.

And if you think that's bad try getting a Computer Science teacher to literally shave six figures off their salary!

I hate to bad-mouth teachers, because there are so many people taking haircuts on their salary for altruistic reasons.

But my experience tutoring college math majors is exactly this. The low performers are nearly all interested in teaching, the high performers nearly all headed to either grad school or engineering/finance.

That's why you'll encounter a lot of super great humanities teachers but a lot fewer stellar STEM teachers.

Salaries are unequal, so that naturally reduces the prestige of being a teacher. It's also a traditional "feminine" job with strong parenting/caregiving elements that further chips away at its status for some.

I don't judge anyone for seeing teaching as a "plan B"; however, the significant turn over/drop out rate of teachers would call into doubt whether it is as safe + easy a back up career as we culturally project.

Standardized testing with per state standards has been nationally mandatory since NCLB, so clearly nothing relying on it is hampered by whatever opposition teachers unions may have.

Despite being a good idea, it's a hard sell when so many states are facing teacher shortages.

For anyone else who had trouble parsing the article, here's a TL;DR:

1. Why buy fancy top-of-the-line hardware when something cheap and utilitarian will do just fine?

2. The author's figure is made up. He takes an estimate of total spending and then assumes 70% of it was wasted. Based on unsubstantiated personal anecdote. But there's a page-long rant about cookware written in cringe-worthy style.

My take:

I'm sympathetic with (1). But I also know some people in K-12 IT. They're professionals with some accounting education who know how to perform a reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

Sometimes money gets wasted on expensive toys.

But sometimes it's less expensive to stick with Macs or Windows machines than retrain hundreds of teachers on Chrome OS or whatever. Sometimes there's bundling and the 30% or 70% that never gets used represented a 0% additional cost to the school. And sometimes people are just stupid.

Probably cost me $5000 since I could have been consulting. Still, it was worth it for love.

Now certain students hate using it, though they do appreciate getting their grades back sooner.

In the classroom, you have (1) the teacher's skills, (2) the computer hardware purchased, (3) and the computer software purchased.

In the kitchen, you have (1) the chef's skills and (2) the hardware purchased.

If it's true that "software is eating the world", then a good analogy wouldn't skip over it. Software could be like the recipe, which of course makes a big difference in cooking outcomes.

Get off my lawn!