Day 50 (of 2024/25) wait till people take a look at modern calculators…. Ban bias via things we wish we had… on a #tEChursday thanks @wired
Recently a focus on banning personal tech has noticed smartwatches
And
https://apple.news/AyqEV8lH6Q52nuhR9C5ExNA OR https://www.wired.com/story/schools-ban-phones-but-kids-arrive-with-smartwatches-edsurge/#:~:text=Many%20parents%20are%20unable%20or,another%20“electronic%20umbilical%20cord.”&text=This%20article%20was%20copublished%20with%20EdSurge.
with a personal note that since the early 1980s, watches have long pushed and blurred tech & distraction boundaries. I had many – a transformer watch, calculator versions, my dad had a Casio computer watch. I almost bought a tv watch (a regret… I shoulda gone for it…) a radio version…
The watches are nice – they allow parents to track their kids and have a more discreet (albeit limited) method to check in/out. – but as the Wired article assumes, there is not the same web browser or social media application… though there are limited web browser apps available and some good distractions (eg the tik Tok app has an easter egg that is a Tetris game – and Tetris is a great game to help the brain after an upsetting (even traumatic) incident!
But… the distractions and communications are part of the reason that schools have noticed the watches as a new tool to ban ~ I still wonder what the reaction is going to be during the future school ‘bad’ events and the attempts to connect and communicate where students are goes wrong because of the devices not being with their users… I know I’d be pretty upset if one of my kids was missing (kidnapped?) and could’ve been tracked if they had their device but it was removed because it might be a distraction… that being said, I hypocritically also want my kids to be independent and not be tracked by us…
But.. I still worry about the rationals… “They’re disruptive, distracting,” says the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.” But so do some analog distractions – that we did/do not ban (*yet?):
- Paper and pencils with sketching and notes to friends
- Pens – whether with clicks or disassembling them…
- Books and magazines that are hidden in laps
- Long hair that attracts combs and twisting it
- Makeup that needs touchups
- Eating in class
- Chewing gum (even though there are links to it helping focus…)
- Being late… getting thirsty… needing to sharpen a pencil…
- Too many colours and items on the classroom walls
- Teacher habits
- Transitions… what if cohorts always stayed together in one room and it was the adults who changed spaces!?!
And calculators do more than calculate equations… or help with graphs… making slide rules and abacuses fun retro tools… but they can still be great distractions…
First some home-grown games… https://www.calculatorti.com/ti-games/ti-83-plus-ti-84-plu
But also some tech distractions that some will not appreciate… This includes everything such as Mario, Pacman, Portal, Snake, Flappy Bird, Geometry Dash, and more… https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Put-Games-on-a-TI-84-Plus-CE/
So, should these tools be banned as cell phones have been? As a distraction… despite many its many uses – some of which that have fundamentally changed how maths are taught… a paradigm shift to rely on tech. Despite knowing they could connect to wifi via The Gossamer web browser that can be used on TI-83+ through TI-84+SE graphing calculators to access the internet…
There was a time when calculators were banned in general… then more specifically (they didn’t like the one I had that had some neat options…albeit not yet at the complexity of the graphing calculators that then had to fight outright bans for awhile before being embraced… now, I am not promoting 24/7 K-12 integrated use of cell phones, but I do see the positives of tech, and I am promoting teaching good use rather than banning them to the outsides of school and hoping ‘that’ learning does better than it has for sex drugs and alcohol in the ‘peer support’ model in the shadows of our world…
Even paper tablets, aka books, were once seen as a distraction from learning… but we don’t ban pencils and books (okay, some titles/authors are still regularly under attack) but instead focus on how to use them for their positives and deal with the negatives as needed.
Technolandy 
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