"Schools are slowly becoming extremely reliant on a few large companies’ entire technological stacks in order to operate. In turn, these stacks are reshaping what schooling is and could be, and exercising unaccountable control over students, teachers, administrators and content providers alike".
This worries me quite a lot, actually. Read the whole essay. https://educationdatafutures.digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/essays/competing-interests-in-education-data/schools-must-resist-big-edtech
(via @garyackerman)
@margreta @garyackerman I would argue this has been the case since the early 2000's where virtually every school was using Windows, Office, and a bunch of other MS products.
CS lessons, as we knew them, were scrapped and turned into "how to use technical tools" lessons, mostly based around Microsoft products.
When they started trying to reintroduce real CS a few years ago, they found almost none of the ICT teachers knew how to teach it.
@Majik @garyackerman I agree, esp for Microsoft's case. I think however, that the introduction of Office 365, and esp the way a lot of schools now use Teams and OneNote, has made it more worrysome. Children hand in their work, communicate with their teachers, use the cloud storage... they are much more dependent on it than was the case when Word was your chosen text editor and that was it.
@margreta @garyackerman personally, I don't see that as much of a problem compared with indoctrinating kids with MS Office.
Kids grow up with a variety of similar communication tools and cloud services including storage and sharing tools that they use with their peers outside of school, and the majority of these are not the ones they use in schools. This has been the case for at least 10 years.
That is unlike office tools which kids tend to only use at school.
You are correct in the "in school" versus "out of school" communication tools, and I am not sure that is bad. Do we really want to "force" students to TikTok (current example) to access education?
I've always been an advocate for diverse computing environments in schools. A students who can use a Mac, PC, Linux, etc. machine to accomplish when they need is a vital skill in my opinion.
I think the indoctrination into MS Office, which has no been replaced with Google Workspaces, ignores what we really should be teaching students about productive computing
