[Case in point: Internet Explorer shutdown to cause Japan headaches ‘for months’](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Internet-Explorer-shutdown-to-cause-Japan-headaches-for-months)
This may come as a surprise: many kids in Japan are not very tech-savvy. While students may have computers and tablets at school and CS classes on how to use them, they lack the opportunity for hands-on experience. On top of that, you have teachers who are deathly afraid of using technology in their classrooms lest students get “distracted” by their fancy new gadgets. The end result is you might have high school students who don’t know how to use some basic functions on their tablets, like *the search bar* or typing with two fingers. Keep that in mind if you see a stash of tablets locked up in the classroom and want to utilize them.
16 comments
Never mind that their “typing classes” were all using romaji, so be prepared to teach them that Tutaya is not a word.
The kids at my schools use tablets all the time in 5th grade and up. However the language barrier cordons them off to a small corner of the Internet and that is where any struggles are likely to spring from.
Teachers aren’t much better. Had a kid call me over for help as “Google wasn’t working”. They had opened a shortcut to incognito mode and didn’t know how to web search without the Google homepage as they had no idea what the URL bar.
As I was showing them how to do it a teacher comes over, sees the icognito mode screen and says it’s broken, takes the tablet away and gives them a new one.
Using the tablets can be good, just make sure your JTE knows how to use them and you’re prepared to monitor and play tech support
This is entirely untrue at both of the schools I teach at. Both JHS. Teachers and kids are great with tech, and we use digital textbooks in class and use the Internet to research discussion topics, as well as Google classroom for speaking practice and homework.
Yes I am the resident tech expert at most of my schools. I’ve even helped the principal! One school has lots of young teachers who like and are good at tech, however. I do have to help most students with seemingly simple things. But I think it’s getting better bit by bit (it was really accelerated by Covid).
Just a heads-up:
this article has received a lot of blow-back for its factuality — especially when you compare what it claims with other stats on browser usage in Japan.
It is suspected that the consultancy firm named in the article in the 2nd paragraph planted / conned / misled the article author — in a self-serving attempt to drum up consulting business for its operations.
Of course this varies a lot. Looking forward, the ministry of education is pushing strongly to get devices into the hands of students. Implementation doesn’t proceed at a uniform pace, but there are many more schools using tablets or laptops now than there were even 3 years ago.
Maybe y’all heard about it, but for the newcomers:
[Japan’s cyber-security minister has ‘never used a computer’](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026)
Yeah can confirm. I’m also the tech expert at school (and it’s frightening that I have that title). My schools rolled out personal tablets for students last year. Prior to that we had 0 technology for students. Not even a computer lab. My teachers are (for the most part) willing to try when it comes to tech, but everyone’s still trying to figure out how to use them in class.
PC ownership rates are really low in Japan compared to the West. I’m in a rural area and most of my kids don’t have computers at home. Almost all of them have a smartphone or tablets, so they’re ok with mobile UIs, but are very uncomfortable with computers. For example, none of my JHS students know how to use PowerPoint. In contrast, I, someone more than 10 years older than them, started regularly making powerpoints in school when I was 8.
To give some perspective for incoming folks, during the height of the pandemic we didn’t have online classes. School was just straight canceled. No online learning whatsoever. We didn’t have the technology. Even now when we have to close a class during cluster outbreaks, there’s no online class because no one knows how to do online learning or use Microsoft Teams (even though we have a subscription).
The folks at my BOE all share one email address.
This rings true for me too. I teach at a uni now and the kids are whizzes with smartphones but useless with PCs. In the last year I’ve literally had to teach whole classes how to add attachments to emails and save Word documents.
It’s not their fault if they were never taught, but still, I was surprised.
Hm I think this isn’t fair, my entire city has tablets for every kid and they all can google just fine. Every situation is (wildly) different, though, and some kids definitely don’t use the internet at home in some areas in Japan.
Teachers though, yeah they suck if they’re older than 30 probably
I’m a teacher in UK and most of my students don’t know how to do a lot of things on computers (like ctrl+alt+delete) , because they pretty much use smartphones 99% of time. So I’m not surprised tbh.
One of my current JTEs came from a more high-tech school and she’s frustrated that my school is not like that. Another of my teachers is comically forgetful and bad at technology. I remember one class with her, she started freaking out because her surface tab wasn’t showing up on the projector screen. Turns out she didn’t check if the HDMI cord was plugged in the right way.
I think now my school is going to start implementing more technology but it’s my last month and I’m not going to see that come to fruition.
I feel like I’m lucky. My students play typing games between classes on their chromebooks. Whenever someone had to stay home because of corona, they always attended through Google Meet. They use the google suite of word alternatives to do their presentations on. I race them in typing games and even ask my boe to unblock [ztype](https://zty.pe/) and they did it for me.
Combine this with the fact that sometimes the technology is so garbage that it makes it worse. Our laptops take about 1 minute from pushing the “start slideshow” button in powerpoint to actually starting it, so it just becomes a feedback loop of:
Teacher pushes button, nothing happens within the first 5 seconds, teacher assumes it didn’t work, pushes button again, powerpoint crashes, teacher unplugs hdmi cable and plugs it back in, the screen is now set to “extend” because powerpoint was in the middle of getting the presenter view ready, teacher closes powerpoint and notices that the screen is set to extend but doesn’t understand what that is and assumes it’s a virus, repeat for several minutes until they give up
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Extra: In windows 10, there’s the lock screen and when you hit a button it slides up and brings up the box to put your password in. If you don’t put it in within a certain amount of time, the lockscreen will come back down. Our computers take so long to load the password box that sometimes the lockscreen will come back down before you have a chance to log in.
ESID