Damn you schools who use iPads
I participated in Girls in Tech Helsinki event at Frosmo Ltd. on the 29th of October 2016. The big picture is to encourage girls and women in their careers in the field of technology and this specific event was to teach participants HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There were several great speeches about diversity in the technology companies and how women are really desired in these workplaces but seem like you just don’t find them anywhere.
Juhani Mykkänen told about the Koodi 2016 book that he has written with Linda Liukas to educate teachers about coding. This raised to my mind one meeting in Studia fair almost about a year ago and that has been bothering me ever since..
The event took place in fall 2015. The corpulent 40-something psychologist woman was proud. They had this huge fair section where they promoted their new thing. Se was telling me how they used this fantastic new technology in schools. Everything is super easy to use and with just a press of a button programs can be installed on the new fancy iPads and it is soooo simple that everyone can use the apps. Sounds like a leap forward in schools. But I was stunned.
This woman, with no understanding of technology, is teaching our feature hopes to adapt to the society of screens and the ever-growing number of tech equipments. My question is, what the f*ck will the kids learn by just pressing buttons in their iPad screens. They will just grow up as dumb consumers of this technology without any clue what is really going on behind the screen and inside the device. It is like learning to read without having the ability to write. How was the application created that you just installed with a press of a button? Who created it? Did you actually even understand that you just loaded something from the internet and installed it? To these children, it looks like the apps just exist. Applications came from somewhere and all you see is a polished brand of the certain app.
One use of the new shiny iPads in classrooms was to learn a new language. A teacher (or the app) asked what is some certain word in a foreign language and students wrote their answer in a blank field on their own iPads. The teacher was able to see a screen of any student and share it in front of the class so that everyone could see it. Again I was shocked. And again these kids didn’t have any clue what just happened. Maybe it was magic that transferred the student’s screen into the screen in front of the classroom? Technology is not about doing the same old things and learning in the same old way — someone asks a question and you write the answer — but instead doing things truly differently. Why wouldn’t you go to the Internet and speak with foreign students on the other side of the globe? Preferably in a way that you need to find the channels first by yourself or even develop software to contact people who are far away. Why wouldn’t you create a website with a foreign language and write your study journal there? We don’t need iPads nor any technology for learning words by just writing them when someone asks. There are much cheaper tools for that and they are called pen and paper.
There is still a long journey ahead..
