Teachers exposed the shortcomings of electronic school diaries and demanded changes

There is a growing movement in Russian schools and educational circles to return ordinary paper student diaries. Many of the teachers we interviewed admitted that this was a “very sore subject” for them. And the point here is not only and not so much in the increasingly frequent technical failures in the operation of various platforms and Internet communications, but also teachers and parents consider electronic diaries to be an extremely inconvenient and even harmful attribute of the digital age for schoolchildren.

The other day it became known that teachers and parents of students in Nizhny Novgorod complained about the inconvenience of working with electronic diaries. Teachers massively stated that they do not have time to fill out electronic diaries in time, “and the mothers of first-graders do not have time to look there!”. In addition, they were indignant that electronic diaries often did not work, and demanded that their “good Soviet paper” versions be returned.

As MK found out, teachers from other regions can subscribe to these words of the Nizhny Novgorod teacher community. And even from Moscow (where there are no failures, but that’s not the point).

– This is my dream – to return to paper diaries, but unrealizable – sighs in a conversation with us, a history teacher from one of the Moscow schools. – This would better discipline the students of the people: he wrote down his homework (DZ) – be responsible for both writing the DZ and for its implementation. And EZhD (“Electronic Journal and Diary”) could be used as a duplication for those who were not at the lesson. And so the children have a good excuse – there was no task in the EZhD! And you ask him: “Were you at the lesson?” – “Yes!” – “Well, you must remember what you did in the lesson, what paragraph was discussed, what topic?” “No, I do not remember”. I sometimes do not let my students out of the class until they write down the DZ in the margins in their notebooks. But that doesn’t help much either. They are in a hurry to get into their phones as quickly as possible … I know for sure that children who have notebooks are in order, and their heads are also in order, – the teacher continued the painful topic. This applies to the diary too. But my opinion, unfortunately, is considered outdated, and most importantly, contrary to the line of the Ministry of Education on digitalization. In a good way, if there is no getting away from the “numbers” anyway, I would duplicate both the EZhD and the printed diary. For me personally, this is a very sore subject. I see where we are headed with this total digitalization. Or rather, our children. Their thinking, their socialization, upbringing….

– The appearance of electronic diaries is a tribute to the times, associated with some optimization of the work of the school and its workflow, – in turn, Mikhail Bogdanov, chairman of the St. Petersburg City Parents’ Committee, commented on this situation to MK. – But the problem is that, by introducing electronic diaries, they combined two functions: on the one hand, it is an electronic journal, that is, the school’s internal workflow, on the other hand, it is an electronic version of a student’s regular paper diary, which is now available in electronic form. And the developers did not think that in this case two documents of different functionality are obtained. Although they tried, sort of, to simplify the life of both schoolchildren and teachers, since now there is no need to maintain two different documents …

According to the expert, if we take intra-school accounting and the work of a teacher, then yes, EJ is quite convenient. And teachers enjoy using it. The problem is in the diary.

“The student’s diary, transferred to a remote form, deprives the child of the tool of self-organization, relieves him of responsibility in the part that concerns the organization of the educational process,” continues Bogdanov. – A student’s diary is a child’s document. He must lead it himself. The educational function of the diary is completely lost: the responsibility is shifted from the child to the shoulders of adults. In fact, today the teacher and parents communicate directly through an electronic journal, not a diary. It is not correct to call him a diary. Now it turns out that the teacher writes down tasks in the EJ instead of the student, and the parent controls the grades in it. And this has a detrimental effect on children: they do not develop independence, responsibility, and the ability to plan their work. Keeping a diary is a very important experience for children.

This bias with electronic diaries – specifically in terms of pedagogical and educational work – very seriously affected a whole range of issues of the internal organization of the school. Not only can parents, while communicating with teachers, go beyond the time frame and make some kind of scandals in correspondence, and the teachers themselves are put in unreasonably tight limits: for example, that homework should appear no later than 16:00. And we have many teachers working in two shifts, and doing extracurricular activities …

Therefore, the expert concludes, if we return the usual diaries that the Nizhny Novgorod teachers offer, this would be the right decision.

As for technical failures, which teachers also complain about, according to Bogdanov, they happen, but these are solvable issues, and the above are much more serious problems.

However, according to the Nizhny Novgorod Ministry of Education, the form of keeping class journals and diaries is not regulated by federal or regional legislation. But the state service “Providing information on the current progress of a student, maintaining an electronic diary and an electronic journal of progress” is among the priority services provided in electronic form, they noted there. Therefore, electronic diaries and journals have been introduced by all schools in the region. However, the ministry nevertheless emphasized that “whether to keep paper versions of documents, each educational organization decides for itself separately.”