The Electronic Classroom

I was watching my oldest daughter do her algebra homework yesterday. In her school, all students are issued a chromebook, and class assignments are distributed via Google Classroom. Homework assignments are essentially electronic forms. She was out on the couch with me doing the work after telling me she might need some help with the math. I watched her work through a few problems until she got to one she struggled with.

As I opened my mouth to help her with the problem, she started randomly clicking answers on the form, and then submitted the form before I could even offer advice. Predictably, she got more than half of the answers incorrect. She then tells me "we can resubmit the form as many times as we want", as she scrolls up the page, takes note of which answers were incorrect, and then proceeds by process of elimination by trial-and-error to select all of the correct answers. It took her about 3 minutes to do the entire 10-question homework assignment like this (systems of equations, intercept points and overlap sets).

She got 100% on the assignment.

I'm staring at her and I ask her "But what happens on test day?", to which her answer was "Oh, I only get to submit it once". I'll chalk up her lack of concern with understanding the material to teenage idiocy, but I have some serious questions to the professional educators who came up with this framework.

The chromebook/electronic classroom initiative was originally touted as a way to teach our children in a 21st century method for the world of the 21st century, or something like that. Not that that actually encapsulates any meaning at all, but most people get the idea. Somewhere along the line, it would seem that cause and effect became conflated, as they always to in the minds of humans - "if we teach the kids on laptops, then they'll be smart" or something to that effect.

And, in an attempt to be as fair and balanced as I can, I attempted to find some kind of paper, essay, or something that actually laid out a justification for this program, and I found an article on the topic at https://www.goguardian.com/blog/technology/7-reasons-your-students-need-chromebooks-in-the-classroom/ that could at least provide me some kind of justifications for this.

From the article:

They .. help engage students, prepare them for careers (which is particularly important as Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fields continue to increase in demand) and close achievement gaps. 

But there's not a line indicating exactly how this happens. I suppose, just give the kid a chromebook, and poof! They're prepared for careers in STEM.

63% of student say the potential benefits of technology in the classroom outweigh the distractions. 

Are we letting middle and high school students set educational policy?

Chromebooks Help Teachers Gain Insight into Student Behavior

That's right - the school can ... monitor ... the children more effectively. The slide into Orwellian dystopia is not a topic for this blog, but I figured it was worth mentioning here. This is not a "pro" for the chromebook program, in my eyes. They knew it the next day when my daughter created a spoof profile on farmersonly.com while in math class. But, I'm not sure how much insight was given as to why she did this (ed. - it was funny, and she's been talked to about it).

Bringing Chromebooks into the classroom, schools can dramatically reduce paper needs. Teachers can manage tests, textbooks requirements, homework assignments, projects, and student reporting online.

Paraphrasing this one, "we're reducing paper and it makes the teacher workload more manageable, while making metrics available to parents online". This one sounds good at face value, but being a corporate shill, here's what I hear: "we can put more kids in each classroom because the google classroom picks up the workload from the teacher". It took me 30 seconds to come to that conclusion, and I imagine that a school administrator whose budget is a function of the number of kids sitting in classrooms did to. Making teachers' lives easier is not the mission of the school administration - serving the daytime education and babysitting needs of the local community is what schools do.

Let's hear it from the horse's mouth perhaps? Some words from the goog on using their classroom:

"We see students coming back time and time again to check out a Chromebook in the library. They love that Chromebooks are easy to use and lightweight to carry." 

-Jackie Radebaugh, Assistant Professor of Library Science, Columbus State University

Source: (https://edu.google.com/intl/en/products/chromebooks/?modal_active=none#casestudy-kippla)

That's it - that's the whole justification on Google's page about the chromebook, Kids go to the library to borrow them, so it's a good program. Oh, and they're lightweight.

And my daughter still can't plot a system of equations on her graphing calculator.