Rather than offering effective personalised learning, introducing screen-based Ed Tech has opened up a whole new hilarious avenue of distraction in the classroom. I recently met an investor in an AI education firm that promised to “fix barriers to learning” by providing “neuro-personalised” software for classroom use. I asked him what happened if, instead of using the software, the children used a VPN line and watched the football? He frowned and said: “I don’t know.”
Well I decided to find out. I asked a large group of teenagers what actually happens when screens and AI learning were introduced to the classroom: the pupils use a VPN line and watch the football. During the hilarious conversation that followed, one of the teenagers laughed so hard he slid off the chair and started banging the floor with his fist, recalling all the nonsense they get up to in lessons. I urge all Headteachers to conduct similar focus groups before they are persuaded by the Head of Technology or Bursar or Business Manager of their wider academy trust into inflicting Ed Tech, or screens of any sort, on their pupils.
In January, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said AI could be “the biggest boost for education in the last 500 years”. She has clearly not stepped foot in a secondary school classroom recently. There are two particular problems with this boast: the useless software and physical devices themselves.
Firstly the software: it generally overpromises and under delivers. For instance, Third Space Learning promises under-resourced primary schools “a personal online maths tutor for every pupil who needs it”. The website shows happy children wearing headphones and plugged into a screen. The Headteacher of an East London primary school whose trust has bought the package for its multiple schools, tells me: “The children hate it. The chatbots can’t understand what the children are saying. The children just ask them stupid questions. It’s a complete waste of money.” Let us not forget that approximately 38% of children do not meet ‘expected standards’ for Year Six SATs.
Another popular bit of software is Sparx Learning that ‘automates’ data collection about pupils’ reading. How insanely joyless. Parents report doing Sparx for their children because they recognise it is an entirely box-ticking exercise that imparts no love of books. Publishers are blaming such ‘innovations’ for ruining childhood reading. Is it any wonder that a woeful two thirds of children don’t read for pleasure? Digital data do not tally with actual education, knowledge, understanding or skills for children.
Secondly: the device itself. Laptops or tablets in the classroom allow pupils to have infinite fun and avoid any teaching offered, whether screen-based or traditional chalk-and-talk.
Teenagers from Good and Outstanding secondary schools share what really happens – not what the AI EdTech salesmen promise – when individual screens are introduced into classrooms. Everything reported below happens while teachers are teaching or pupils are supposed to be getting on with work. While it is hilarious, it is not education by any stretch of the definition.
- We make notes of teachers’ number plates and in lessons search up their registration. At some point one of us will put up our hand and say, “Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt but I need to let you know your tax car is due to expire on November 3rd. That’s only four months away. Are you on it, Sir?” We do the same for MOTs.
- I was going through my smoothie phase and during one history lesson we browsed about 30 blenders working out which one to buy.
- Any international football tournament is a must-watch throughout all lessons.
- Classic games are Boxel Rebound with levels 36 and 49 being particularly difficult.
- Teachers do have ways of turning off all our browsing or gaming – the screen will burst into a red explosion – but then we just start up again.
- Chess.com is my go-to site in lessons. My friend and I play for hours in all classes.
- We have an ongoing competition in Economics to see who can keep the chatbot conversation going the longest. We are supposed to be following the PowerPoint lesson but instead go on car hire sites and talk to the chatbot. We ask if the car has car seats for triplets, then a roof rack, then we ask if actually we could also hire a trailer and could we drive the car to Benin and drop off there. We ask if they do charter flights and when the chatbot finally says: “This conversation is terminated,” we’ve lost.
- All the teachers know what’s going on. Anyone who is sitting with their laptop open, blanking out at the screen with their right hand moving on the three arrows is gaming.
- We all plug the extension in and start the game at the same time. The schools can’t ban the games because they are part of Google – it’s great.
- My favourite is Bullet Force. We spend Science shooting Russians.
- Run3, Slope Run, ShellShockers, Tetras and Snake are all-round classics that the whole back row plays at once.
The whole business of screen-based learning is impossible. No matter how brilliant the teacher, using laptops in classrooms turns teachers into digital policemen constantly slamming down laptops and tapping pupils on the shoulders saying in a resigned voice, ‘Stop playing that now.’ As one pupil explains, “No one ever stops.”
No wonder Sweden is investing in textbooks again, Norway is turning its back on the iPad for every pupil experiment and South Korea has halted an experiment to use AI textbooks in classrooms. Less Tetras more textbooks for British pupils too, please.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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Notice the Globalist Miscegenation Propaganda in that photo: blonde Ethnic European girl, Ethnic African boy, another blonde Ethnic European girl, then Ethnic Oriental boy. No White Boys in sight, except a small one at the far end of the room.
Another news item today is directly related to this, before the kids even reach school:
Children aren’t learning to speak properly. Parents are to blame
“Excessive phone use creating a barrier to interpersonal relationships is now so common that it has its own word – “technoference”– and we’ve all seen it in action when it comes to parents and children.”
“The result isn’t just unruly children, but an entire generation whose ability to communicate and understand the world around them is being disrupted by a lack of crucial face-to-face interaction.”
Here’s a great public comment:
“— “The first three years of raising a child is an endless, constant engagement of ushering them into a world they can’t comprehend. Chanting baby songs, nursery rhymes, keeping up a running monologue of what’s going on around them, what’s being done, and why, liberally sprinkled with absurdities to keep a baby both amused and thinking. Holding them in a lap and reading to them from cloth books, explaining the pictures as one goes along is another necessity. They’ll squirm and grab and slobber and squeal but they also begin to grasp the rhythm of language and the give and take of verbal exchanges. It’s exhausting, boring, repetitive, and seems largely… Read more »
I started out (1957) with chalk and slate. We had paper and pencils too. Then age 7 we moved onto dippy-pen and ink and exercise books.
A large part of teaching was from the blackboard – memorable myrrh from a maths teacher at secondary school: “Pay attention. Watch the board while I go through it”.
My final year or so at school was the year that the ZX80 had first appeared and then the ZX81 a few months before I left school at 18. It was all chalk and talk for me, and I am very glad about that.
These children are doing what kids do, running rings around adults and teaching themselves in the process. I did that by sneaking out to the pub which I suspect my housemaster knew about but tolerated, and it was fun.
Maybe I would have been better at software stuff than I am if I’d spent more time on computing at uni but in all honesty I am analogue in most respects and during my time at work in engineering it still hadn’t been subsumed by digital processing and I was good enough at it to get by.
I was in the first ever Computer Studies Group that was offered to our sixth form. Official lessons were “last week we did GOTO, now let’s look at GOSUB.” Unofficially I spent them tweaking “Lemonade” (remember that?) so instead of letting you run a lemonade stall, it announced “Welcome to the exciting and glamorous world of the Slave Trade,” and played the Camptown Races.
The only distraction we had was looking put of the window, if I’d had the Internet available to me in the classroom I’d never have done a thing. I think it must be tough for kids.
I just remember for our lessons in the computer lab, learning about word processing and whatnot, in the ’80s ( with those white monitors with green text ), playing Granny’s Garden. Do you remember that game? That’s when floppy disks were still a thing.
A new generation of IT geeks in the making. Bring it on.
…because they’re not scared of the tech, and they learn in the process that the teachers know a lot less then they do, which makes the whole thing a lot more fun. And when you’re having fun, you don’t even realise you’re learning.
…and well developed anarchic tendencies and relentless questioning of authority while remaining courteous are very necessary characteristics of determined and focussed IT professionals.
Interesting take on it. Perhaps in some cases you are correct, not convinced in all cases.
You can’t question a machine. You’d rather children be radicalised by a machine than a person? Because an ideology sits within both, the difference being that you can’t argue or change a machines ideology (the ideology of its programmer). And although the children can, at the moment – somewhat surprisingly – access sites they shouldn’t, it’s an easy thing to stop. In fact, it’s so easy that it’s almost as if they want us to know that it’s chaos so everyone is less fearful for what will surely come – machine taught ideology in the shape of machine learnt psychology and machine efficient repetition. And what do machines build? Other machines.
Oh dear. I work in IT. I was educated before computers in schools were a thing. I had no trouble picking up “tech” as I went along, when I started programming. The brain I was blessed with (such as it is) and whatever I learnt at school from books and chalk on blackboards, seems to have been sufficient to get me started. So I am sceptical regarding any claims that it’s necessary or advantageous to introduce kids to “tech” in schools.
I rather have the opposite view. And I very much work in IT, too, for the last thirty years and solidly for the last fifteen. LOL
We seem to have a lot in common. Out of morbid curiosity, what kind of programming do you do?
Cobol, ADABAS/Natural, Java. Don’t do much coding these days, mainly design, product owner/subject matter expert, bridge between business and technical teams. I’m not a great coder – not bad I guess, but don’t think I would have made a great living at it had not broadened out into aforementioned areas. I was pleased to have grasped OO paradigm at a relatively late stage in life – a few of our ex-Cobol and Natural coders really struggled with OO.
Never even heard of Natural and I’ve been in the game a long time! I think some people struggle with OO because it’s such a fundamental shift in thinking, and some people can’t adapt, so what they do instead is just write their old code within a framework that supports OO programming… there’s an analogy in there I’m sure!
It was a SoftwareAG product, German firm, Rolls Royce aerospace were heavy users. Started off as green screen. UNIX and mainframes mainly. ADABAS was marketed as “post relational” – not SQL compliant, supported arrays in tables.
“some people can’t adapt, so what they do instead is just write their old code within a framework that supports OO programming”
Yeah we’ve got a bit of that – methods that go on for 100s of lines, no re-use, no encapsulation, no use of inheritance or interfaces, lack of understanding of objects, scoping, too much use of class level variables…
100s of lines? Bloody amateurs! I inherited a codebase which had a single function of over 1500 lines. Now that’s proper commitment. Although to what I’m not sure. Bloody-minded laziness maybe?
Many people struggle with OO because its explained badly in the textbooks and the most commonly presented examples (which tend to revolve around the classification of animals and such) are mostly constructed, are somewhat absurd, and don’t click with any real-world applications that the learner will have come across. This leads many people to think OO is a classification system. Also many programming languages implement OO in a clunky way, with the OO bits seeming to have been added as an afterthought rather than being at the heart of the design.
Isn’t it the case that children are tech-savvy before they go to school and it is they who should be teaching the teachers?
It’s why plans to ban social media, and all the on-line child-safety non-sense is bound to fail because children know far more than the adults (supposedly) making the rules.
In a way maybe. Depends what you mean by tech-savvy. They know how to use it, but that’s not the same as understanding how it’s put together.