As a developer, I’m not at all surprised, I suspect it’s negative from almost all points of view except at the district or city or state level where they pat themselves on the back for bringing technology into classrooms via spending some money, what little money they have, on tech that they don’t use and don’t understand. I don’t even have that much experience with it, but I’ve tried making educational software, in the form of multi-user whiteboards teachers could use for their classes. The people approving purchasing decisions don’t use the software, and don’t ask teachers or students about the experience or value of the software. The insane sales cycles are a never-ending nightmare of requirements and delays, far beyond the reasonable concerns about kids & privacy. After years of run-arounds, we gave up trying to use any official channels and just let teachers use the software free.
As a parent, the experience was also very negative. My kids hated almost everything the school forced them to use, because the software was terrible compared to non-educational software. Teachers didn’t get any training on the software, and didn’t have the resources or time to use it effectively. Hardware was always outdated or supremely cheap and crappy. Possible the single worst software experience was the automated essay grading software. It was beyond broken, actively harmful, and it literally didn’t work. I came home from work one day and my oldest kid was in tears and my wife at her wits end trying to finish a homework assignment to write a short concise 2 paragraph essay on a specific topic and achieve an arbitrary 90% score or whatever within 10 tries, and they’d used up 8 of them and scores were going down each time. This software isn’t even supposed to be used unsupervised for grading, but the teachers didn’t seem to understand, and weren’t following recommendations. I figured out quickly the software doesn’t understand english and would score higher if you fed it more words, regardless of their quality or relevance - the polar opposite of the assignment’s goal. So I gave it a wikipedia article on why people shouldn’t use software grading robots, which scored 100%, and then scheduled a meeting with the teacher, who proceeded to complain about the software and told me she didn’t have a choice because it was district rules and a state software contract.
The cynic in me thinks this is 100% working as intended if you view school (especially before university) as an industrial sssembly line to produce the obedient little workers of the future.
By making kids “accept” to be arbitrarily graded by an automated black box on seemingly virtuous but absurd criteria in practice, they’re being trained for what the future of work might become if coporations get their way and put AI everywhere they can. Or if they’re lucky they learn instead to cheat the system and/pr hack it but that’s a minority who will become misfits in their professional lives.
I hope you were able to cheer your kid up, regardless but this is a scary look into the near future.
As a parent, the experience was also very negative. My kids hated almost everything the school forced them to use, because the software was terrible compared to non-educational software. Teachers didn’t get any training on the software, and didn’t have the resources or time to use it effectively. Hardware was always outdated or supremely cheap and crappy. Possible the single worst software experience was the automated essay grading software. It was beyond broken, actively harmful, and it literally didn’t work. I came home from work one day and my oldest kid was in tears and my wife at her wits end trying to finish a homework assignment to write a short concise 2 paragraph essay on a specific topic and achieve an arbitrary 90% score or whatever within 10 tries, and they’d used up 8 of them and scores were going down each time. This software isn’t even supposed to be used unsupervised for grading, but the teachers didn’t seem to understand, and weren’t following recommendations. I figured out quickly the software doesn’t understand english and would score higher if you fed it more words, regardless of their quality or relevance - the polar opposite of the assignment’s goal. So I gave it a wikipedia article on why people shouldn’t use software grading robots, which scored 100%, and then scheduled a meeting with the teacher, who proceeded to complain about the software and told me she didn’t have a choice because it was district rules and a state software contract.