The Case For Technology; Kennedy School’s ICT Information Session

Rockstar’s school had their ICT information evening recently, where it was explained among others how they employed technology in classrooms.

Parents were shown how in Years 1 and 2 the younger kids would start with “Bee-bots,” which are these little electronic bumblebees you “program” literally by pressing the directional buttons X number of times to make them travel X paces in a given direction. During group work, the kids would be given these huge floor maps that look like monopoly boards, and they would have to “program” the Bee-bots to travel to the supermarket, library and what-not, chalking the coordinates and progress on their individual little white boards.

Beebot pic from keepad.com; the kids press those arrow keys X number of times to make them go X paces a particular direction to navigate maps

In Y3 we were told, this might then progress to kids building their own maze (or “monopoly board” which I guess is part of their learning unit about public spaces, form and function) for the Bee-bot to navigate.

Y4 kids would start simple coding, plus probably the use of Lego Mindstorm, culminating in the building of a robotic arm in Y5 (or maybe it was the whole robot). By Y6 we were shown kids using teleprompter and book-creating apps.

By Christmas, every Y4-6 classroom would be equipped with one Mac or Chromebook per child permanently in their class (Kennedy btw is a big school – that’s a lotta machines). They use robust external shared drive storage for each child, with their work constantly saved real-time and monitored by the school. So if the machine a child was using went down, the Learning Technologies Specialist could be flagged to replace the faulty machine immediately, and the child can log back in to a fresh machine and carry on with the lesson. It would also mean teachers and technicians could check the child’s work at any time, with additional information uploaded, downloaded, emailed about.

Now, a fair number of my mum friends are quite technology-adverse. No iPads, no playing with Mummy’s iPhone. They’re not alone. Guy named Steve Jobs didn’t allow his kids iPads either. And here’s another (albeit dated) article by the New York Times about how some top execs in tech want their kids in tech-free schools. If you are not of the completely anti-tech school of thought then I think the general consensus is age of child directly related to iPad time (i.e. the younger the child the less time they should get with these things. Or none whatsoever.)

I think apps matter. One of my friends showed me a musical instrument app that was literally life-sized guitar strings on a screen and not that much more. (Unlike say, apparently psychotic birds with super powers who poop on helmeted pigs who steal their eggs.)

random Minecraft PE pic from play.google.com

Another case in point: Minecraft. Some ban it, some swear by it, after at least a few mum friends of mine bought it over summer thinking that was what they were using in school, I thought to mention: that I know of, the version they use in school is NOT the gaming one. Rockstar had been on my back constantly to look into getting it also, and given his general affinity to things tech I was especially wary that once he bites of the apple there be no turning back. I didn’t want daily fights or subterfuge over gaming, which is how I ended up in search of Minecraft, Educational Version. Rockstar actually read where it said in fine print on the site that what we’d been told they’re using in school, stripped of the “junkier” bits (or else that part of the game can be turned on and off), is not available for home purchase as of this writing. I think the closest you can get is the downloading of a more limited App and then staying perpetually on Construction mode. (Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.)

My mum friends’ kids were also honest enough (despite serious Minecraft Itch) to come clean that the gaming stuff my friends bought for them didn’t look like what they get in school for creating community spaces (Rockstar’s group were assigned to build a library) or for that matter pure number sense back in Y2 as they stacked blocks in the 10s, 100s, and 1000s. (Also, any chemistry buffs out there? I haven’t gotten around to checking the Minecraft periodic table against the real one. Please, please Lord, if it’s similar it will be that much easier to get kids like mine familiar with Au and Fe and what-not!)

Minecraft periodic table from howtogeek.com

Which pretty much sums up my take on apps and games in school – at appropriate age levels, why not take advantage of every opportunity available to enhance our kids’ learning and make it enjoyable? The key being of course not to let them have the real junky stuff because after that they don’t think the educational stuff is quite that much fun anyway, they’d just rather Angry Bird.

Now on to security. I have a confession: I have a blog, and after seeing too many social media and online fights, trolls, cyber-bullying and what-not, getting emails from people who set up email accounts with pseudonyms that give me the impression that is the only reason they created said accounts to begin with (i.e. people don’t even use their real accounts, they have accounts for a specific subject – which begs the question WHY)…… I was really cringing initially, as they talked about social media.

I once said people who sold CDOs (the complicated credit derivatives they flamed the financial sector for) without understanding what they really were was like when you gave a monkey a knife (or ok, an AK47). I’d say social media and the internet is like giving that monkey an atomic bomb. Can’t shut it off and it stays there for much longer than the maturity of a structured note investment. Plus, heard of the study Trolls Just Want To Have Fun? According to the abstract, it’s the internet manifestation of your every day sadism. Basically sickos finding more and better and wider ways of hurting people (and btw tweeting appears to be their favorite modus operandi).

Then with the recent Hollywood celebrity iCloud hacking case were speculations about what celebrities had unwittingly disclosed about themselves on social media which had helped the hackers. What I’m thinking is how some of those celebrities had not kept up with how to stay safe amid the gadzillion advancements in technology, while still choosing to use the latest apps. Then I think they have friends who might have been up to scratch on internet and social media safety, who still got compromised because the celebrities didn’t. (Though yes there was that glaring mistake as well if I recall correctly, whereby the account doesn’t get locked despite umpteen attempts at guessing the password; and was the user flagged that multiple attempts to log in had been made?)

It’s because of all these fears that I believe we need schools that really get involved. Schools that roll up their sleeves and introduce their Learning Technologies Specialist and team charged with the responsibility of sourcing educational apps, monitoring social media (I think school staff can also monitor all the kids’ emails), and constantly schooling the kids to use the safeties put in place. Schools that put effort into having all the conversations, not simply banning everything (and then maybe it’s your fault for not being able to enforce the ban at home.)

And so this just in: tech support is no longer back end, it’s front-and-center. What is done through each child’s login can be monitored, or the data pulled for future monitoring or investigation. (I find the virtual “paper trail” (was once trained as an auditor – hated it, but it was useful in tracing trades) of kids’ tracks potentially very useful.)

One of the things I noticed about Rockstar is how the first thing he does online is go through the school Virtual Learning Environment. I’m about to go one step further and set the Virtual Learning Environment as our home page for the computer Rockstar uses – i.e. the first page when he opens a browser – because front and center on the school VLE are the child-safe search engines, among others. We were also advised to make sure the kids were accessing the internet say, in the living room or other more “public” space (other than say, their own rooms where eventually they close their bedroom doors.)

That evening, another parent then mentioned how she had learned from her daughter about the Youtube child-safe filters – her daughter had come home one day having been taught at school to turn them on first thing before browsing Youtube.

There we go. The people at my child’s school who make me a little bit more comfortable that along with the rest of the pencil-and-paper education is the much needed education about internet and social media security and etiquette. How to treat people with respect online, and how to stay safe. 

We’re not going to be able to keep technology away from our kids for very long. And frankly I lost count how many little kids I’ve seen fiddling with what I suppose are their helpers’ smartphones while they’re being minded by said helpers. (I wonder how many of them are on child-safe engines etc.) So much better for the child to be educated to do so themselves, and as soon as possible. 

I’d rather Rockstar be able to say no to the virtual equivalent of ice cream in excess, than to never have heard of ice cream. Because we’re not going to be able to keep it from kids for very long. A kid at the next table is always going to order it.

Nor should there be Forbidden Fruit Syndrome either. Before forbidden fruit gets even more attractive, let’s hear it for the schools who’ve already looked into it, and are all ready to talk to our kids about it. Now, that’s an education.