Digital education in 2023

Dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion in 2023 — I recent­ly wrote a com­ment on a post about dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion, post­ing it here. In this com­ment, I only touch on the dig­i­tal com­po­nent and invite you to decide for your­self what is good and what is bad.

Dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion is the con­duct of edu­ca­tion­al activ­i­ties using spe­cial software.

As such soft­ware, “Elec­tron­ic jour­nals” and “School dig­i­tal plat­forms” are used. There is no sin­gle stan­dard for this soft­ware, it is a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket for which pri­vate com­pa­nies such as Sber­Class, Yan­dex, MES are fighting.

The elec­tron­ic jour­nal is a cloud plat­form that main­tains the school sched­ule, atten­dance log and elec­tron­ic diary. Implies that the paper diary is no longer kept at the school.

Such a sys­tem allows par­ents to eas­i­ly find out what is hap­pen­ing with the child at school, such a diary can­not be for­got­ten at home, lost, etc.

But school­child­ren stop keep­ing a diary on their own, even the teacher writes their home­work there. The stu­dent los­es a sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty for an impor­tant doc­u­ment. Main­tain­ing some elec­tron­ic jour­nals increas­es the bur­den on teach­ers. Infor­ma­tion about the progress of stu­dents is sent to third parties.

The elec­tron­ic jour­nal allows you to make a bunch of reports, in prac­tice, few peo­ple use it.

The School Dig­i­tal Plat­form (SDP) is a cloud plat­form that includes edu­ca­tion­al con­tent, edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als, elec­tron­ic jour­nal func­tion­al­i­ty, infor­ma­tion about the stu­dent enter­ing and leav­ing the school premis­es, infor­ma­tion about meals, pay­ment, addi­tion­al edu­ca­tion, and more.

With the devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of the SDS, elec­tron­ic jour­nals will die out.

What was planned

At the ShT­sP, the teacher cre­ates tasks for stu­dents, the stu­dents go to the ShT­sP and com­plete them, the teacher checks the result. Every­thing hap­pens in a sin­gle plat­form, there is a his­to­ry of com­plet­ing tasks, a quick reac­tion from the teacher to the result. The sys­tem will show the strengths and weak­ness­es of the stu­dent, sug­gest ways for the devel­op­ment of the child. Per­son­al­iza­tion of education.

What do we have now

Exist­ing TsP are incon­ve­nient, plus teach­ers do not know how to use them. In prac­tice, the teacher takes a pic­ture of a piece of paper with tasks and puts it on the TsP as a pic­ture, the stu­dents com­plete the task, take pic­tures and put it on the TsP. It is dif­fi­cult to check this, every­one is dissatisfied.

Oth­er edu­ca­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ties are poor­ly used or not used, schools and plat­forms say a lot, but noth­ing hap­pens in practice.

Again, all data is passed on to third parties.

Development

Over time, all these sys­tems will be final­ized and it will be con­ve­nient to use. You will like it, or you will be told that you liked it. Chil­dren will be 100% sat­is­fied, less wor­ries. It will be easy for teach­ers to report, a lot of ana­lyt­ics, etc., once you cre­ate tasks and use them. Every­thing is open and hon­est. There will be no need to buy text­books and part of the school inven­to­ry, but a com­put­er or tablet will be need­ed. Over time, book text­books will be abol­ished, and writ­ing by hand will be an anachro­nism, like an aba­cus or an inkwell now, and will be made an elec­tive. All your school his­to­ry will be ana­lyzed and saved.

What does dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion look like in “good schcool”?

All chil­dren from the first to the eighth grade have iPads, from the eighth grade all chil­dren have a Mac­Book, smart boards are installed in the classrooms.

The con­cept pro­vides that the child does not need to car­ry text­books and note­books to school. There are text­books in dig­i­tal form, and instead of note­books, they type text on devices, with some excep­tions, for exam­ple, the Russ­ian lan­guage, where the teacher gives out a spe­cial note­book. Some­times teach­ers offer to do the work in writ­ing, but this is at the dis­cre­tion of the student.

Software

There is no spe­cial, unique soft­ware on chil­dren’s devices. There is a min­i­mal pack­age of pro­grams such as office and riso­val­ok. The device is more nec­es­sary for the stu­dent to access the ShT­sP. In prac­tice, it turns out that some stu­dents, espe­cial­ly high school stu­dents, do not use their devices at all for more than a year. They go to the ShT­sP from their per­son­al devices, or maybe they don’t go at all.

I assume that teach­ers and method­ol­o­gists would devel­op pro­grams for using gad­gets for edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es, but this did not happen.

Smart boards to dis­play images from a teacher’s lap­top, or they will write with a fin­ger, like chalk on a reg­u­lar board. The main fea­ture is the abil­i­ty to call a QR code on the board, the chil­dren scan it and the image from the board, in the form of a pic­ture, to save it to the chil­dren’s devices, there is no need to write any­thing off the board. The func­tion­al­i­ty of the boards is huge, redun­dant, but teach­ers do not use it for var­i­ous reasons.

Protecting school devices from harmful content.

Of course, the con­tent on school devices is fil­tered, chil­dren can­not watch pornog­ra­phy, down­load games, etc. But chil­dren are smart and bypass any block­ages. What’s more, child locks are a chal­lenge. Even if you come across stu­pid, lack of ini­tia­tive chil­dren who them­selves can­not bypass the block­ing, there will be those in the class who were giv­en a phone with unlim­it­ed Inter­net access by their par­ents, and this child will glad­ly share con­tent with classmates.

Con­clu­sion. You your­self are oblig­ed to explain to your child what is good and what is bad, to edu­cate a moral per­son in him. In today’s dig­i­tal world, it is impos­si­ble to pro­tect your­self from infor­ma­tion. For com­par­i­son, you can not swear in front of a child, but he learns these words back in kinder­garten, and whether he will use them or not depends on how you raised him.

Teachers

There is sad­ness here, I would nev­er have thought, but teach­ers are the worst PC users, they are, for the most part, poor­ly trained and do not know how to for­mu­late thoughts. They own 5% of tech­nol­o­gy and plat­form capa­bil­i­ties. Plus, “good schools” has a high staff turnover, up to 50% of teach­ers per year. Only teach­ers, some­how, start to use the plat­form, boards, mac­books, bitrix­es, when it was time to quit. And in oth­er schools, oth­er IT sys­tems and his good school expe­ri­ence will be use­less there.

One teacher for the whole school knew how to con­trol what chil­dren do on their devices dur­ing the les­son, but he was fired and now no one can do it.

As a result, due to the fact that teach­ers can­not con­trol what is hap­pen­ing on the devices, they are afraid that when doing tests, the chil­dren will send each oth­er the cor­rect answers, so they print assign­ments on a print­er (there are no note­books) and dis­trib­ute leaflets to chil­dren. Nat­u­ral­ly, this vio­lates the prin­ci­ple of dig­i­tal education.

Con­clu­sion. Teach­ers are not ready for dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion. In a good way, they must take cours­es and pass exams on dig­i­tal sys­tems, oth­er­wise, this is mon­key work. IT sys­tems in schools should be as uni­fied as possible.

Children

Accord­ing to the law of nor­mal dis­tri­b­u­tion, 5 – 10% of chil­dren do not care what school they study in, they will be excel­lent stu­dents every­where, and vice ver­sa, 5 – 10% will not receive an edu­ca­tion any­where. School need for 80% of oth­er chil­dren. Is Horoshko­la doing well? Judg­ing by the results of the exam, he copes, the grades are good.

Chil­dren are gen­er­al­ly great, the tech­nique that they have quite eas­i­ly, thanks to which they play­ful­ly deceive their par­ents. Typ­i­cal decep­tion: “Mac­Book not work­ing well, I could­n’t con­nect to the les­son.” Par­ents do not under­stand, they call the IT Depart­ment and swear.

Chil­dren hack into devices and steal pass­words from care­less teach­ers. In the class­room, to cheat, every­one knows each oth­er’s passwords.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, teach­ers note that chil­dren can­not con­cen­trate for more than 10 min­utes. But I don’t know if this is a glob­al prob­lem or just “good school”.

Dis­tance learn­ing chil­dren are not good.

Outcome

At the moment, dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion is just a phrase, there is noth­ing dig­i­tal in it, just an imitation.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion is spon­ta­neous, not project-based. So this is the result.

And most impor­tant­ly, this is a lot of mon­ey and pow­er, the win­ners will get every­thing, which means the process will go on.

More posts from cat­e­go­ry Soci­ol­o­gy.