Denise Mills: "I can help them right up to Year 6 or 7, and then I'm lost." Photo / Peter Meecham
Today's schools are barely recognisable to adults who went to school in a different era. Grandmother Denise Mills and education reporter Simon Collins spent two days in a Year 4 "modern learning space" to report first-hand on the new world. Today: learning on devices.
Grandmother Denise Mills says she can keep up with her grandchildren's learning - but only up to about Year 7.
Mills, 67, retired from paid work last year so that she can look after granddaughters Katie, 12, and Mya, 6, after school until their parents get home from work.
The children bring their homework home on their devices.
"Mya has Mathletics. That's her only homework, plus her reading book every week," Mills says.
"I can help Katie with her pronunciation, and I help Mya with her Mathletics. But Katie's homework, when it comes to coding, it's just like gibberish to me.
"I was never taught coding. I had never seen it till Katie brought it home.
"When they are younger, I can still help Mya. I love reading their books once they have finished their exercise books. I can help them right up to Year 6 or 7, and then I'm lost."
Learning on devices is one of the biggest changes in New Zealand schools since most parents, let alone grandparents, went to school themselves.
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The Gardens School near the Botanic Gardens in Manurewa, which Mills' granddaughters attend, has a bring your own device (BYOD) policy from Year 5, when the children are about 9 years old.
Parents are asked to buy their children iPads. A local dealer offers them an iPad 6 for $535, plus optional screen protector, case, keyboard and pencil which can add up to a further $446.
To prepare for this, the school provides a free iPad for each child in Year 4, but these devices have to stay at school and the children plug them in to recharge in a cupboard whenever they are not using them.
"We give them 1:1 devices [one device per student] in Year 4. They get their own Gmail account," says principal Susannah Fowler. "It's 1:2 [one device per two students] down further."
In Year 4, the teachers load each student's menu for each lesson on to Google Classroom, along with materials such as any book the group is studying. Students can access these materials in the school, and from home or anywhere if their families have their own devices.
In one English lesson, we saw students working with their lesson menu open on their devices and writing with old-fashioned pen and paper.
On another day, they made "Story Mountains" on their devices - writing the beginning, middle and end of stories in blocks of words arranged around the shape of a mountain on their screens.
In a maths class, the teacher had loaded a quiz on to Google Classroom and displayed it on the screen while the children wrote their answers on paper.
Then, while the teacher ran a "workshop" for a small group in a breakout room, the other children were left to do Mathletics or Kahoot, another learning game, on their devices.
"We make sure they have a good balance," says Year 4 teacher Tracey Kuba.
"I would say we start off with a little bit more bookwork, and by the end of the year we may be tipping slightly towards online work depending on how we're going. We aim for about a 50/50 split."
Digital technologies became part of the official school curriculum last year and will be compulsory in all NZ schools from next year.
Primary schools are expected to integrate technology into other learning areas. By Year 4, students are expected to be able to "break down simple non-computerised tasks into precise, unambiguous, step-by-step instructions" - in other words, understand the basics of coding.
Christine Hansen, The Gardens School's lead teacher for information technology, says coding at primary school level uses "block" codes where children move blocks on the screen labelled "move right", "move up", "move down", and so on to produce a simple code that moves an object across the screen.
"That's thinking in sequence and order, and coding helps with being able to put instructions together," she says.
"So we have Scratch Jr, and today I was doing Bee-Bots - they are programmed to move around, that was the little bumblebee.
"Then as they get up to higher levels they can program things and make things. The intermediates [11- and 12-year-olds] made this rubbish bin where you lifted the lid and it said, 'Thank you for recycling.'"
The main reason for teaching this stuff is that it is now such a pervasive element of the world children will live in.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said in an influential 2013 report: "A fundamental reason to pursue technology-rich learning environments is that we live in a digital world. The digital transformation is continuing to change how people work, communicate, play and conduct their daily lives."
A bonus is that the kids love it. Mills says 6-year-old Mya enjoys Mathletics so much that she does it even on weekends.
"Mya has to get 1000 points a week in Mathletics. Today she already had 1230 points," she says. And today was only Monday.
Kuba says the technology gives a huge boost to the children's learning.
"I would say the biggest difference is their engagement, their problem-solving skills," she says.
"They are just not scared, so they just problem-solve. They learn to collaborate together: 'Oh that's cool, show me how to do it!'
"They really enjoy sharing their work, they love having their work on the screen. We have seen such a big difference in our engagement with the boys especially."
One particular boy "did an amazing job" with his "Story Mountain".
"He loves it. He goes the extra mile, he makes it creative, he makes it his own," Kuba says.
"If he was writing in a book and was asked to summarise the main points of the story, it probably would have taken a week."
There are, however, at least three issues around the digital devices.
First, not every family can afford them. Children whose parents can't afford an iPad from Year 5 can still use school devices, but parents are advised: "The downside for students not having their own device is that they will be unable to access work from home that they have been doing in class, which may affect the continuity of work."
Andrea Gray, a New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) deputy chief executive in charge of putting senior school exams online, says there is no coherent national programme to give every student a device.
"Different school communities have different attitudes towards resolving the challenge," she says.
The Manaiakalani Trust helps parents to buy devices at 13 schools around Glen Innes and has established outreach programmes in other places, but still only serves a fraction of the country.
Second, planning work for every child and preparing everything for Google Classroom adds to teachers' workloads.
"We have a really high expectation of workload," Fowler says.
Mark Bracey, a Howick Primary School teacher who writes the Ease Education blog, believes such detailed planning is a mistake because it ties teachers to a rigid lesson plan, delivering knowledge like a "fire hose" when the teacher should be more of a "water fountain" for the children to drink from when they are thirsty.
"You go and deliver this lesson and it doesn't quite fit the children for some reason, or there is a difficult child," he says.
"When I discovered that, I stopped doing it and I started to become a bit more organic. My job is to know the children and to know what they know and what they are willing to do."
Third, and most importantly, Bracey and others worry that children are already spending too much time on devices outside school and need to develop other, more human skills at school.
"Society is changing, and the children are coming with a lot less self-management ability. I have children who arrive at 7am and are still there at 5pm," he says.
"Sometimes you have to just ditch the device learning and get the social learning right so then you can uncover that intelligence and curiosity. A lot have been on devices since they were young, so a lot of those social things have been lost."
Fowler worries about this too.
"Fortnite [an online game] has really impacted our kids because they are spending a lot more time gaming," she says.
Kia King, a Blenheim mother who started a Facebook page "My child is not a guinea pig", says the instructions on her son's device became "mechanical".
"He got given lots of things to do and just ticked them off like I'd tick off a shopping list," she says.
"There was no joy in the learning, and he couldn't get to the teachers because they were too busy constantly explaining to all the other children."
A research summary published by the Education Hub, run by Auckland University educationalist Dr Nina Hood, says: "Currently, there is a lack of rigorous, robust research evidence on educational technology.
"Despite these challenges, there are some areas of educational technology research where there is a growing evidence base for schools and teachers to draw upon in their decision-making," the hub says.
"There is evidence emerging from meta-analysis studies to suggest that technology has a moderate effect on learning. However, this effect is not consistent across all subject areas or types of technology use.
"The evidence suggests that learning effects are greater for learning other languages, mathematics, and science and technology, and lower in social studies and English.
"Overall, the evidence suggests that technology should be used to supplement rather than replace more traditional teaching approaches."
Kuba says The Gardens teachers talk to their students a lot about "having a balance".
"We have just done an activity where they had to tell us why it's a good idea to have that balance between their game and screen time and their real-life activity," she says.
"We do have to be very careful not to overdo the technology to the point that they are online all the school day. That is not what we want.
"We want them to be talking to each other, we want them to be doing hands-on work and work in their books, and we don't want them to be going home and doing stuff on their iPads all day."
BYOD: Bring your own device, kids are expected to bring tablets to school.
Coding: Writing instructions in a simple, logical sequence that a computer can understand.
Google Classroom: A Google service launched in 2014 allowing teachers and students to share files online.
Kahoot!: A web-based system developed in Norway in 2013 to transform the classroom into a game show, with the teacher as host and students competing to answer questions on their own devices.
Mathletics: A web-based system developed in Australia in 2005 in which students gets points for answering maths challenges.
Story Mountain: A strategy for writing a story from the introduction up to the climax of a problem, and then resolving it.
Monday: No more rows of desks
Today: Learning on devices.
Tomorrow: Literacy - reading to understand.
Thursday: Maths - the right answer is not enough.
Friday: Self-directed learners.
OPINION: Kids’ attempts at difficult words can at least be humorous.