i get it, but i also think about all the useful things i could have been doing (perhaps now assisted by AI) instead of pounding through Algebra homework and English essays all night...
I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision. Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.
Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.
I know it was a rough transition for my nephew, though, and I don't know that I would have handled it very well either. I'm not sure what would be a better option, though, given how much of a disservice such easy access to a mental crutch is.
> I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision.
Good!
If they want to give kids the chance to develop the skill of managing unstructured time, that could easily be fit into the school day/week in a variety of ways.
In most K-12 schools, there is a lot of time in the day that is used incredibly ineffeciently.
For my personal experience, college was a time management joke after high school, mainly because I didn’t have to spend so much bullshit/wasted time in classes.
> Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.
That’s a very privileged stance to take (I usually don’t play the “privilege card”, but it’s appropriate here).
For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons.
Maybe not for the median HN contributor, many not for the median middle class person in the US, but these groups are not the majority of students.
> Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.
IMO getting too worried about this sort of homework “cheating” feels like the wrong way of looking at it. Although, there are lots of processes that accept and reinforce this wrong viewpoint.
For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools.
For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some.
The problem is when undue grade weight is put on these processes. It is a hard balance to strike, because you need to offer enough grade to incentivize the stuff, but not enough that it feels unfair to those who go individually.
As far as LLMs go, it offers an alternative to learning to collaborate with other humans. That’s bad, but the fix should be to figure out how to get the students to get back to collaborating with humans.
My college professor (English) friends are doing this. Making students hand write and do their assignments during class. I think it's great, thanks AI!
>I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time
I would have failed high school if attendance/classwork mattered at the time. I skated by with test scores and homework -- I was too busy chasing sex and drugs during the social hours of adult-age-day-care public schooling.
I tell people that I didn't learn a damn thing until I hit a university, and I mean it. The "all classwork" policy would have ruined me -- hopefully they'd have had the mercy to kick my ass out on my 7th year of high school..
> I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision. Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.
While I respect your good intent, I am disappointed to hear this perspective. The increasing burden of homework on children honestly strikes me as the denial of childhood.
I am happy to hear that this is one by-product of the widespread adoption of LLMs. I don't even mind getting rid of phones from the classroom to ensure that school time is productive learning time under these conditions.
Children should absolutely be permitted to live out their childhood. I don't think that time without homework equates to time with electronic brain rot. There is absolutely a middle ground that parents should enforce (like doing chores and engaging in discovery).
Similarly, I think that adolescents can find far more rewarding ways to spend their time outside of homework, whether that's working part-time, participating in volunteer activities, building personal projects or developing soft skills. While there absolutely will be adolescents that spend their time consuming social media and doing nothing productive, it feels problematic to enforce the double standard that teenagers should be required to juggle school, homework, extracurricular activities, basic familial responsibilities, and personal development, all while many adults do nothing productive outside of their work lives and barely meet their own familial responsibilities. Instead of having them do more homework, we should trust them to navigate their time. Parents, mentors, teachers can guide them with a gentle hand.
In-class, in person, oral examinations is the other way. Call on each student, have them come up to the front of the class, and answer one or more questions. For some topics this could take several class periods.
Maybe they can allow AI for writing but raise the bar on quality so the blind copy-paste submissions still fail. I've still never read a good AI-generated doc at work, it's always verbose and aimless. At this point I close the doc if I catch a whiff. Unlike the AI code which is fine.
It's probably either that or ban it and do everything in-person, which might have to be the stopgap solution.
This take from a Hermione-type High School senior shed next to zero new light on the subject. Yes, we know AI is redefining school and jobs and daily life. The perspective of an obnoxious A+ type student isn't helping, especially because you kind of can read between the lines that she isn't friends with these kids using AI, which would give her a deeper perspective of why and how they are using AI.
Is this what The Atlantic has come down to, publishing a complain-y piece by the class president?
EDIT: For anyone struggling with my criticism of the article, I very much agree that there is a problem of AI in education. Her suggestion which is "maybe more oral exams and less essays?" I'm sure has never been considered by teachers around the world rolls eyes.
As for how to tackle this, I think the only solution is accept the fact that AI is going nowhere and integrate it into the class. Show kids in the class how to use AI properly, compare what different AI models say, and compare what they say to what scholars and authors have written, to what kids in the past have written in their essays.
You don't have to fight AI to instill critical thinking in kids. You can embrace it to teach them its limitations.
Proves the simulation of AI never required the virtual plug in pod. It's simply pervasive in our reality as Baudrillard asserted (contrary to the Matrix dichotomy), and now requires its overthrow to obliterate automated seamless simulation from taking over. Say goodbye ML, we won't be missing you.
It seems like the real problem here is the curriculum. The school should be removing students' ability to use AI on these assignments, and it really isn't that hard to do.
Phones shouldn't be in the classroom, and devices used in the classroom shouldn't have any access to AI.
Students shouldn't really have homework anyway so I think it's completely reasonable to just have kids doing work on pen and paper in the class for the most part.
I struggled alot with hand writing assignments and the greatest boost in my grade
and academic ability was getting my own laptop in highschool because of the writing.
So i really do not wish to see that backtracked. But i could see the internet being declared too destructive.
A computer without internet, a book, and ample time would have worked for me.
How about be strict on spelling and grammer (sic) to have a GPA that accurately places students in colleges. The days of dunces getting 3.9 GPA and making it into Yale need to end.
From a teacher's perspective, I'm sure the craft is a mess of bad school policies vs. so-called "best practices" vs. real learning science vs. government policies vs. ancient bad advice (eg. learning styles and tablets in classrooms) vs. personal opinion.
It's not like there is a senior engineer who's got mountains of expertise to defer to (like a software team would have). Teachers are likely given directives from their schools and get dumped a bunch of tablets and are told this is "modern" education and to just roll it out.
Anyway, to your point - top-down directives are what change schools. There has been success such as banning smartphones in Ireland & UK recently. Schools taking on the problems and then solving it themselves could go a long way, rather than waiting for government to mandate things.
An older analog is calculators. My college intro to stats course didn't allow them. We did simple arithmetic by hand and looked up things like roots and logs in tables. I still have my copy of this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0849306922
I just tutored my nephew through his college intro to stats course. Not only are calculators allowed, but they had a course web app so that all they did was select a dataset, select columns from those datasets, and enter some parameters. They were expected to be able to pick the right technique in the app, select the right things, and interpret the results. Because of the time savings, they covered far more techniques than we did in my day because they weren't spending so much time doing arithmetic.
Despite lots of cries about "who will know how to make calculators?", this transition to calculators (and computers) being allowed was unavoidable because that's how these subjects would be applied later on in students' careers. The same is true of AI, so students need to learn to use it effectively (e.g., not blindly accepting AI answers as truth). It will be difficult for the teachers to make their lesson plans deeper, but I think that's where we're headed.
Another lesson we can draw from the adoption of calculators is that not all kids could afford calculators, so schools sometimes needed to provide them. Schools might need to provide access to AI as well. Maybe you are required to use the school's version and it logs every student's usage as the modern version of "show your work"? And it could intentionally spit out bad answers occasionally to test that students are examining the output. There's a lot to figure out, but we can find inspiration in past transitions.
It's weird. All of our attributes which we hold and value, and develop via a mix of genes and training - intelligence, but also strength, stamina, reflexes - we acquired, if you strip it all off to basics, to feed and to procreate. That's all evolution cares about.
Now, we are social animals, and we grew to value these thing for their own right. Societies valued strength and bravery, as virtues, but I guess ultimately because having brave strong soldiers made for more food and babies.
So over time, we tamed beasts and built tools, and most of these virtues kind of faded away. In our world of prosperity and machine power on tap, strength and bravery are not really extolled so much anymore. We work out because it makes us healthy and attractive, not because our societies demand this. We're happy to replace the hard work with a prosthetic.
Intelligence all these millenia was the outlier. The thing separating us from the animals. It was so inconceivable that it might be replaced that it is very deeply ingrained in us.
But if suddenly we don't need it? Or at least 95% of the population doesn't? Is it "ok" to lose it, like engineers of today don't rely on strength like blacksmiths used to? Maybe. Maybe it's ok that in 100 years we will all let our brains rot, occasionally doing a crossword as a work out. It feels sad, but maybe only in the way decline of swordsmanship felt to a Napoleonic veteran. The world moved on and we don't care anymore.
We lost so many skills that were once so key: the average person can't farm, can't forage, can't start a fire or ride a horse. And maybe it's ok. Or, who knows, maybe not.
I think that humans can find new frontiers to struggle on and develop mental faculties for, even if the prior frontiers are solved.
"Problem-solving" might be dead, but people today seem more skilled in categorizing and comparing things than those in the past (even if they are not particularly good at it yet). Given the quantity and diversity of information and culture that exists, it's necessary. New developments in AI reinforce this with expert-curated data sets.
I'm a sysadmin for a public school district and the admins are working on rolling out Gemini for students/staff. I've shared all the studies I can find about cognitive decline associated with LLM use, but it seems like it's falling on deaf ears.
Could you link some of the more compelling studies you've found? I've only found one major empirical study directly examining cognitive decline from LLM use and there are substantial methodology problems. I've elaborated on the specifics here if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118819
I do contract network admin work for a K-12 school district and I'm hearing the same thing from the in-house sysadmin about his administration staff. The District superintendent is very enthusiastic about getting LLM tools into the hands of the students and teachers. The in-house sysadmin and I are both horrified at what we're enabling.
This can only end with punitive federal measures. Of course every 80 IQ school superintendent is going to push for whatever tech cuts costs at the expense of the kids' education.
I can definitely vouch for this based on stories from my wife stories (teacher at a private school), her friends (fellow teachers), and my experience working at coworking spaces and coffee shops. [^1]
LLMs can be amazing [^0] as an assistive technology, but using them as a "do it for me" button is just way too easy, so that's how they are de facto used.
I believe it will take about 5-10 years for us to fully comprehend how damaging unplanned remote classrooms and unchecked LLM use in the classroom was. Like heroin, it will be extremely hard to undo our dependence on them by that point. I'm pretty scared for how our students will fare on the global scale in the coming years.
[^0] I strongly believe that 60% of the value of LLMs can be realized by learning how to use a search engine properly. Probably more. Nonetheless, I've fully embraced my accidentally-acquired curmudgeon identity and know that I'm in the minority about this.
[^1] You won't believe how many people leave their laptops unlocked and their screen's contents visible for everyone to see. Committing identity theft has to be easier than ever these days. This basic infosec principle seems to be something we've lost since the great WFH migration.
> We used to share memes about pounding away at the keyboard at 11:57, anxiously rushing to complete our work on time. These moments were not fun, exactly, but they did draw students together in a shared academic experience.
This reminds me of type 1 vs type 2 fun. Type 1 fun is fun in the moment; drinks with friends. Type 2 isn’t fun in the moment but is fun in retrospect. Generally people choose type 1 if given a choice but type 2 I find is the most rewarding. It’s what you’ll talk about with your friends at the bar. I know it’s very much old man, well I guess this high schooler is too, yelling at clouds but I do worry what the elimination of challenge does to our ability to learn and form relationships. I’d expect there to be a sweet spot. Obviously too much challenge and people shut down.
For reference, a similar HN story from about a month ago [1] on teacher usage of AI tools in the classroom.
It's pretty fucking dire. I think we're failing an entire generation of kids and the ramifications of this is going to be real bad in 5-10 years. I've heard similar stories from friends of mine whom are teachers.
to me this is an indication that the priorities of these formative years should change, and it doesn't look like what "school" looks like
the montessori and sudbury school model always seemed closest to what was necessary, although now I wonder if even those are cracking at the seams with outsourced thinking
regardless, I think a re-evaluation of the point is absolutely necessary.
self-motivated children are rare and require a specific environment and support system to thrive in, but will always be there to escape the more obvious return to serfs working on fiefs, unless born into capital themselves
Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes.
Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet.
Caught with a cellphone, you fail the test. Caught twice you fail the class.
The non-story beatings will continue until morale and common sense improve.
Right a broader theme about AI safety and AI politics and all of it: we have choices as a society, so if our choices are good and our will to see those choices respected are intact, then the scope for harm is pretty manageable.
When the one that can make Captain Trips bioweapon in a garage comes out, I'll start blaming the technology, at the moment, its the choices made by humans.
> or that they remove a sense of urgency from academics
That was one of my frustrations with "prep" school: An artificial sense of urgency that does not, in any way, reflect how one leads a happy, healthy, and successful life; nor does one need a sense of urgency in academics to grow into an adult who makes a positive contribution to society.
> Some students may use these tools to develop their understanding or explore topics more deeply, ... can also be used as a study aid
I think the same can be said about internet searches. Altavista came around when I was in high school; and I lost all motivation to memorize arcane facts. The same can also be said about books and libraries.
Instead, it's important to realize that a lot of topics taught in schools have to do with someone's agenda and opinion about what's important to know, and even political agendas; and then accept that many lessons from school are forgotten.
> Student assessments should be focused on tasks that are not easily delegated to technology: oral exams ... or personalized writing assignments ... Portfolio-based or presentational grading
Those are all time consuming; but they miss a bigger point: What's the real point of grades anyway?
Perhaps its time to focus on quality instead of quantity in education?
Idk this doesn’t really click for me. That first cheating example was entirely possible before GenAI (through sparknotes). And yet, we learned. Learning has always been a choice
80 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 69.5 ms ] threadNow, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.
I know it was a rough transition for my nephew, though, and I don't know that I would have handled it very well either. I'm not sure what would be a better option, though, given how much of a disservice such easy access to a mental crutch is.
Good!
If they want to give kids the chance to develop the skill of managing unstructured time, that could easily be fit into the school day/week in a variety of ways.
In most K-12 schools, there is a lot of time in the day that is used incredibly ineffeciently.
For my personal experience, college was a time management joke after high school, mainly because I didn’t have to spend so much bullshit/wasted time in classes.
> Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.
That’s a very privileged stance to take (I usually don’t play the “privilege card”, but it’s appropriate here).
For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons.
Maybe not for the median HN contributor, many not for the median middle class person in the US, but these groups are not the majority of students.
IMO getting too worried about this sort of homework “cheating” feels like the wrong way of looking at it. Although, there are lots of processes that accept and reinforce this wrong viewpoint.
For k-12, getting the parent and the student to sit down outside of school and “cheat” by having the parent teach the kid is… victory! You’ve reinforced the idea that learning can happen outside schools.
For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some.
The problem is when undue grade weight is put on these processes. It is a hard balance to strike, because you need to offer enough grade to incentivize the stuff, but not enough that it feels unfair to those who go individually.
As far as LLMs go, it offers an alternative to learning to collaborate with other humans. That’s bad, but the fix should be to figure out how to get the students to get back to collaborating with humans.
I would have failed high school if attendance/classwork mattered at the time. I skated by with test scores and homework -- I was too busy chasing sex and drugs during the social hours of adult-age-day-care public schooling.
I tell people that I didn't learn a damn thing until I hit a university, and I mean it. The "all classwork" policy would have ruined me -- hopefully they'd have had the mercy to kick my ass out on my 7th year of high school..
The magic of AI is it amplifies what’s there. Smart or diligent people get better. Dumb and lazy people kick the can down the road.
While I respect your good intent, I am disappointed to hear this perspective. The increasing burden of homework on children honestly strikes me as the denial of childhood.
I am happy to hear that this is one by-product of the widespread adoption of LLMs. I don't even mind getting rid of phones from the classroom to ensure that school time is productive learning time under these conditions.
Children should absolutely be permitted to live out their childhood. I don't think that time without homework equates to time with electronic brain rot. There is absolutely a middle ground that parents should enforce (like doing chores and engaging in discovery).
Similarly, I think that adolescents can find far more rewarding ways to spend their time outside of homework, whether that's working part-time, participating in volunteer activities, building personal projects or developing soft skills. While there absolutely will be adolescents that spend their time consuming social media and doing nothing productive, it feels problematic to enforce the double standard that teenagers should be required to juggle school, homework, extracurricular activities, basic familial responsibilities, and personal development, all while many adults do nothing productive outside of their work lives and barely meet their own familial responsibilities. Instead of having them do more homework, we should trust them to navigate their time. Parents, mentors, teachers can guide them with a gentle hand.
It's probably either that or ban it and do everything in-person, which might have to be the stopgap solution.
A quite possible future: you're surrounded by dead-eyed humans with AI implants who mindlessly repeat whatever the chatbot tells them.
Is this what The Atlantic has come down to, publishing a complain-y piece by the class president?
EDIT: For anyone struggling with my criticism of the article, I very much agree that there is a problem of AI in education. Her suggestion which is "maybe more oral exams and less essays?" I'm sure has never been considered by teachers around the world rolls eyes.
As for how to tackle this, I think the only solution is accept the fact that AI is going nowhere and integrate it into the class. Show kids in the class how to use AI properly, compare what different AI models say, and compare what they say to what scholars and authors have written, to what kids in the past have written in their essays.
You don't have to fight AI to instill critical thinking in kids. You can embrace it to teach them its limitations.
Phones shouldn't be in the classroom, and devices used in the classroom shouldn't have any access to AI.
Students shouldn't really have homework anyway so I think it's completely reasonable to just have kids doing work on pen and paper in the class for the most part.
Banish tech in schools (including cell phones) (except during comp classes) but allow it at home
Ie in high school only allow paper and pencil/pen
Go back to written exams (handwriting based)
Be lenient on spelling and grammer
Allow homework, digital tutoring AI assistants and AI only when it not primary- ie for homework not in class work
Bring back oral exams (in a limited way)
Encourage study groups in school but don’t allow digital tech in those groups in class or libraries only outside of campus or in computer labs
Give up iPads and Chromebooks and Pearson etc
You could write your essay and save it in your classroom shared folder. I don't think this is rocket science.
So i really do not wish to see that backtracked. But i could see the internet being declared too destructive.
A computer without internet, a book, and ample time would have worked for me.
How about be strict on spelling and grammer (sic) to have a GPA that accurately places students in colleges. The days of dunces getting 3.9 GPA and making it into Yale need to end.
It's not like there is a senior engineer who's got mountains of expertise to defer to (like a software team would have). Teachers are likely given directives from their schools and get dumped a bunch of tablets and are told this is "modern" education and to just roll it out.
Anyway, to your point - top-down directives are what change schools. There has been success such as banning smartphones in Ireland & UK recently. Schools taking on the problems and then solving it themselves could go a long way, rather than waiting for government to mandate things.
I just tutored my nephew through his college intro to stats course. Not only are calculators allowed, but they had a course web app so that all they did was select a dataset, select columns from those datasets, and enter some parameters. They were expected to be able to pick the right technique in the app, select the right things, and interpret the results. Because of the time savings, they covered far more techniques than we did in my day because they weren't spending so much time doing arithmetic.
Despite lots of cries about "who will know how to make calculators?", this transition to calculators (and computers) being allowed was unavoidable because that's how these subjects would be applied later on in students' careers. The same is true of AI, so students need to learn to use it effectively (e.g., not blindly accepting AI answers as truth). It will be difficult for the teachers to make their lesson plans deeper, but I think that's where we're headed.
Another lesson we can draw from the adoption of calculators is that not all kids could afford calculators, so schools sometimes needed to provide them. Schools might need to provide access to AI as well. Maybe you are required to use the school's version and it logs every student's usage as the modern version of "show your work"? And it could intentionally spit out bad answers occasionally to test that students are examining the output. There's a lot to figure out, but we can find inspiration in past transitions.
Now, we are social animals, and we grew to value these thing for their own right. Societies valued strength and bravery, as virtues, but I guess ultimately because having brave strong soldiers made for more food and babies.
So over time, we tamed beasts and built tools, and most of these virtues kind of faded away. In our world of prosperity and machine power on tap, strength and bravery are not really extolled so much anymore. We work out because it makes us healthy and attractive, not because our societies demand this. We're happy to replace the hard work with a prosthetic.
Intelligence all these millenia was the outlier. The thing separating us from the animals. It was so inconceivable that it might be replaced that it is very deeply ingrained in us.
But if suddenly we don't need it? Or at least 95% of the population doesn't? Is it "ok" to lose it, like engineers of today don't rely on strength like blacksmiths used to? Maybe. Maybe it's ok that in 100 years we will all let our brains rot, occasionally doing a crossword as a work out. It feels sad, but maybe only in the way decline of swordsmanship felt to a Napoleonic veteran. The world moved on and we don't care anymore.
We lost so many skills that were once so key: the average person can't farm, can't forage, can't start a fire or ride a horse. And maybe it's ok. Or, who knows, maybe not.
Soldiers do still go through physical training, and this seems to be a closer metaphor than swordsmanship.
Quite scary in its implications for the future.
"Problem-solving" might be dead, but people today seem more skilled in categorizing and comparing things than those in the past (even if they are not particularly good at it yet). Given the quantity and diversity of information and culture that exists, it's necessary. New developments in AI reinforce this with expert-curated data sets.
LLMs can be amazing [^0] as an assistive technology, but using them as a "do it for me" button is just way too easy, so that's how they are de facto used.
I believe it will take about 5-10 years for us to fully comprehend how damaging unplanned remote classrooms and unchecked LLM use in the classroom was. Like heroin, it will be extremely hard to undo our dependence on them by that point. I'm pretty scared for how our students will fare on the global scale in the coming years.
[^0] I strongly believe that 60% of the value of LLMs can be realized by learning how to use a search engine properly. Probably more. Nonetheless, I've fully embraced my accidentally-acquired curmudgeon identity and know that I'm in the minority about this.
[^1] You won't believe how many people leave their laptops unlocked and their screen's contents visible for everyone to see. Committing identity theft has to be easier than ever these days. This basic infosec principle seems to be something we've lost since the great WFH migration.
This reminds me of type 1 vs type 2 fun. Type 1 fun is fun in the moment; drinks with friends. Type 2 isn’t fun in the moment but is fun in retrospect. Generally people choose type 1 if given a choice but type 2 I find is the most rewarding. It’s what you’ll talk about with your friends at the bar. I know it’s very much old man, well I guess this high schooler is too, yelling at clouds but I do worry what the elimination of challenge does to our ability to learn and form relationships. I’d expect there to be a sweet spot. Obviously too much challenge and people shut down.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/new-york-city-public-...
Then reverseed the ban
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/chatgpt-ban-dropped-new-york-ci...
It's pretty fucking dire. I think we're failing an entire generation of kids and the ramifications of this is going to be real bad in 5-10 years. I've heard similar stories from friends of mine whom are teachers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808122
the montessori and sudbury school model always seemed closest to what was necessary, although now I wonder if even those are cracking at the seams with outsourced thinking
regardless, I think a re-evaluation of the point is absolutely necessary.
self-motivated children are rare and require a specific environment and support system to thrive in, but will always be there to escape the more obvious return to serfs working on fiefs, unless born into capital themselves
I've seen the same commentary about:
Spellcheck
Typed material
Computer art programs
Calculators
Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet.
Caught with a cellphone, you fail the test. Caught twice you fail the class.
The non-story beatings will continue until morale and common sense improve.
When the one that can make Captain Trips bioweapon in a garage comes out, I'll start blaming the technology, at the moment, its the choices made by humans.
That was one of my frustrations with "prep" school: An artificial sense of urgency that does not, in any way, reflect how one leads a happy, healthy, and successful life; nor does one need a sense of urgency in academics to grow into an adult who makes a positive contribution to society.
> Some students may use these tools to develop their understanding or explore topics more deeply, ... can also be used as a study aid
I think the same can be said about internet searches. Altavista came around when I was in high school; and I lost all motivation to memorize arcane facts. The same can also be said about books and libraries.
Instead, it's important to realize that a lot of topics taught in schools have to do with someone's agenda and opinion about what's important to know, and even political agendas; and then accept that many lessons from school are forgotten.
> Student assessments should be focused on tasks that are not easily delegated to technology: oral exams ... or personalized writing assignments ... Portfolio-based or presentational grading
Those are all time consuming; but they miss a bigger point: What's the real point of grades anyway?
Perhaps its time to focus on quality instead of quantity in education?