Son and app's

securityguy

Idiophreak wrote: »

Write 100 sums on a piece of paper and have an 8yo child sit down and solve them.

Then have them do the same sums on an iPad app, with pretty pictures etc.

Any ideas which the children will do with more enthusiasm?

Should they be doing either?

Idiophreak

securityguy wrote: »

Should they be doing either?

I don't know...Why don't you tell us what you think?

securityguy

Idiophreak wrote: »

I don't know...Why don't you tell us what you think?

Ah, the rhetorical question clearly not being rhetorical enough.

No, they shouldn't. Providing flashing lights around poor teaching still leaves it as poor teaching. They do it a hundred times, and at the end have got some number right and some number wrong. If they got most/all of them right, so what? Doing ten would equally have proved they can do it. If they got few/none of them right, so what? You'd have known far quicker that they couldn't do it, and should be attempting to find out why they can't do it and helping them learn how to.

It's the old gag that people who have been doing a job for a long time don't have thirty years' experience, they have one years' experience, thirty times. Repeating the same task without expert feedback doesn't, past a very low threshold, improve performance.

Idiophreak

securityguy wrote: »

Ah, the rhetorical question clearly not being rhetorical enough.

No, they shouldn't. Providing flashing lights around poor teaching still leaves it as poor teaching. They do it a hundred times, and at the end have got some number right and some number wrong. If they got most/all of them right, so what? Doing ten would equally have proved they can do it. If they got few/none of them right, so what? You'd have known far quicker that they couldn't do it, and should be attempting to find out why they can't do it and helping them learn how to.

Obviously it depends on your equipment etc, but at my wife's school, as children are completing tasks on the iPad, their results are fed in real time to the teacher so they can see which children are coping well and which are struggling. The children that need additional support are identified far quicker than having them write down all their answers then marking it overnight.

I agree that repetition isn't *always* the answer - but in many cases it gives children a chance to practice what they've learnt - and builds their confidence in the topic. Using software also enables easier differentiation allowing children across the class to be appropriately challenged.

The "100" number was irrelevant to the general point - that children will engage more and be more enthusiastic about their learning when they get to use certain tech to do it...To a really sad degree, actually.

My wife's been responsible for trialling a lot of this kind of tech over the last couple of years and the results are quite upsetting for "normal people" to hear...they've tried stuff like the RM slate, Sammy tablets, Asus things...and some of them have performed really quite well technically and had some very clever and useful features...but they lack the branding of the iPad, which make so much difference. Give a child a generic tablet to work on and they're relatively indifferent. Give them an iPad and they're enthusiastic...they know it's something "cool" and expensive they're being given to learn with and they respond to that.

The same's true with sports kit etc -put a nike swoosh on footballs and see how many boys are suddenly interested.

I had a real issue with this at first - I didn't understand why schools should be paying more just for brand names when there is better, cheaper kit around...but the truth is that the brand generates enthusiasm...and it's the enthusiasm schools are after, not tech.

securityguy

Idiophreak wrote: »

The "100" number was irrelevant to the general point - that children will engage more and be more enthusiastic about their learning when they get to use certain tech to do it...To a really sad degree, actually.

But this year's Avant Garde is next year's Vieux Chapeaux. Sure, children are excited by shiny new technology. For a while. I doubt many today would find 1970s language lab, with its lovely cassette recorders, terribly engaging. I doubt trooping into the hall to watch
a TV programme would engage today as much as it did in the 1960s. How alluring is an iPad once they cease to become aspirational? I can remember carefully shepherded sets of calculators, one between two, counted out and counted back in because they were so expensive.

How long will a room full of iPads engage before they are either boring or broken? A year? A couple of years? Say you spend nine grand (300 per desk) to buy a roomful of equipment, and it lasts three years before either it's stopped working or it no longer has the allure of shiny new toys. Three grand a year for one class: that's quite a bit of opportunity cost to think if it's actually worth doing.

And I would seriously question if they're engaging with learning more. They're engaging with using the shiny toys. You have to hope they're learning something.

Idiophreak

securityguy wrote: »

How long will a room full of iPads engage before they are either boring or broken? A year? A couple of years? Say you spend nine grand (300 per desk) to buy a roomful of equipment, and it lasts three years before either it's stopped working or it no longer has the allure of shiny new toys. Three grand a year for one class: that's quite a bit of opportunity cost to think if it's actually worth doing.

And I would seriously question if they're engaging with learning more. They're engaging with using the shiny toys. You have to hope they're learning something.

You're entirely right. A couple of years down the road these things will be less than useless...and they're expensive...but it entirely depends upon the school and the children as to whether you think it's a cost worth paying.

If using an iPad for an hour a day settles the children down and prevents you from having to employ another TA to help control their behaviour, the 3k per year doesn't sound so bad.

(yes...I know...if a teacher can't control their class without using iPads or an additional adult you'd move your child to another school...)

You *can* question if they're engaging with learning more - go and ask the school whether they think it works. As far as I can see, though...if you set someone a task to design a poster for something, it makes little difference to the learning outcome if this is designed on paper or on PC. If you want a report written, I don't see what it hurts to turn it in as a website rather than an essay....

securityguy

Idiophreak wrote: »

You *can* question if they're engaging with learning more - go and ask the school whether they think it works (...) As far as I can see, though...if you set someone a task to design a poster for something, it makes little difference to the learning outcome if this is designed on paper or on PC.

Schools thought Brain Gym worked. It was unadulterated nonsense. The plural of anecdote is not data.

We're all I hope on the same page that Edward Tufte is almost always right about almost everything, and the stuff he's wrong about doesn't matter much anyway.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

Idiophreak wrote: »

If using an iPad for an hour a day settles the children down and prevents you from having to employ another TA to help control their behaviour, the 3k per year doesn't sound so bad.

Employing a TA for an hour a day over a full school year is about 190 person-hours. I don't know what the on-costs are for a TA, but then I don't know what the on-costs are for iPads either. Just short of sixteen quid an hour doesn't sound unreasonable.

Idiophreak

securityguy wrote: »

Employing a TA for an hour a day over a full school year is about 190 person-hours. I don't know what the on-costs are for a TA, but then I don't know what the on-costs are for iPads either. Just short of sixteen quid an hour doesn't sound unreasonable.

...except they wouldn't employ a TA for an hour a day, they'd employ them for half a day minimum...these things are used to "hook" a child's interest in a topic - the enthusiasm for which carries on beyond the use of the iPad itself.

But it's all a bit of a moot point...the school has a budget with which to achieve the best results they can...if they decide that spending X amount of that budget on buying iPads will get them the best results, then that's what they'll do.

To be honest, the amount of money that's wasted in the school system, the cost of an iPad for each kid is small change, anyway.

ETA: Oh, and the on-costs for iPads, or any school tech for that matter, are horrific - hence my last point

[Deleted User]

Idiophreak wrote: »

To be honest, the amount of money that's wasted in the school system, the cost of an iPad for each kid is small change, anyway.

ETA: Oh, and the on-costs for iPads, or any school tech for that matter, are horrific - hence my last point

Not to mention, schools are passing the costs on to the parents in some cases.

If people think ipads are expensive, they should see the costs of laptops/desktops from companies like RM and Viglen

~~~~ Goes back to remembering the days of playing Grannies Garden on the school BBC Micro B ~~~~~

TheEffect

As an app developer, I think Apple needs to look at this issue and make 'In App Purchases' off by default for all phones, requiring a password to turn it on, as well as a password every time an 'In App Purchase' is made.

Developers also need to look at the way they implement In App Purchases when the target audience for their app is children. In an ideal world, in app purchases would be banned from apps aimed at children, but developers and Apple need to make money, so a limitation and much more security in such apps should be implemented.

£60 purchases for 'coins' in a children's app is ridiculous. A limitation should be put on both the price and amount of times they can be purchased, e.g. 99p per coins purchased, with a maximum of 5 a day. Worst case scenario, you lose £5 before you get an iTunes bill.

Developers ripping off children and their parents are giving us a bad name, even though it's primarily the parents fault for not locking down their iDevices.