1:1 ed tech (e.g. chromebooks) probably exacerbates the problem because kids have a single machine that's their own. They can customize it as they please, for better and worse.

When I was his age, my school's thin clients would wipe most of your customizations every time you logged out. For the handful of standalone desktops, you'd still have to set stuff up on each machine individually. This limited the effectiveness of the various tricks we played to get past IT guardrails.

I think the title is a little misleading, though. The essay details why DNS-level blocking doesn't work in educational environments. The title suggests it'd talk about why ed-tech fails in a more general case. Remember, projectors, document cameras, VHS players, and Smart boards were all red-hot tech at some point. Even today, ed-tech is more than just computers assigned to kids.

In my day, tests were on paper and collected at the end of class.

Now they’re online and kids exchange answers by taking the cell phone to the bathroom.

Or they will exploit the online nature and compare answers during the passing period AFTER the class a submit it before the next class starts. Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!

Instead of being 25-50% short response, tests are all multiple choice so they can be automatically graded.

To think my teachers recorded grades in a ledger and computed averages by hand for classes of 35+ students…

To get a healthy society, you must teach people how to behave, then (again, still explicitly prevent serious crimes, but otherwise) trust them. Some will take advantage of the system, but they may still face natural and social consequences, and some abuse of the system is OK.

A practical example of this from fitness is turning exercise into a sport.

No phones, no internet at school. If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless. Leave the screens to their software and programming classes.

I'd say it will be a blessing when this debacle is replaced with AI, except the AI will also come from the revolving income stream guys, and will also have children's well-being as an afterthought. It will be the same failure, but with 4x the margin going to 1/100 the previous number of vendors, just like every "tech advance" in the past decade.

OK

I teach a code club. I try to get the students excited and focused, and especially on projects where they work together, it generally works really well, even for students who obviously aren't quite 'into it'.

But at absolutely any opportunity where they are not focused (and there's always someone) they try to play roblox or other games. They try to have it running in the background and switch. And even installed a workspace switcher so it wasn't obvious they had game windows open.

It's really like highly addictive drugs. For kids, at least, the best solution is to make them unavailable while they are supposed to be learning.

In my opinion, elementary school (grades K-5) should really focus a good deal on rote memorization, but only if this focuses on teaching every kind of game and technique to facilitate that kind of learning. By that I mean making flash cards, learning to create and use mnemonic devices, etc.

I just asked ChatGPT, and got something like 15 different techniques, some of which can be used with kindergarteners, all of which can be used by grade 5.

There are always going to be "boring" things to learn. These things are often no longer boring once you know them by heart. In fact, they're often extremely valuable to know. I think by grade 5, if kids are going to be taught anything, they need to be taught the techniques that they can use—on their own—to make learning fun.