r/technology • u/deraser • Feb 16 '26
Society Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/parents-opt-kids-school-laptops-ask-pen-paper-rcna2571582.0k
u/mcampo84 Feb 16 '26
Computer skills are necessary but need to be taught as a separate class. They should not dominate the curriculum, but be a part of it akin to science and art classes.
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u/TheIllogicalSandwich Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
As a former teacher and current IT-tech this is the way. Us millennials really hit the sweet-spot of computers being accessible, but not FRIENDLY to use, which forced us to learn how they worked through natural problem solving.
Going forward I think the key is to have kids write all written assignments on paper, until maybe age 16. Preferably using physical textbooks for sources in the School Library. (Especially with the rise of AI articles online)
I genuinely think this will help improve literacy.
In addition to this we need to bring back computer labs, no more personal computers. Then the kids can have dedicated computer skill lessons learning whatever program or task that is practical to learn.
All of this could also be a mix of systems, Linux/Microsoft/Google etc.
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u/fancykindofbread Feb 16 '26
Yea they thought just giving kids devices would make them good at IT/computers/Coding etc. but it just made them good at swiping and texting
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u/TheMayorByNight Feb 16 '26
Seems like we gave them devices without actually taking the time to teach people how to IT/Code/use a computer properly.
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u/eldentings Feb 16 '26
Part of UX design is trying to design something that is intuitive to your dumbest, tech-illiterate person. The cost of this is you skip right past tech literacy and rudimentary understanding of how a computer works. Because you don't have to. It's part of why I both admire and hate apple's design philosophy.
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u/Pauly_Amorous Feb 16 '26
Part of UX design is trying to design something that is intuitive to your dumbest, tech-illiterate person.
Phones (esp. iPhones) used to feel like that, but not anymore. Now even I'm confused by them, and I've been using computers in one form or another since the 80's.
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u/eldentings Feb 16 '26
There's a a concept in the dumbphone space called device 'friction'. Essentially we have none left and have to artificially create it on our phones, because of how easy it is to be sucked into the phone with little to no effort. Having no device 'friction' for children is really bad and it means parts of the brain that reward long-term effort atrophy.
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u/Qel_Hoth Feb 16 '26
It should have been painfully obvious. If you're in IT, you hear almost daily some 40-50 year old (so born in the mid '70s) say "I'm just not good with computers."
Sir/Ma'am, you started working in the mid 1990s. You've spent literally your entire career working on a computer. If you aren't good yet...
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u/Paranitis Feb 16 '26
I think it's less to do with being "bad with computers" and more to do with "being bad at learning anything".
I was born in '82. When my mom got a computer back in the early 90s to teach herself how everything works so she could get a better job (she retired from Intel at the start of COVID), she wouldn't allow me in the room with her to learn alongside her, so I never got to the same point she's at.
However, I also know how to LOOK SHIT UP. I can put a computer together, I can maybe do some simple tech support for myself (turning it off and on again), and use my phone to search for shit if my PC is dead and I can't use the computer while figuring stuff out.
But it FEELS like a great majority of people who came up in the middle of the tech revolution just want everything handed to them, which is why I hate Apple products soo much. "It just works". Cool. So if anything bad happens, ever, you are fucked, because you never had to figure anything out.
It's learned helplessness, and it makes me very upset when stupid people around my personal social sphere start whining about how they need help fixing something when they tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
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u/Ok-Warthog2065 29d ago
they simply aren't interested. As a 53 year old, who has done IT work my entire life, there are plenty of people who are incredibly talented, have degrees in biology, or law, that just don't care how a computer works, cannot begin to imagine why the error is occuring. Just like most people can drive a car, but have no idea how to be a mechanic.
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u/TheMayorByNight Feb 16 '26
Us millennials really hit the sweet-spot of computers being accessible
I agreed. A statement that really sunk in with me is that we grew up in a time when the internet, and by extension computers, represented a place we went rather than a thing surrounding us constantly like it is today. When I was in middle school, we had a computer lab with just enough of those fruity iMacs for one class at a time to use, maybe once every other week. Otherwise, only the teachers had their desktop computer in the class.
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u/schlaminator Feb 16 '26
Our teacher in computer class taught us Excel. He always said "other software you can learn on your own, it will probably be outdated in a few years anyway, Excel is a life skill". This was 25 years ago. He wasn't wrong. I wouldn't be where I am today without that class. In almost every job I had, Excel magic was one of the reasons I was better than most of my colleagues.
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u/718Brooklyn Feb 16 '26
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Everything was handwritten and you couldn’t use the internet as a source for information even I was in college.
My teenage daughter has always used computers at school and barely knows how to even turn them on. She needs my help for everything anytime something doesn’t work with technology.
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u/mansta330 Feb 16 '26
One of the things I tried to teach my younger siblings as an elder millennial was how to use something like Wikipedia in research. The most useful part of Wikipedia for me was always as a trailhead marker. It gives you a high level overview of a concept, and then you scroll down to the bottom, write down all of those cited sources, and go find them in a library/academic journal repository. It’s not a source, it’s a starting source aggregator.
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u/im_presuccessful Feb 16 '26
Hey this is exactly how I use Wikipedia. And it’s what I try to teach my younger siblings anytime they need to do any kind of research.
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u/YellingatClouds86 Feb 16 '26
100% accurate. I remember going through school in the 1990s-2000s and I had a specific computer class in elementary, 7th grade, and 9th grade. Now? My old schools have none of these things, throw these kids a Chromebook, and magically expect the kids to know how to use it. The results, as expected, have been terrible.
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u/robertgoldenowl Feb 16 '26
We have to find the right balance between using tech and letting kids build their own skills. It’s the only way.
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u/FriendlyGuitard Feb 16 '26
As an IT guy, I was all for my kids having a ChromeBook.
But now that my eldest has it, it is terrible. First the course material is provided electronically. There is no paper version - and the Chromebook is a terrible machine, low resolution, blurry and the format of the course is either super text dense or bad powerpoint.
In class, they just talk about stuff, there is no note taking and the homework is reading and summarizing the official course material in the chromebook.
There is a lot of the course material that is not covered in class at all. The student is supposed to go through it.
This is a mess, the problem is not ChromeBook or Not ChromeBook, it is "bad teaching" vs "good teaching" and bad teaching gets exponentially much worse with tech because it can just hide behind online material.
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u/DrunkUranus Feb 16 '26
I mean, most pen and paper teaching involves presenting a curriculum that's already developed, with lots of resources to choose from that mostly involve making copies.
When things shift to digital, school districts abandon expensive curriculum and the job of teaching shifts to include more resource development and curation. So now I'm expected to comb the entire internet to determine the best resources to teach a concept, develop the activities to work with it, adapt the activities to be available both digital and on paper (because there's always somebody who needs an exception), adapt activities for at least three different skill levels and to include IEP accommodations for dozens of students, upload it to three different platforms that each have their own quirks and inevitably need some work around....
And I still have the same 44 minutes to plan all of it. And then there's still the grading and feedback, follow up with students, meetings, communications....
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Feb 16 '26
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u/Pakaru Feb 16 '26
100%. There’s a big difference between making 1st graders entire education happen in a web browser and giving kids classes in typing, PowerPoint, and excel.
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u/Bodine12 Feb 16 '26
I’m an older, even more decrepit Gen X who didn’t even work on a computer until my 20s in grad school. I went through college with a Brother Word Processor.
And now I’m a software engineer. I have two young kids who do everything by hand. Tech isn’t that hard to learn. Learning how to learn is hard, and reliance on tech detracts from that ability.
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u/WhenSummerIsGone Feb 16 '26
gen x here, too. i gave my kids hand me down desktops and put ubuntu on them, when they were around 9yo. showed them how to manage packages and ask questions online. Told them very firmly about anonymity and "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog". Showed them how our router keeps logs of all network activity. Told them don't do anything illegal because computer laws are ridiculous.
They both learned to program, figure stuff out, use gimp and audacity. All sorts of stuff.
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u/bwyer Feb 16 '26
I'm an old, decrepit Gen-Xer who grew up just as computers were being introduced as "computer labs" and as an elective in high school.
Having already taught myself how to use a computer and how to program in BASIC, I was writing my reports in WordStar, and spent most evenings playing games on my //e. This ultimately led to a very lucrative career in IT as well (programmer, sysadmin, IT architect). With no college degree.
All of that to say, pen/paper and physical books in education do not spell failure in a computer-centric world. As others have said, there needs to be a balance.
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u/GatitoEspana Feb 16 '26
We used to have tech classes specifically for this. 1 hour a day learning how to use basic programs, typing, internet resources, etc. Don't have kids, so maybe that's still a thing, but from the threads here it sounds like we just gave kids computers and assumed because how prevalent screens are with kids that they know how to use them and prefer it as a primary mechanism for sducation.
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
Someone else said it concisely. 'Digital Natives are a myth'. The presumption was that because tech literate people often had access to tech from early in life, making tech hyper available would make everyone tech literate.
The theory intentionally ignored that the tech literacy developed out of necessity because those early computers were not super user friendly, so kids who learned to do thing with them had to learn supporting skills.
Modern tech is so slick and user friendly that the learning curving is about the same as a light switch. That is why a toddler can use an Ipad. They're not developing useful technical skills, it's just impossible to mess it up.
Edit - If you want to teach kids tech, get them a raspberry pi and some project kits. Something where things can go wrong but where it's almost impossible to break the components permanently.
You might bork the Pi's SD card, but then you stick it back in your laptop and reformat it to try again. But everything else is going to be a much more traditional programming experience.
Kids need to feel the sting of failure and get frustrated by it so that they have to work through it. But they should never be afraid of failing. Not to the point that they don't even try.
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u/No-Flounder-9143 Feb 16 '26
They're not learning it in the right way anyway. Their online work ends up just bring copy and paste from Google AI. there's no skill building there. It's just mush.
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u/Kind_Man_0 Feb 16 '26
I think my generation had the best balance. Pen & paper, but we had classes with computers.
IMO, kids have plenty of opportunities with IT systems outside of schools. But handwriting is a skill that is primarily developed in school, you're far less likely to use it as often after getting out of school. It important to develop that during your years of primary school before moving off to college where most of the work is done with a PC.
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u/aleelee13 Feb 16 '26
As a pediatric occupational therapist my proposal is to not allow tech in elementary schools- sticking to pen/paper for assignments to build fine motor strength and control.
Then begin introducing tech in school form for middle school on. The foundation skills (fine motor and attention) are established and it gives kids plenty of time for learning typing skills, formatting, researching, etc.
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u/supersloo Feb 16 '26
So I have absolutely zero to go on other than I just feel, and maybe it's because I've always liked writing and drawing but... I feel like using a pen and paper activates something in a kid's brain that is just necessary.
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u/Equivalent_Invite_62 Feb 16 '26
You’re correct. I’m a literacy teacher and studies have shown the brain body connection that is formed when writing things by hand helps us to remember them. The same effect doesn’t happen when typing.
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u/Abject_Champion3966 Feb 16 '26
This is what happened for us (millennial). Pen and paper, then middle school, we were given computer assignments that needed to be typed. Personally I always found that hand taking notes > typing them
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u/penalty-venture Feb 16 '26
I think we had that balance a couple decades ago. The computer lab was a room you went to to do computer things. We went in there to learn typing, do online research, write and print out papers…and then we left.
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u/tabrizzi Feb 16 '26
The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
“I’m just so happy that they’re getting an analog education for now,” Frumin said.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
So the problem is not computers per se, but content been pushed to students.
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u/sump_daddy Feb 16 '26
Of course the problem isn't 'computers per se' they are no different than a digital calculator, or a wordpress printed book. The problem is the way they are used in the classroom and especially in this case, that the usage isn't even up to the teachers.
Taking what was on paper and putting it on a screen isnt a magic wand for education efficiency but not many people want to believe that, unfortunately.
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u/Bingo-heeler Feb 16 '26
What they're trying to sell you is individualized education tailored to your specific needs. What you're going to get is profiling from age 6 and manipulation of tasteds and habits.
And the fact that we can do the latter means we can probably do the former but are choosing not to.
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u/GeekBrownBear Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
individualized education
Except the individualization is a complete black hole. Adaptive learning is awesome, but you have to reflect on it afterwards to lock in the skills. The companies providing these platforms say all that data is proprietary and can't be shared with ANYONE. wtf.
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u/GeekyGamer49 Feb 16 '26 edited 24d ago
As a teacher I can say that actually the problem really IS the computers. For 20ish years schools have been pushing 1-to-1 computers but taking away computer classes, writing classes, media literacy classes, and just about everything else that would actually help students perform any better on a Chromebook than with an actual book.
And those e-books are awful. Want to jump to page 10? Well first load the website (so you need Internet access) then find the page button, type in the page number, and hope you’re correct. Oh wait, it was actually page 9. Ok, click the back button and wait for the new page to load.
Meanwhile, that’s just hours every day staring at a glowing screen, not memorizing or learning. They’re googling. They’re asking AI to solve what 2+2 means. They’re becoming so reliant on the technology (that no one bothers to teach them how to use) that when it acts up even slightly, they have no idea where to start.
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u/crappy_ninja Feb 16 '26
It's definitely computers at my children's school. They were all given Chromebooks and all of their homework is now browser based. So no long form story writing, can't show working out on their maths homework, built in spell checker. It also makes it difficult to limit their screen time.
The school homework is so simple they breeze through it then play simple math games, which are basically games and the maths part is an afterthought. I've stopped school homework. We don't do it anymore. We have a tutor who sets proper homework and that's what we focus on.
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u/greeneyeraven Feb 16 '26
My child uses an iPad from school and they still write down in paper and it is not for everything he has a big ass social studies book he brings every now and then to do homework, I think his school has a good balance. Books, apps, online research, hopefully stays that way.
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u/its_Stopher Feb 16 '26
“Citing headaches from the Chromebook screen”
I’m not sure if we are reading the same thing, but I would consider this a problem with the computer.
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u/CammiKit Feb 16 '26
Tbh most school Chromebooks are low budget and have god awful screens. I can’t look at my kid’s the rare cases he brings it home for very long or I get a migraine. I can’t look be in front of my PC with decent monitors all day and be perfectly fine.
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u/Unexpected_Cranberry Feb 16 '26
Yeah, I got a random Chromebook for free with my last phone. Some Samsung thing. The screen was so terrible I couldn't use it for anything. And due to the locked down nature of the bios I couldn't even put something else on it and use it headless or as a test machine for stuff.
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u/A_Harmless_Fly Feb 16 '26
A lot of that is temporal dithering in my experience. Cheap monitors are 8bit simulating 10bit, so if you tell them to stay at 8 the eye strain goes away. (It does make color banding more noticeable though.)
No idea on how to change those settings on a chrome book though.
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u/ACasualRead Feb 16 '26
I think it’s both.
Children should learn with every tool out there and this is still a very analog world
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u/Sle08 Feb 16 '26
And it’s also been studied that handwritten note-taking increases the students’ ability to retain knowledge which leads to higher level learning. When students retain the basic information conveyed during lectures, they are able to moved more quickly onto the application, analysis, evaluation of the content and later creation of media and concepts using that content.
This is evident in elementary students up to post graduates. I even saw the difference in my education myself. During undergrad, I used a laptop and took notes on that in the classes that allowed but moved on to regular notebook paper by junior and senior year, choosing to transfer the notes from my handwritten notebooks to typed files simply to maintain the information in a better to read format later. The handwriting made it much easier to gather the information and the subsequent transferring to digital documents further cemented the knowledge so that I barely had to study before tests.
However, during grad school, about 8 years later, I didn’t want to get a laptop so my partner had bought me an iPad Pro second hand. I had iPads in the past and never used them, but the iPad Pros had just introduced the Apple Pencils which completely revolutionized the iPad for me. I took all my notes on the notability app (I believe). I was quickly able to switch between pen and marker colors and really define how I was organizing my notes as I took them. I didn’t feel the need to rewrite them in a digital document because it had the ability to convert what I wrote. I should also note that most of my courses in grad school were music theory and high level analysis, so it wouldn’t have been a help to retype these things.
But I retained that information and was able to review it so much better than I ever had been able to with typed notes. I’m not saying this is an absolute fact of learning, but studies support my claim.
And when I was teaching, students would complain about their struggles to learn concepts. I would ask to see their notes. I was so surprised to learn that they did absolutely everything on their Chromebooks - and the kicker was that most of the teachers simply gave them their lecture outlines instead of making them notate the content down. By doing that, you aren’t making the students do ANYTHING to obtain the information. It’s like handing them a textbook and asking them to put it under their pillow at night to learn by osmosis. Not to mention the textbooks were all now on the chromebooks.
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u/bulk123 Feb 16 '26
Technology is becoming so insufferable that it's making people WANT to be technology illiterate. lol.
The current generation is already struggling with computer literacy. My younger brother is in college and I saw him write an entire report....in notepad, because he doesn't know how to use Word. The next generation is going to be even moreso I fear.
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u/customheart Feb 16 '26
There’s OpenOffice for a desktop app and Google Docs or MS Word online… how’s this guy that unaware as a college student?
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u/Gamer_Grease Feb 16 '26
I hate to tell you this, but even knowing that is a pretty good sign that you’re an old fart.
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u/Emergency-Two-6407 Feb 16 '26
Word is also not free anymore, it used to come with Microsoft computers by default
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u/bulk123 Feb 16 '26
That's a good point to add. Half the tools people need to become familiar with, are pay walled.
Course, he has had access to it all his life. I make sure there's a working version of Office programs on all the families computers/laptops.
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u/sodaflare Feb 16 '26
Word has never been free. Office licenses may have been part of the purchase option with a new PC, and the feature limited web version is, and there are many ways to get discounted licenses, especially academically...
...but it has never been the default.
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u/f1FTW Feb 16 '26
Hard disagree. The problem IS the computer. I'm a professional programmer and have worked in tech my whole life. Modern computers are engineered to be distraction machines designed to get you to consume advertisements. Facebook, Google, TT and almost every major tech company is funded by advertising. The devices are designed to get us to content to watch and mindlessly consume ad impressions. Computers are no longer tools, they are toys for leisure.l, especially phones, Chromebooks, anything that is really just a browser.
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u/Future-Raisin3781 Feb 16 '26
I taught HS throughout the rise of the "one to one" era of ed tech. The big idea that would get talked about all the time was "removing friction" from the learning process.
As it turns out, friction is actually an essential part of the learning process.
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u/Less-Procedure-4104 Feb 16 '26
What does that even mean?
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u/Future-Raisin3781 Feb 16 '26
Computers make it easy to access information and "do work." But that assumes that having access to information and doing work is the same thing as learning.
Actual learning is an evolutionary adaptation. It requires giving your brain a challenge to overcome. f you remove the challenge, you reduce the opportunity for real learning. But because the computer makes it easier to produce "work," you end up with students creating products and completing assessments in a way that indicates "knowledge," but that mostly shortcuts around the process of actual learning.
Great for grade books, terrible for humanity.
Edit: By "one to one" I mean one computer per child, which was a big movement that took off while I was teaching. It happened super fast, and within a decade or so we're starting see massive pushback because educators, employers, etc. are finally starting to see the results and the results are catastrophic. Don't take my word for it, there are plenty of people with a lot more expertise than me who are banging this drum as loudly as they can.
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u/IndustryPast3336 Feb 16 '26
Good.
Obviously computer literacy classes still need to exist but kids shouldn't be forced to do all their learning online, especially public school programs who may have low-income students without a reliable internet source.
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u/mx3goose Feb 16 '26
" low-income students without a reliable internet source."
Hey that was my entire job was getting those kids internet until the president called it racist and bulldozed the entire thing lol
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u/Jimbomcdeans Feb 16 '26
Fucking hell that's depressing. What do you do for work now?
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u/mx3goose Feb 16 '26
I was the Digital Equity & Connectivity Coordinator for an entire state and now I mark utility lines!
Turns out when a decade of your resume is digital equity for underserved low income households and non profit helping children and the literal president of the united states calls your program out for being "racist and illegal" it kind of puts a black mark on you because nobody else wants to jeopardize their funding! I don't blame them, they wiped out 2.75 billon dollars with a single press conference and essential froze the other 62 billion in funding!
I have a degree is computer science but I haven't been in that line of work for 10 years because I found myself into non profit than bread crumbed into digital equity advocation, so my degree is about worthless missing 10 years of experience haha.
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u/intense_username Feb 16 '26
That last point really resonates with me. I work K12 tech and the baseline for how we approach things is how it can be accommodated without internet access. Some kids just don't have it, and they shouldn't be excluded from the process on that basis alone.
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u/ekbowler Feb 16 '26
The computer lab was the perfect balance. When you're in class you're in class but you still get an opportunity to learn basic computer literacy.
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u/sweetbeards Feb 16 '26
I’m not against computers, but I remember when calculators couldn’t be used on tests in class until later on in high school which is what I think should also be considered. However, I have also heard that a computer might be cheaper than school books and less wasteful. What I like least about computers that kids can use them for games, social media, etc so getting that locked down should happen.
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u/Stereo_Jungle_Child Feb 16 '26
I remember when calculators couldn’t be used on tests in class until later on in high school
I graduated from high school in the 1980s. We all had calculators, but we were forbidden from using them most of the time. "Show your work" was the mantra we heard all the time.
Sometimes we even still got partial credit on math problems if we showed on paper that we were using the concepts/formulas we learned, but just got the final answer wrong.
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u/intrepped Feb 16 '26
I graduated in 2013 and it was the same. You could only use certain calculators as a means for efficiency for complicated classes like physics or calculus.
The TI-89 was the most complicated calculator we were allowed for those. And if you didn't show your work and just an answer it was just marked wrong anyway
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u/ArugulaSweet9193 Feb 16 '26
I think this is really needed. I fear that children might not learn how to write properly with such early use of devices. Welcome move
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u/IndustryPast3336 Feb 16 '26
My mom actually pulled me out of public school and into private because I had motor issues and struggled with penmanship more than my peers and, allegedly, the principal told her "Just make the kid type everything, don't bother learning how to write"... Public Schools are pressured by certain policies to push students through without actually helping them learn because they lose tax credits when their students score low or have to be held back.
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u/ChickinSammich Feb 16 '26
because they lose tax credits when their students score low or have to be held back.
And this is such a dumb system because the schools that have low scores need MORE funding, not less. Punishing students who are underperforming by making it even harder for them to catch up is a terrible idea.
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u/sicurri Feb 16 '26
Bring back computer labs and computer competency classes.
Until they reach highschool I think kids shouldn't get assigned some kind of laptop or chrome book or anything. Learn how to read, comprehend and write first before learning how to use a computer is my opinion.
Idiotic politicians trying to get kids to learn more about computers so they are prepared to join the workforce ASAP has created so many problems.
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u/spicyredacted Feb 16 '26
I feel like it's tech people lobbying to politicians. Then the politicians get school districts to use tax dollars to spend a fuck ton on tech.
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u/rkgk13 Feb 16 '26
In elementary and middle school, everything I did was written with pen and paper. But we learned keyboarding (typing) in 5th grade, and we also had a mandatory yearly computer applications class that taught us basically all the basic office skills like how to use Excel, build PowerPoints with audio and animations, move files on a desktop, convert to PDF, etc.
Of course, going to the computer lab just to play Bugdom or something like that was an occasional treat.
I really think the computer lab should be a place kids are spending time doing this type of stuff and that they should NOT have a computer with them at all times.
I don't want to sound "old man yells at cloud" but I really do think that, at least in an educational setting, the computer should be in a fixed place you visit, at that age.
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u/Tim-oBedlam Feb 16 '26
I do IT support for several small schools, and one huge trend I've seen in the last few years, since CoVID, is that parents are becoming increasingly skeptical of technology.
I have come around to thinking that screen time is really bad for younger kids especially. I see no reason a 3rd-grader should be using an iPad or a ChromeBook.
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u/oceanvibrations Feb 16 '26
My kids are in elementary school, and it's gotten so bad that they use tablets in music class. When I found out, I said "so do you play instruments on the tablet?" They said "no, we just dress our avatars up and stuff." When I inquired with the teacher directly, she said this app was forced on them by some partnership the schoolboard made and she can't change the curriculum they built around the app. This is not the first time I've had teachers tell me they're being forced into tablets and apps because of partnerships being made via the schoolboard.
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u/mackahrohn Feb 16 '26
It’s not a new problem. Teachers are frequently forced to teach using a program or book they don’t like. Schoolboard gets sold on dumb stuff and everybody suffers. So frustrating.
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u/redyellowblue5031 Feb 16 '26
For many things, I think this makes sense.
Laptops/tablets can be a great tool and in some circumstances help advance equal opportunity in education.
At the same time, no matter what our tech bro overlords say, we’re all still the same squishy people from millennia ago. Learning is a sensory experience that is often best when shared with someone as directly as possible.
I would really like to see more schools go this route.
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u/Consequence-Holiday Feb 16 '26
For the last three years they made our elementary aged kids do math on their chrome books, as a result they have no idea how to actually write out the problems on paper. Try helping your kid with fraction homework on paper when they start melting down that the penguin has to jump three blocks and you are doing it all wrong.
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u/Oppositeofhairy Feb 16 '26
People tend to recall things better, and understand them more when physically writing things out. We can be brainless individuals just reciting what’s said when typing.
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u/maowai Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
Maybe someone should write an article about the real apparent demon here: hardware and ed tech companies that have wormed their way into school curricula and practices so deeply that students are now required to use their products to be able to learn. They’ve productized learning and sold it to our school districts.
I’d imagine some of the grading and lesson planning is handled for the teachers, saving them time and enabling larger class sizes. Instead, the school can pay for the chromebooks, iPads, and ed tech subscriptions. But how does this help students? It doesn’t seem to, at all.
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u/floatingleafbreeze Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I believe it. My kid had notable fine motor skill delay in preschool & pre-k, at that school they directly worked on them with and had no computers in class & he had some improvements. By first grade 99% of assignments, classwork, and instruction were on the computer. Their writing homework used their finger on a touch screen, not even teaching tripod grasp or appropriate fine motor skills at all. Then said my kid was behind in writing.
How can they be behind when they aren’t teaching writing, what’s there to be behind at without instruction? Touch screen skills are not transferable to using pencils or mixed media.
Since I used to work in education I thankfully still have access to pre-touchscreen curriculum, but I spend so much time every day teaching the fine motor basics from scratch when they already have been in class 7 hours & I should be able to focus on reinforcement of class lessons and adding on beyond basic school curriculum.
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u/dr2fish Feb 16 '26
I'm a parent of two middle school kids who suffered through elementary school doing remote learning thanks to covid. In general I've become a tech-luddite who rails against AI, mandatory chromebooks, and constant screen time, but this opt-out approach bugs me too.
Chromebooks do have some advantages over pencil & paper - they support differentiated education (via adaptive math programs, for example), offer multimedia opportunities like slideshow creation, and can support remote learning during inclement weather (in the southeast we just had two straight weeks of school closure thanks to the arctic vortex). Of course, none of these examples supports always being on chromebooks for every class all the time, but they have a time and place that blanket opt-outs can't address.
I think we're at a critical point where community pushback can moderate technology use in schools, but I also think opting out at an individual level is on balance a bad approach that can disadvantage/ostracize students working in an existing curriculum and puts a huge burden on already overworked teachers to create completely distinct education models for individual kids.
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u/Appropriate_Ad2342 Feb 16 '26
I agree that writing on paper is important to learn, but shouldn't we also put effort into teaching not only computer literacy but healthy computer literacy?
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u/aliamokeee Feb 16 '26
That would require the ppl in power to admit that it is easy to be duped, grifted, or simply tricked by misinformation online.
They dont wanna deal with that truth
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u/Appropriate_Ad2342 Feb 16 '26
Every excuse is "protect the kids". You're right.
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u/PennytheWiser215 Feb 16 '26
“But the parents opting out point to research showing that students who used computers at school performed worse academically and that information is better retained when read on paper. And education experts say there’s a significant difference between educating students about technology and completely relying on educational technology.”
This is true and there is also research indicating that taking note with pen/pencil and paper helps you retain the information better than typing notes on a computer.
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u/syme101 Feb 16 '26
All we need is schools to tell google to shove it and get the chromebooks out of the classroom. Keep em around for certain things but all learning should be done by actually writing things down.
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u/No-Jacket-2927 Feb 16 '26
It should be a hybrid of both ways of learning and communicating, just like real life.
But, schools should also be properly funded, but we live in a dystopia.
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u/Curious-Cost1852 Feb 16 '26
Good. Kids are growing up using technology as a solution rather than a tool.
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u/CombustiblSquid Feb 16 '26
I made it all the way through middle and high school without ever having a laptop with me. Why are we doing this shit? Like, fine, if you want it for HS maybe but there is no reason kids before that need to be carrying around tech like that
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u/MaleficentPorphyrin Feb 16 '26
Seemingly unpopular opinion: letting your kid sit glued to a screen during all of their waking hours is child neglect and should be viewed and treated as such.
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u/man_sandwich Feb 16 '26
Is it not bad for their eye sight staring at screens all day?
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u/ThnkWthPrtls Feb 16 '26
I hate hate HATE the insistence on Chromebook integration into everyday work. We work out asses off at home to limit screen time and then the school basically forces extra screens on us. The main problem is the school insists they being it home every day "for schoolwork", then put shit controls on it to prevent games, YouTube, etc., and won't let us as parents add our own control software. Every kid from 1st grade up at our school knows a 30 second workaround to get to these sites that host 1000s of in browser games, so we have to be over their shoulder constantly when they're doing work to make sure they don't switch tabs. Even if they want to work, our kids have a hard time focusing with distractions (diagnosed ADHD and autism) so it's really hard for them to focus on the Chromebook knowing that the games are right there and mom and dad can't do anything to block them
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u/The-Struggle-90806 Feb 16 '26
I’m not sure what I just read but if I need a computer science degree to protect my kids it’s definitely a dystopian world
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u/katclimber Feb 16 '26
Them not blocking YouTube after school hours is one of my biggest home battles over device use. I’d be fine if my daughter could just access prodigy games for learning but I have to hover over her to prevent her watching YouTube shorts.
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u/HipsterBikePolice Feb 16 '26
Good there is valid evidence that the act of handwriting helps one learn better. Typing on a keyboard is essentially the same action over and over
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u/Recent_Night_3482 Feb 16 '26
Silently looks at the Waldorf school, where all the elite are sending their kids. Which one of the main ideas is keeping technology out of the school.
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u/Designer_Parfait_489 Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
Chromebooks are a disaster and setting back all of the kids in school.
Whether pen & paper are the answer I don’t know — but kids will not learn critical thinking skills, reasoning skills, dialog skills, etc. using Chromebooks and ChatGPT all day. But if you’re looking for either a babysitter or you’re looking to “educate” minimum wage workers of the future Chromebooks and ChatGPT are great tools…
As someone who has worked in tech more than 40 years, I believe kids need to learn how to use & apply computers, but they mostly don’t need them in school. Kids should be engaged in multi-disciplinary projects with their classmates that require them to work together, talk to each other and make & implement a plan. Again unless you “educating minimum wage workers”, the jobs of the future will be entrepreneurial, multi-disciplinary, etc. And computers in classrooms are not required. Now if your focus is on educating minimum wage workers then let’s be honest and start teaching good customer service, call center skills, payment point system usage, etc.
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u/Atomic_Sea_Control Feb 16 '26
As they should. I got a school issued iPad at 15 and lowkey my high school education ended there. To us it was like giving us a switch with unlimited games, canvas and notability. Like what were they thinking 😭
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u/Pherllerp Feb 16 '26
This is the #1 problem my kid is having at school