RE: Failing Down

The truth is, the majority of us are just people trying to do a job who care about the students and want the best for them.

Yes. I can't agree more with this. Teachers get a bad rap but we wouldn't stay in it if we didn't genuinely care for kids.

I work in a private school (it's more accessible to middle classes here in Australia) and everyone has a laptop. Most of the time it's used for schoolwork - the work is usually via class notebooks on OneNote which I loved as I could pre load lessons and content for students to access, and mark their work from there. There was a big push on how to use tech in the classroom just before COVID actually but now I'm seeing a lot more students doing work in written notebooks they hand in, and computers are just used to access work, research and so on. Especially in English, where the final exams are written anyway. The students tend to quite like that.

I've done everything in the last ten odd years - I've been really happy to embrace tech and was very good at it, and taught other teachers various ways to use it in the classroom. However, as more time went on and we started to undrstand how it affected their learning, I've gone more and more back to traditional notebooks too. There's a lot of research that backs up the idea you learn better through the tactile process of reading and writing on paper.

Then of course the distraction of games. We used to have this app called 'Dyknow' - have you heard of it? You could see, on your screen, what every student in your class was doing. If they went on a game, you could literally remotely shut down their computer. I loved it. They stopped it though because it was expensive, but also there was a theory (probably right!) that students should learn to self monitor.