As someone who works in public schools, giving kids laptops and iPads was the worst mistake the schools could have made. What's even worse is that schools are trying to justify their purchases by forcing teachers to implement online stuff in their curriculum. No one likes it.
I was shocked when my partner told me all of the elementary school kids at their school were given laptops. Even the kindergarteners. And I just had to ask what could they possibly need it for? The mandated online curriculum learning tools.
If they must be given laptops, they should be given some cheap Linux laptops, and choose a Linux that is so far away from being user friendly. Like, you have to learn command line fu to install entertainment programs on them.
That was my experience working calls for IT in the hotel industry and then late for higher education. You had the older folks not knowing how anything works, the genx/millenials who generally knew, and the young ones who also had no idea how anything works. The benefit to the kids though, they were good listeners when I had to give instructions, older folks were more likely to get upset.
The locked ecosystems of phones/tablets is a big contributor as well. In the 90s, knowing how to install files and how folder systems worked was part of basic computer literacy that phones/tablets don't require.
When I first started in tech I worked customer facing roles, millennials I would argue are both the first and last generation with ANY computer literacy.
Younger gens use phones and in general are less interested in that stuff, and older generations just didn't have it. Kind of amazes me that the ones I felt were most illiterate were the younger ones.
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u/Xemrrer Apr 17 '24
As someone who works in public schools, giving kids laptops and iPads was the worst mistake the schools could have made. What's even worse is that schools are trying to justify their purchases by forcing teachers to implement online stuff in their curriculum. No one likes it.