Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

Sweden is bringing back books amid declining test scores

See full article...

 

[Boskone]

This is anecdata, but I remember information about as well reading on-screen or paper, but I remember written information better hand-written than typed
.

E.g. I'll remember an email the same as a printed doc, but I'll remember a hand-written post-it better than a virtual one.

So IMO a screen for reading would be fine, but notes should be hand-written.

I split the difference with an eink tablet with an active stylus.

 

[Madestjohn]

... and we haven't even started talking about AI/chatbots. The fall-out, 4-5 years from now, is going to be... at the very least catastrophic. We all know it, and nobody can stop it, because the adults in the room are totally drowned out by billionaires and their cynical, shortsighted and corrupt political and media allies.

I don’t know if you’ve turned on the news lately but we’ve already reached catastrophe

The really scary thing is we’re apparently headed pass that
And we haven’t even started to slow down

 

[arstechmfw]

This is anecdata, but I remember information about as well reading on-screen or paper, but I remember written information better hand-written than typed
.

E.g. I'll remember an email the same as a printed doc, but I'll remember a hand-written post-it better than a virtual one.

So IMO a screen for reading would be fine, but notes should be hand-written.

I split the difference with an eink tablet with an active stylus.

It is unlikely you remember my 1987 paper:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/28189.28192


. . . in which the simple, elegant experiment design is easily falsifiable, repeatable, and applicable to new confounding variables under study. There are many studies since then and overwhelming evidence that reading retention from paper is STILL overwhelmingly better than screens.

 

[chanman819]

Could it be that Google Classroom is partly based on Youtube, and needs it to work?

I'd bet it uses Youtube's infrastructure for video content in general to avoid reinventing the wheel. I think the question is access to Classroom is through a personal machine or a school Chromebook. For the Chromebook, it seems like a basic design/configuration would be to limit the account to only specified content, at least during class hours.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

This is anecdata, but I remember information about as well reading on-screen or paper, but I remember written information better hand-written than typed
.

E.g. I'll remember an email the same as a printed doc, but I'll remember a hand-written post-it better than a virtual one.

So IMO a screen for reading would be fine, but notes should be hand-written.

I split the difference with an eink tablet with an active stylus.

It's a tough call for me because while I will remember the hand-written note better, I will not be able to read it without great effort, if at all! (It works for shopping lists of one-word items, but not for any note with a lot of words.)

 

[Zeppos]

This sounds like a good move, not removing the tech completely but reintroducing "real" reading. Wish they would do it here.

Teacher here, Belgium, I grew up with a dry theory math book which I had trouble decoding. Solutions to exercises? At the back of the book was the numerical solution, that was it. It was not uncommon for them to be wrong by the way. No internet, you could call another kid through the land line, that was it. Creativity was the only option. Try a different way. Is there a way I can confirm my solution?
Did a career switch to teaching 6 years ago. Much has changed, much hasn't. One thing was that kids had access to the full solutions through the online version of the book. Rookie mistake: if I worked with slides, I put them on the school system so that kids could print them out. My first approach was: more! I gave them everything.
Result? I often found handouts on the floor. "Hey, put it in a folder!" "Sir, why bother? I will print it out at home when I need them." "Sir, I need more exercises, because I made all the exercises in the book." "What do you mean you made all those exercises? Show me!" Kid shows me print out of all the solution. "I read this and I understand it all, but my scores are low, I need more!" "Sir, I found a youtube channel of a guy that explains all the math theory. I looked at it until night, but still failed the test. It was too difficult." "Did you make exercises?" "Why, I understood what he was telling. He was really good!"
I learned to make it "difficult" for them. It was not on my initiative alone, colleagues were sick of it too and were actually the ones that proposed the first changes. We closed down the full solutions of the book, only numerical solutions available. The book did not supply that, we had to write it up our selves. Some parents were outraged, went over our heads to demand the full solutions. 'My kid is desperate!" Principal stood her ground with us. Thank God! Others welcomed the change. Handouts? No way they are digitized. Keep your stuff in order. "Sir, I lost my handouts, what now?" "Go to the copy center down the street." "The what? Can't I just take a photo with my smartphone?" Smartphones are locked during classes now.
Kids have to copy everything from the blackboard again. A bit of protest at first, but telling them it is a way to focus on the boring stuff, really helps motivating them. It is boring, but my classroom is silent when they are taking notes. "Sir, why is there a 5 there, doesn't it need to be 7?" "Oh, you are right!" Some even enjoy the process. Beautiful drawings and handwriting, nice sparkly colored titles. A beautiful artistic line below the title. An young intern was surprised: "they can copy from the blackboard without protest?" She had never seen such thing nor experienced it. Sloooowly things are getting better.
This year I had the nicest class. As always a few failures in december, harsh words, by even the smart ones: "the examn was too difficult, this is not doable!", but already surprisingly less failures than usual. They get a professor Sneep speech in september that already helps them being prepared for the shock. I calculated the scores of the second trimester yesterday. Almost cried. They did astonishingly well. The ones that failed? Ramped up their total score by ... 40%. All of them.
Just make it difficult for them, stay nice, be supportive and it worked. That is still exceptional though. Same method, different class, a lot more struggle.
I am not going to take the credit for this change alone though. It is society that is changing slowly. Only few parents complain these days. Most understand that change is necessary. From what I hear from colleagues, it was very different a decade ago. There is a teacher shortage because of that now. That gives us a lot of leverage.
We gained a lot with technology, but we also forgot that we are not Gods. Our puny brains learn slowly by automating knowledge step by step and making room in our cognitive side. Empty space that can be filled with the next level of knowledge.
"Oh damn, I am preaching again. Sorry kids I got carried away, kick me next time I do this. Gabriel figuratively! Just roll your eyes next time, works great. No really we have stuff to do. So where were we. Oh right! Yes, yet another equation for a straight line. What is your favorite up to now?"

 

[tuna74]

I can't say how jealous I am of this. Having a kid in school with computers/chromebooks has destroyed his ability to learn. Instead of paying attention, he watches videos off of google.com. It's basically impossible to block videos while allowing standard search AFAICT.

In Sweden, my big kid (13 years old) has a chromebook from school as well.

 

[tuna74]

How will the private sector thrive under this unhinged socialism?

Sweden has one of the worlds most capitalistic school systems.

 

[reimu240p]

A well-known critic of the use of smartphones and social media by children, Jonathan Haidt, posted in February: “Putting computers and tablets on students desks in K-12 may turn out to be among the costliest mistakes in the history of education.”

Hard agree.

The crazy thing is, despite the increase in tech, we're also not teaching digital literacy at all. When I was in elementary school in the early aughts, we went to the computer lab and were taught how to use word PowerPoint and email, how to effectively Google, how to save and store files, and how to type.

Now since we've got a generation of "digital natives" we just assume they know how to use computers, even though they've only used ipads their entire lives. They don't know where files are saved. They don't know how to type in a url. They don't know how to type using the homerow.

We plopped them in front of ipads and said "you can use this to learn anything" and stopped actually teaching them everything.

Reminds me of this blogpost from 2013 http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

 

[MrTom]

Came here to say exactly this. My stepdaughter is 10 and her attention span, reading, writing skills and mathematics are terrible even though her screen time is limited to 2 hours a day at most and she has no access to social networks. And she is above the average in her class. It's terrifying. Now that I'll be somewhat fathering her we will try to enroll her in extra activities to try to improve her abilities.

The attention span thing is so bad that I put my old knect to use some time ago and she had trouble doing stuff in games even though the instructions were on screen, right in front of her eyes. Her friends are even worse. I'm terrified of what is going to happen when they become adults. I agree with Haidt: “Putting computers and tablets on students desks in K-12 may turn out to be among the costliest mistakes in the history of education”. But costs are far from the worst of the problems.

Well, you shouldn't be too worried that she'll be left out in the cold, now that "AI" is around the corner for her. She'll just be able to ask any electronic device for anything. So in reality, this is where the new generation is heading to, lazy learning. So it won't matter if they know how to actually pick up a book and read it, or won't matter to know advanced physics. They'll be so used to asking a machine what they need, and it will produce.

 

[reimu240p]

I have always loved the tangible aspects of books, but as I get older I've noticed I rarely GAF about seeing/going into tech stores, but my eyes light up when I see a book store, especially one with old used books, can get lost in those for hours.

I say this as a gamer/programmer.

I think much respect for the 'word'/knowledge is lost/thrown out when it is reduced to something intangible/immediately changeable as bits/bytes on a screen.

This is what is leading the world into the current stupid notion that opinion=fact.

Relatable

 

[tuna74]

By American standard, Sweden is a borderline communist country. Detractors will point to whatever, lower density of billionaires, fewer Unicorn startups, their whatever-index growing less fast than the S&P500 as evidence of how hard the Swedes are losing because of this.

Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US* and a way more market driven school system compared to the US.


*https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68927238

 

[e.halap]

Always funny but also a bit sad to see kids trying to pinch to zoom a magazine. It's even more sad when I surprise myself doing it, too.

 

[Madestjohn]

Well, you shouldn't be too worried that she'll be left out in the cold, now that "AI" is around the corner for her. She'll just be able to ask any electronic device for anything. So in reality, this is where the new generation is heading to, lazy learning. So it won't matter if they know how to actually pick up a book and read it, or won't matter to know advanced physics. They'll be so used to asking a machine what they need, and it will produce.

Does this post lack a /s?

 

[denemo]

As a parent in Sweden with kids in middle school age I can confirm that all their textbooks are physical and that they have to write things by hand. Homework is also by hand.

Where iPads are used is like rehearsing for glossary in English and rehearsing multiplication tables and stuff like that. Essentially bite sized tasks that can be generated infinitum.

And my kids school is mobile phone free. What happens is that the first thing they do when they get to class in the morning is to place their smartphones in a shelf with different compartments. Then a person from the after school hours staff collects them and the kids get them back at the end of the day when they go home.

As for tablets and smartphones contributing to digital literacy I call bullshit. Devices today are so freaking simple that it's basically nothing to learn. So you don't have to use them as a kid.

I read a Swedish news story a couple of months ago where scientists had evaluated swedish 14 year olds digital literacy with 14 year olds in another country where technology was way more limited and concluded that there was basically no difference in digital literacy.

I have had this discussion with friends but my argument is that we who were born in the 70s and 80s are roughly speaking the pinnacle of digital literacy.

The generation before us were a bit to "old" to really invest a lot of time early in computers and the internet and the generations after us got everything served on a platter more or less.

I knew a shit tone more about computers and how they worked, even from a casual point of view, when I was in my kids age than they do now.

That is to say, I don't think not having smartphones and tablets in school is debilitating in any way. It's probably a positive.

 

[Fury13]

Could it be that Google Classroom is partly based on Youtube, and needs it to work?

That is my point. Why would Google make youtube.com a dependency for Google classroom? Please make a case as to why this dependency is needed.

 

[MsSuperPartyWonderFunDay]

It is unlikely you remember my 1987 paper:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/28189.28192


. . . in which the simple, elegant experiment design is easily falsifiable, repeatable, and applicable to new confounding variables under study. There are many studies since then and overwhelming evidence that reading retention from paper is STILL overwhelmingly better than screens.

I wonder if that holds true for print vs e-ink screens.

 

[Robin-3]

<>

We can call that unintended physical education.

I did also consider whether an idea such as breaking a monolithic textbook into maybe two to four smaller books might be helpful. It would add some annoyances for teachers such as having to swap books and limiting the ease of jumping around, but it could reduce the load... especially if they aren't hardbound.

(snipped out your initial, on-topic content to more clearly point to what my own off-topic comment is in response to)

... as someone who's had back pain since high school, I wish adults didn't tend to assume that kids and teenagers can lug around stacks of large hardcover books with no ill effects. That said, I also understand that hardcover books are typically more robust, and the idea of switching to electronic alternatives has all kinds of issues (as per everything above).

You know what would actually help? Making sure that kids not only have lockers, but also enough time between classes to actually go to their lockers and switch out textbooks. I'm just guessing here (I'm in my 40s), but when I was in high school most schools in our district only allowed 3 - 4 minutes of "passing time" between class periods. In a crowded school, especially one with overflow trailer classrooms and your locker potentially at the far end of the school from the two classes you're switching between, that really isn't enough time. Especially also not if you need to use the bathroom, much less stop and say hi to a friend or ask another teacher a question in the hallway. I'd be (pleasantly) shocked if things have improved since then.

I went to a high school with an unusual schedule; we had 10 minutes between class blocks most days and our school itself wasn't that big (fewer than 2k students total). Anything shorter than that makes no sense to me. It presumes that students aren't human - that they won't sometimes need a few extra minutes in the bathroom, or need to double back to grab a forgotten assignment or a tampon or whatever. Or maybe that they'd just like a minute to check in with friends (building social relationships is part of healthy emotional development for kids & teens!), breathe, mentally switch gears, and re-focus before diving into another subject.

Ugh. Sorry. Apparently this is more of a hot button for me than I'd realized.

 

[denemo]

By American standard, Sweden is a borderline communist country. Detractors will point to whatever, lower density of billionaires, fewer Unicorn startups, their whatever-index growing less fast than the S&P500 as evidence of how hard the Swedes are losing because of this.

Sweden actually has more billionaires per capita than the US. We have also had some really successful startups like Spotify and Klarna (despite what you might think about their business model) but also gaming sensations like Minecraft and Candy Crush (again, despite what you might think about their business model).

As a Swede I would say that we are punching way above our weight.

Edit: Arc Raiders was also made by Swedes. As was Helldivers 2. And Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

 

[user12121]

We may not be able to make big changes, but, no matter what, kids can still read books at home.
How about family time a few nights a week where the kids read to the adults.
You spent how long reading to them, they owe you lol

 

[unshavenyak]

Having spent 10 years in IT support for a local US school district, all I can say is this level of sanity will never prevail here. They are all in on the grift, completely in thrall to the EdTech companies. They're salivating over 'AI', Chromebooks, web apps, video, and all the other rubbish, and still don't understand how it is that their student reading scores are plummeting. I despair.

I am so happy I grew up in an era where the only thing a computer could be used for in school is Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Oregon Trail. I can't imagine how different I would be if I didn't spend my childhood reading and instead was doom scrolling on TikTok or YouTube shorts.

 

[42Kodiak42]

I can comment from experience how horrible this specific point is.

My now adult ADHD child super struggled during COVID with remote learning, specifically Google classroom. What I observed during this is my kid would join school meetings and simply start watching YouTube video's. I would catch them doing it and would close YouTube and leave the room. Unless I did this all day long my kid would continue this loop.

So as a Engineer father, I went to my router and disabled access to youtube.com. Just that single site. Can anyone guess what happened?

When I disabled access to youtube.com, Google Classroom - the entire site, would not render. Nothing would come up for my kid unless I enabled access to youtube.com.

Can anyone make a case why have access to youtube.com was a requirement for Google classroom to even run? I can only think of one and its disgusting.

Google wanted our kids watching YouTube while Google Classroom was running.

Disgusting.

As much as I love to ascribe malice to Google's choices, the requirement for YouTube access probably has a much more innocent explanation: Google Classroom is built with parts of YouTube's backend resulting in some hard dependencies on resolving a YouTube URL.

Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if Twitch shuts down when you block Amazon. Though it might not because Amazon (the company) probably has AWS as the URL of their tech-stacks. Google (The company, because none of their stuff is branded "Alphabet") definitely has all of their video-player tech under a YouTube URL.

 

[unshavenyak]

I disagree with the whole premise of "basic education as means to prepare the youth to be the workforce of tomorrow".

We should prepare human beings who know how to learn and are able to think critically and be competent citizens, not cogs in the machine.

I was blessed with a good education. Even though I studied music at university, my fundamentals were strong enough for a successful career in IT. I left high school with rudimentary English, but enough understanding of linguistics to finish learning English, then go through three more languages.

We were building 3D figures by hand, using cardboard, out of projections on paper. We also went on camping trips. We learned how to navigate by paper maps. Matrix transformations. The history of the Russian Revolution took us 3 months to go through. History of the world with a good level of detail. Calligraphy. The main rivers of each continent we had to know by heart. Central and South American civilizations. Taking care of a huge marine aquarium. We also had to clean our classroom every day.

Trips to the computer lab were rare and yet people our age seem to be way more tech-savvy than the youth that spend the day on the phone. My girlfriend teaches English and German and, honestly, the ability of her students to produce a longer coherent sentence is just... sad.

(I finished high school in 2003)

Let's teach kids how to human, how to think and how to learn. Then they will be able to focus on their interests when they are a bit older.

edit: Knowing how to learn also makes kids more resilient. The market changes and a dream job now can suck a few years down the line. IT used to be awesome but now I hate it and I am planning to change.

A few years ago, I was chatting to a friend in a park and a boy approached us saying that he was stressed about choosing his career.
I told him "not to be what you do unless you do something truly beautiful". Pick what you like and be smart enough to be able to learn any job. Unless you are a doctor or an engineer, chances are you can basically do anything.

Wow, your school sounds quite similar to mine. We took field trips out in the middle of winter to Maple Syrup farms for Ecology class. On top of basic history, we also had a mandatory 'Civics' class that included our rights and responsibilities as Canadian citizens. Our school also covered the history of Africa, including apartheid South Africa. One of the highlights of my early school life was meeting Nelson Mandela when he came to Toronto.

We had mandatory basic finances that covered things like debt and compound interest. Physics class was a lot of theoretical work followed by hands-on experiments (e.g., designing and building cardboard racers). A part of our curriculum was basic understanding of how to use a library and computer to intelligently use a search engine and gather information.

I am really worried about the future generations, as it seems we've just plopped them down in front of tablets or computers and said 'You'll figure it out,'.

 

[NoReallyJustSaying]

I don't know your situation or childcare practices, but I 100% recommend reading to your kid every day from an entertaining or interesting paper book or magazine. Keep doing it until they can read it for themselves.

The very best way to get your kids to read books is to read books yourself and have a bunch of them around the house. Making your kids read a book for school makes reading books a chore they want to stop doing as soon as possible. If reading books is just something that is done at home, it becomes something entirely different.

 

[AjaxTelamon]

What I've seen from my children's experience is a failure in the implementation. They're supposed to view textbooks on small screened chromebooks. By the time they're done toggling between screens, etc. it's just a jumble of confusion.
Had the textbooks been available on something like a Kindle scribe or something more generic that I might've been a lot more success.
Teachers can't be IT staff and a teacher at the same time.

What about the problems with eye strain?

 

[NoReallyJustSaying]

That is my point. Why would Google make youtube.com a dependency for Google classroom? Please make a case as to why this dependency is needed.

I don't think it's necessarily that nefarious, they probably just use YouTube infrastructure for streaming and usage tracking to better feed AdSense.

Nothing nefarious about that.

ETA: badly ninja'd by kodiak. shakes fist

 

[NoReallyJustSaying]

What about the problems with eye strain?

That would be easy enough to combat: just mandate e-ink displays. But then again, how are the kids going to watch YouTube videos on that?

 

[unshavenyak]

Most schools already insist on phones being put away for instruction if they're even allowed in hallways. Here locally our state just enacted a pointless law making pre-existing policy everyone was following law.

The reason digital text books were adopted--is because paper books are wear-items and cost a lot of money to buy and house and buy new editions for ...and deal with spoiled/ruined book inventory. It is a warehousing/logistics problem. As opposed to digital textbooks which are easy to update--take no space, and you don't have to worry about kids losing/writing profanity in. Which was all precipitated--because taxpayers hate paying taxes for stuff they rely on. The always demand more austerity--and digital textbooks was a path to that goal.

Except screen-induced brain rot. Yea.

I remember having paper textbooks....and back problems as a kid because of how much they weighed when I had to take even half of them home to do schoolwork.

The problem with digital textbooks is that if they are deployed on tablets, it's easy to get distracted. If it's on an eReader, most aren't snappy enough to quickly move through pages like a physical textbook allows. I know there is a happy medium out there, because slugging those giant physics and biology textbooks was not fun. Heaven forbid if you forgot one in your locker and had homework or a test.

 

[unshavenyak]

I was a fairly early adopter of ebooks and epaper devices .. I had early kindle and some other ones that I gave away ,
then have gotten and still have at launch kobo aura, and boox tab-c as well as the original ipad retina, og Ipad pro and current (m4) ipadpro all in an attempt to first supplement then replace the bookshelves that used to fill my apartment

I want to read on device .. I have plenty of things to read on device
But .. its hard

I just can’t seem to lose myself in a novel or history book or especially study unless its on paper.. epaper works .. but is frustrating
It sounds convenient to have thousands of books in a form I can slip in my bag - and objectively it is
but I used to be able to read a entire paperback even when standing and being jostled about on a crowded bus
Now I can’t get more than a chapter in of an ebook while sitting in a quite room


Its like part of my brain just drifts away


Sorry Not really relevant … But I really want to be able to lose an afternoon reading a book or two again

Me too. I find it far easier to get into a physical book than using my eReader. Unfortunately, my career has me re-locating every 3-5 years. I do not want to accumulate a huge stockpile of books to move and the libraries where I move to aren't always offering books in English or French. For some of us, eReaders are a real blessing.

 

[Random John Smith Guy]

Having spent 10 years in IT support for a local US school district, all I can say is this level of sanity will never prevail here. They are all in on the grift, completely in thrall to the EdTech companies. They're salivating over 'AI', Chromebooks, web apps, video, and all the other rubbish, and still don't understand how it is that their student reading scores are plummeting. I despair.

It'll happen when people start running for school board on an explicitly "Chromebooks OUT OUT OUT" agenda.

It'll happen, phone bans are new, too.

 

[unshavenyak]

This is anecdata, but I remember information about as well reading on-screen or paper, but I remember written information better hand-written than typed
.

E.g. I'll remember an email the same as a printed doc, but I'll remember a hand-written post-it better than a virtual one.

So IMO a screen for reading would be fine, but notes should be hand-written.

I split the difference with an eink tablet with an active stylus.

Which one do you use? I've been wanting to consolidate down to something like a Kindle Scribe for a while now, but the note management system leaves something to be desired there...

 

[unshavenyak]

It is unlikely you remember my 1987 paper:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/28189.28192


. . . in which the simple, elegant experiment design is easily falsifiable, repeatable, and applicable to new confounding variables under study. There are many studies since then and overwhelming evidence that reading retention from paper is STILL overwhelmingly better than screens.

I have seen studies and meta-analyses on this, but AFAIK, there has yet to be one done randomising people exclusively to e-Ink readers and physical books. At least one of the three Screen Inferiority Effect dimensions (and possibly two) are nearly impossible to have occur on an e-Ink Reader.

 

[FlightofFancy001]

In United States
80% of population is monolingual

And a wild guess, most of the remaining 20% are immigrants who have learned English as a second language in order to function here.

To the point of the article: The greatest thing my mother ever did for me was to get me interested in reading at a very early age. Something I've told her many times. It sparked a life-long interest in learning. Anyone remember the "How and Why Wonderbooks"? I loved them. They were educational candy to me. I learned so much from them in so many different areas that inspired me to learn more. Books are precious in ways digital media will never be. There's a permanence about them. Nobody is going to dig up an iPad in 500 years and learn anything interesting about the culture that used it.

 

[FlightofFancy001]

Always funny but also a bit sad to see kids trying to pinch to zoom a magazine. It's even more sad when I surprise myself doing it, too.

I've caught myself starting to do this, too. I'm getting older, and my eyes aren't as good as they used to be, so as I'm looking at text on paper, I'll feel my muscles automatically tense to start the pinch/zoom motion. I feel like a complete idiot, but at least I catch myself before actually doing it. It's a pretty good indication I've spent too much time on a tablet/phone recently and need to get offline for a while.

 

[mikelama]

I can't say how jealous I am of this. Having a kid in school with computers/chromebooks has destroyed his ability to learn. Instead of paying attention, he watches videos off of google.com. It's basically impossible to block videos while allowing standard search AFAICT.

Former teacher here. It’s possible to block sites but it costs money and uses a lot of teacher attention. And kids are clever and find ways to dick around on computers no matter what. They’ll spent an hour changing their cursor to something lame and barely useable. Or chat w friends using a shared gmail doc. Crap like that. A little laptop time is ok, but it has to be limited a lot more than it is now.

 

[Mostly Wise]

I know this has been said by many others, but as a parent of young kids I hope that this level of common sense prevails before my kids get to school. My wife and I have already had the discussions of "what do we do" if they drop a laptop in a 6 year olds lap, because we are not cool with that. Unfortunately, the number of traditional options outside of home school are dwindling and I don't think I have the skill set for that anyway.

Also, as someone who just completed their master's degree as an adult, digital textbooks are much more difficult to read and learn from. I had a couple of classes that only had digital options and they were weirdly difficult to navigate and I barely absorbed anything from those texts.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

That would be easy enough to combat: just mandate e-ink displays. But then again, how are the kids going to watch YouTube videos on that?

Also e-ink display devices are generally more expensive or less-capable devices or both. You're not going to want to use an e-ink device for any kind of school research or even software anything. E-ink is only good at readability.

Which so long as your coursework doesn't involve asking kids to search for things, or any kind of STEM hardly-anything....is a fine trade off.

 

[taxythingy]

From my second child's experience doing maths homework on algebra simplification, the online system is great, EXCEPT it only allows for a result to be entered. This directly leads to not writing down intermediate steps and therefore increases the mental load. The concepts of physically shifting x's etc. around loses some of the visual / spatial component. She was struggling to get to the right answer.

How did I fix this?

By giving her a piece of paper and a pencil.

 

[taxythingy]

My other main criticism of the online app is that the question structure often required significant decoding. There's a difference between "how many rotations does a wheel of d diameter complete in x distance?" vs "how many FULL rotations..." The app will mark an answer wrong due to rounding, even if the calculation was otherwise correct. Ideally it would have a partially-correct response, which would help indicate where the issue was and keep encouraging the student.

A person marking/reviewing would be able to give the right kind of response here. It wouldn't be hard for the app to mostly be able to do this as well.

 

[silverboy]

A worthy experiment! I hope it goes well. I'm also mildly in awe that this plan wasn't immediately derailed by parasitic corporate interests who want to sell tech, and paralysis-at-all-costs government opposition parties.

Well, it wasn't in the U.S., that's why. Good ideas and right choices have a fighting chance in Sweden.