Four views: Is edtech changing how we learn?

I also worry that glamorizing screens as our fix-all solution could hurt the kids who need physical support for accountability and stability. Schools don’t just exist to teach. They are an emotional, physical and mental haven for kids who don’t have good home situations. Adding a screen and calling it a day puts these kids at an even greater risk.

Right now, that’s practically unthinkable (outside a few forward-thinking classrooms), partly because the culture around gaming is weird, toxic and few people take the medium seriously for educational purposes. But if remote learning is going to be part of K-12 education from now on — and we’d better plan for that — we need to meet kids where they ... See more

If you notice the thread across all these activities, it’s human labor: and a lot of it. A mathematician on campus needs a blackboard and some chalk to teach a room of students. In the digital world, now they need a producer, a director, camera crews, audio engineers, software engineers to integrate online platforms, technical support staff to hand... See more

Our education system has a sort of built-in fun-to-learning ratio that gets smaller as the years go on, because many of the tools we use to teach core concepts are dated and static. There are a few “edutainment” products if kids are lucky enough to have the iPads or laptops to use them on, but not enough, and they’re plainly of a lower order than t... See more