Back to school!
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What is the episode’s overall theme and why are the hosts back for a new school year?
Welcome to For Tech's Sake, a podcast where each week we gather at our virtual roundtable to vote out the traitors of tech. We are your hosts, Elaine Burke
and Kelly Early.
And actually, we have not been meeting weekly at all for the last few weeks, so it's nice to be back.
Yes, a whole summer of relaxation and new birthday milestones achieved for Elaine.
Yes, I turned 40, took a month off and had the best time. It was great. What did you get up to?
I went to your 40th. Other than that, I've just been busy writing, busy working at GCN and preparing for the galas. And yeah, it was not a restful break for me at all. Sorry. I can rest when I'm 40. I highly recommend it, actually. Yeah. I might take 40 months off. Is that five
years? I don't know. Speaking of that rudimentary arithmetic in my head,
we're going
back to school today, aren't we, Kelly?
Mm-hmm.
yeah um you might think that a podcast with an episode called back to school might be recommending all of the latest gadgets that students could benefit from but today it's quite the opposite we are packing your lunch ahead of the school year with food for thought i'm sorry No, I love it. I love that so much. Yeah, we're giving you more stuff to think about and you might like some of it, but you probably won't like most of it. The good news is that most kids can now do better maths than me and Elaine, in Ireland at least. A major international study PISA, which is the Programme for International Student Assessment, released their latest results, which found that Irish students are first in the whole EU for reading skills, third for science and fourth for mathematics out of 27 EU countries.
So maybe we're grooming all of our kids to work for Stripe someday, but maybe we're teaching them how to read and think critically. There's... There's a mix there.
The reading one I love because I do think we've done a really, really good job as a culture to continue the childhood love of reading. Like I always see kids with books and reading books and it makes me so happy.
I know, it is very sweet. And I like the amount of Irish language books, the amount of like really niche themes that are covered in children's books by authors in Ireland, but also... The amount of kids I know who just love YA fiction as well is just lovely to see. So, yeah, even though there's good news for Ireland, there's bad news for the world at large because school test scores have been declining. There's falls in reading and maths that equate to two years of lost schooling. So what we were told were issues caused by COVID have continued on for six years and it might just be a broader trend caused by smartphones, AI, early exposure to tech, inappropriate exposure to tech and yeah, just general horrible stuff.
Yeah. And like, I mean, the truth of the matter here is this is we don't know and there's probably no one easy factor to point your finger at as to why these things are declined. It's like literacy and numeracy problem because people when they think of like the cognitive decline because of your devices, they are thinking of like overuse of them and over reliance of them. But something I heard of was there's also things like if parents decide that the tablet entertains their child, do they spend less time reading to their child then? And then like reading to children has been seen over time as something that has a huge effect on their literacy and also like their later stage reading and like kind of developing a love for it and stuff like that.
So there could be like Those offshoot impacts having an influence here as well. It's like it's a very complicated net of things, I think.
Yeah, like, I mean, Tony's is... Yeah, this has become an anti-Tony's podcast. But I think maybe there's, like, as you said, there's a lot of factors and it's not all related to tech, but it's not good.
But an interesting thing when we come to that talk about, you know, kids and devices and... Should they be having devices? Should they be online? And it comes up all the time and lots of people have opinions on it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the episode’s overall theme and why are the hosts back for a new school year?
0:00–5:40
2
How do recent PISA results reflect Ireland’s strengths and the global decline in test scores?
5:40–11:11
3
What are tech‑company CEOs doing with their own children’s screen time and why does it matter?
11:11–16:50
4
Why is image‑sharing in schools a privacy risk and what guidance does Webwise provide?
16:50–21:08
5
Are today’s kids really ‘digital natives’ and what does that myth overlook?
21:08–25:28
6
Can tech‑free or low‑tech schools improve learning and wellbeing, and what are the challenges?
25:28–31:39
7
What did the 1982 Cockroft Report recommend for maths education and how does it relate to today’s devices?
31:39–36:01
8
How can parents and schools reduce the digital footprint of children’s photos (e.g., low‑resolution hacks, blurring, metadata removal)?
36:01–41:43