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Students Outpacing Teachers With Online Skills
beaverfever writes: "The Christian Science Monitor ran this commentary by Tom Regan on how students in middle and high school are outpacing their teachers when it comes to understanding the potential of and using the internet for learning and doing research. The article addresses a study, The Digital Disconnect, recently released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Regarding the study, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, is quoted: 'Educators have a choice: Either they need to adapt or they will be dragged into a new learning environment.' Both the study and article are about two weeks old, but an interesting read nonetheless."
Yes! Students need to read more. It takes a village you know!
I bet most /.ers can recall a time when they corrected a teacher. I think students can be as important as educators to the education process. Incidentally, most good MBA programs require that you get some real world experience so this student led education is more valuable.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Ho HO! Radish, you thought YOU would get first post! But NO!! It was *I*! I also added some insightful comments to my first post. Mod me up scotty! In other news, the Newton will not die! Soon there will be posts about the iOpener, and how it will be used on the ISS to control docking manouvers!
I'm sure -no one- on Slashdot would EVER have seen this one coming...
From more than ten years away, anyway. Heck even before then I could use BBSes for research purposes.
I am a science fantasy fan
Our schools have senior citizens teaching classes. Did they really have to do a study to come up with such a conclusion? What t waste of money!
Not for nuthin', but at a local school where I went with my GF to pickup her little sister, I saw a room full (20-25) of 5 year old kids using DELL LAPTOPS and MS WORD. It's a spooky sight to see a little penquin sized thing complaining because FILE-OPEN dialog box is sometimes a bit confusing. They were using portable mice because the little rodants fit more easily into their hands. Ever see a 5 year old girl browse the web? twilight zone spooky. And I though I was kewl at 13, using ZModem and tradin' warez on BBS's here in Long Island, New York. CRAZY!
I think I feel a new side-project coming on...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I remember getting into arguments with my teachers and principals years ago because I did some research on the internet and there was no standard way of annotating it in the bibliography/footnotes yet. This was back around 1992.. evidentally there's now standards for that, but it's just one examples years ago.
teachers spend 8-12 hours a day in the classroom, then go home and try to relax. free time? hah. like any adult, it's just the weekends.
students spend 6 hours in the classroom, and if they don't have extracurricular activities or a job, they get to surf until the wee hours of the morning.
not a big surprise.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
oxymoron anyone ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I am one teacher who knows more than my middle school and high school students. They hate it. They don't get away with anything in my lab. I know all of the tricks. OF course, the rest of the teachers in the school need clue sticks, but I am working on all of them. I suppose most computer teachers should be ahead of the kids, but that's isn't necessarily how it really is, and most teachers of other subjects just don't get the internet-thing either.
The Internet is great, if you want to figure out that chick who was in the movie with the guy, if you need some information about Linux, or if you want to view some naked ladies. It is not, and I doubt will ever be, a good source for education.
The nature of man is to put forth as little effort as possible to get the most in return. Since web sites are advertising-funded, that means web publishing tends to sensastionalism, as sites try to attract as many "impressions" and "click throughs" as possible. This makes it a terrible place for doing research.
Educators should give up on the pipe dream of using the Internet for educational purposes. Computers in classrooms are important, to teach children how to type, write and format a paper in Microsoft Word, and to play Oregon Trail. These are valuable skills, and (surprise) none of them require the Internet. Schools would put their funds to better use by passing on the 'ternet hookup and instead purchasing some quality glassware for chemistry class.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
the web is a wonder full tool for pOrn^H^H^H^HSex education.
...but when people want to know why teachers (in general--some are quite adept) don't know jack about technology, they can start by looking at their superiors. How many people in positions of authority at high schools/middle schools (principals, "technology coordinators" for that matter) understand what the average student needs to learn about computers, and what computers are not fit to teach?
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
1. Pay Teachers what they are REALLY worth
2. Train the teachers that are already in place so they don't get left behind.
I teach at a suburban high school (approx. 2700 students). Although our Internet access is fast, it is so hobbled by censorware that most research on the web is useless. The machines themselves are locked down with Fortres, which prevents knowledgeable teachers like myself from even being able to introduce the kids to new technologies (I teach computer science, and it's a real pain in the ass to get the student machines updated and reimaged every time I want to work with open-source software I find on the web).
Add to this the fact that most school district technology staffers are woefully ignorant of technology (many are teachers who have no background in technology but thought it would be "cool" to learn how to jockey a mouse around like a pro), and you have the situation described in the article. It's a sad, sad situation, and it frustrates me to no end that I must deal with so-called district technology "gurus" who have no idea what the hell they're doing, but do happen to know how to type a password in.
I've found that most teachers have not entirely adapted to using computers in general. My chemistry teacher awarded twice as many enrichment points for flash animations and posters done with Photoshop than she did for normal posters. For example, she gave a friend of mine two times more enrichment for a poster describing the four states of matter and which had no information we hadn't learned in class than my poster, which was not as visually pleasing, but was on the Bose-Einstein condensate, which she herself had not even heard of.
When I was in high school I knew more about computers than anyone else in the building. I knew more than the net admins too. Their security consisted of removing icons from desktop and start menu. By pressing F3 getting find files and folders, then right clicking to get windows explorer, I was able to run nwadmin.exe and change anything. I was really tempted to change the mayor's password.
Anyway there is only one way to get quality tech education in high school/middle school. You have to hire a professional. I wont go into detail about how completely awesome that would be. If my high school had a full time employee who knew more about computers than anyone else there it would have been great. I wouldn't have to deal with stupid teachers thinking I'm "hackign the schools network" when I'm installing Macromedia flash player.
The problem is that no non-university will pay a salary as good as what you could get working for a real IT firm. Even college professors work "real" jobs in the summer because they make so much more money that way.
A big problem is that attitude that you just have to have the computers in the school and everythign else will follow. I see these public schools with labs and labs full of too-powerful computers that are only used for MS-Office. I ask why they have GForce2s, they don't know they're never ever going to run any application that has a scrath of OpenGL or Direct3D in it. If they spent that money more wisely they could have hired a pro to work for them full time, maybe even teach, and help them make better buying decisions. But they didn't hire a person before buying, so now they can't afford to hire anyone.
I don't think they can afford a real IT salary anyway. At least not a public school. But if they did you can expect the face of computer education to change greatly.
I'm seeing a freshman year of high school class required for all students in which they learn how a computer works (what are the parts, what do they do) and how to build one and set it up. BIOS OS. Windows, Linux, Mac. Once you know that much, everything else falls into place, unless you are a techie. The problem is people just learn "click, click, type, click".
So, this is to all you schools out there. Hire people like us, we will help you! You just have to pay us what we're worth.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
As a former public school teacher, technology coordinator, and comp sci professor, it's my experience that with the terrible pay and bureaucracy in public education, very little innovative education with technology is being done. Sure, every state and lots of districts can point to a shining example, but those are by far the isolated exception rather than the rule.
When you see sharp kids in public schools who know technology, credit the kid and not the school. In many cases, the sharp kids are bored out of their minds and are discouraged (either directly or indirectly) from pushing the envelope and rocking the boat.
I've done tech support. In my experience teachers are some of the dumbest people (as in how on-line goes) it's just the who way of thinking is alien to them. --not to put down teachers, just the way it is - some people's brains just don't work in this particular way of thinking.
I think teaching is easy, the real skill is dealing with a bunch of whining students who always ask the same question over and over again... we IT people just blow it off with a loud RTFM
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
My fiance is in a computer class for nursing students. She would skip it, but she wants the easy 3 hours of 4.0 to boost the GPA. She has had one class and already she is ready to shoot the lady. Some key phrases:
Once you switch to Cox [High Speed Internet] you will never go back to the Internet!
The reason all these computers [windows boxes] are slow is because they all run off one CPU!
She told me there were more, but she was busy trying to electrocute herself to get out of class...
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Only two weeks old?
/. article.
Damn, didn't even get a chance to age. This is pretty young for a
Normally, you only get fresh articles when they're links to Register stories
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Now, my four year old son says "dad, we should write a story about this and that and publish it at my homepage so kids all over the world can read it". "Dad, let me play tetris on your Communicator" - heck, he has even already broken 2 communicators (dont tell my employer :)) Also, I quess I was around 11 when I first used a mouse. And maybe 9 when I first punched in the first letters using a keyboard.
Things chance. 20 years from now kids learn to use computer when they are 2. You and the teachers have to work seriously hard to even have a change to be at same level on some detailed area of knowledge. Teachers should - and already concentrate - in teaching larger concepts and teach to ask why - instead of how.
"...Educators have a choice: Either they need to adapt or they will be dragged into a new learning environment." 25yr old. I have taught for 3 yrs. at Mission High school San Francisco. 2 yrs. I was teaching Cisco Systems. What I did realize is that for the San Fransico Unified School District, teachers didn't have a choice. How could a teacher prepare a outstanding lesson plan when they have no resourses. By resourses I mean time and books. For the moment let's just say that they do have computers. Teachers are expected to teach anywhere from 2 to 3 subjects a day on a block schedule with different learning levels involved. After school, instead of planning an outstanding lesson plan, teachers are dragged off to some figgin' meeting that has absolutely nothing to do with giving the students your best, cause that is what they deserve. Instead the administrators and district consultants come in and tell you that you can make a difference in the childs life. They have no idea. In order for computers to be a success in the secondary schools the district is going to have to accept that computers is a science just as much as it is a research tool. It's not about connecting to the internet. It's about standardized programming syntax, making the right decisions in the networking world (and there not always cisco). Also the computer is not a replacement for books. Another thing I had to beg the administration for books. what kinda $hit is that? Programmers need books, I don't care how much information is on the net. Based on my experience, the teachers had no choice, but to do what the School District told them. If I ever go back to teaching, It's teaching *nix. The District will try to stop me. Computer Science is the way. Just straight acceptance. I spoke too much.
It's a spooky sight to see a little penquin sized thing complaining because FILE-OPEN dialog box is sometimes a bit confusing
Freudian slip?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
When I was in school, the web was still very young and the only valid use in school for the internet might have been research for a paper. But now times are changeing. Some teachers in highschool are answering questions by email, some post materials online for students.
Both of my parents are highschool teachers, and I got them to use computer more and more in there teaching method. It started with useing word processing to create tests and assignemnts, but now they do online research, answer questions by email, do virtual since labs over the internet, use computer games such as Sim Coaster to demonstrate the principles of physics, etc.
The big complaint I hear from them is not that they are not able to incorporate the internet and computers more becuase of there skills (they are not experts by any means, but they get by with what they need to do), but that schools do not have the proper equipment to do what they want to. Computers, internet access, etc are all limited resources in many schools.
To make maters worse, when the schools do get money for equipment, it often gets improperly set up or isn't getting used as it is down. The schools often can't afford to spend them oney to higher a descent IT staff to setup and manage the computers efficiently. This made worse by students who decide to hack and break the school systems for fun...the staff can't keep up.
Unless schools are willing to shell out the money to get descent staff to setup and support the systems and networks well, and train the teachers to use them effectively, the teachers will always have a hard time keeping up.
I dont have a
I almost failed Intro to Comp. Sci. last year (have to take it to take Avdanced and AP Comp. Sci.) because I hated the teacher some much.
She walks into the class expecting to teach us QBasic by going through a 'Learn QBasic In 24 hrs' book.
Then, for html she made me and some others teach the class while she took notes for the other classes
forget it.
teachers have jobs, students just bum around at home and have lots of time to play on the internet.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
I find this more disturbing than encouraging. Web searches are great for looking up facts or getting a quick overview of a topic. But except for very recent topics or technological subjects, Internet research is going to be far, far inferior to what you can do in even a realtively poor library.
Web searches are easy, fast and don't involve going anywhere. But when I've been dragged in to help teenage relatives and neighbors with papers and seen the stack of printouts they're working from, I always wind up telling them they're going to need to visit the library.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Students always overpassed teachers :)
First off, Christian Science is neither Christian nor Science.
From the article,
"Students said the single greatest barrier to Internet use at school is the quality of access to the Internet - they say it's too slow and often, there's too much censorship. They complained about filtering software, saying it prevented them from reaching legitimate educational materials."
it's sad how often the tech support dept. at the school (I worked in one) makes poor decisions regarding the level of security on the school equipment.
At Humber College here in Toronto:
-you would have to upload your work every 2 minutes or so, as the pc's all had GoBack on them, set up to get rid of anything left anywhere on the hard drive. People with multiple GB of digital video footage would find that Windoze would freeze, leaving them with no choice but to reboot, and once back in Windows would have a clear desktop, with no evidence of the hours of footage they had just captured.
-when making anything more than a straight HTML site, no plug-ins, etc. you would have to FIND a tech person (about an hour) then wait for him/her to actually show up at the lab (another hour) to let you download the plugs and updated codecs necessary for your work.
-making a CD-ROM was hell, though.. god, running between two labs, back and forth, PRAYING they wouldn't crash, because the Macs needed admin access (which came from hunting down the techs until they came and typed in the password, something i did NOT want to do repeatedly, but had to time and time again) to create a disk image or copy an application (both are things you need to do if you are making a run-time program for distribution on CD-ROM)
I could go on and on, and if I get some more time later, I will fill you in on the rest of my godawful tech adventures at Humber.
Props!
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
liek one tem my techar was al ilek"hey calss totay we aer goinig too surf teh web " and I wsa all liek "hHAHAHAHAHHA!!! YUO sed surf teh wbe nad nobody syays htat any mroe!!!! YUO AER SO L4m3raX0r!!!!!!
but i gto her bcack cuz i H4X0red her MAC PLSU in detanshan.
Of course technically minded people very rarely make good elementary school teachers ...
This problem is not just with computers -- their knowledge of biology and general science is just as bad but the impact is seen less (my daughter was recently taught that solar power was a viable energy source and only politics was preventing us from using it to heat our homes in Canada's winter :-/ )
This problem is going away until some good way of teaching technical subjects is found.
Until then I'll just point my daughter to articles about using soya bean oil instead of diesel fuel as a legitimate alternative energy project ...
Sure, some students are going to "outpace" teachers when it comes to computers. I had my General Class Ham license when I was 14, and _none_ of my teachers had one. When you are 14, and apply yourself, you can do all that and more. Not all students have access at home, and in a safe environment, to a decent computer, and have the time away from others to work with that computer. The school systems need to see, somehow, that more students have the chance to work with, and learn computing skills. The teachers already have a full time job, teaching, so they cannot now learn computer skills if they were not "into" computers at an early age. There will always be some students that excel in something the teachers are not able to devote time to. That's why they have a "Math Teacher" and an "English Teacher", etc. Once you get into their classroom, you, as a student, are in their territory, and they are supposed to be masters of their craft, not you, the student. Then they get to teach the student. Powerful, space-age technology like computers require lots of expertise that your garden-variety English teacher may not have been schooled in, so they are sitting ducks for hot-shot kids that are able to focus themselves to learn and master.
A really good teacher will get a good kid or two to help her (or him) get computer-savvy. I know of a choral-music teacher in high school that did just that.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
I just talked to a 14 year-old girl (friend's little sister) the other day who asked me about some assignment she had. Something to do with the dutch constitutions and how the Liberals forced a change in that in 1848. I told her to surf to google and stuff "1848" and "constitution" (in dutch) into the thing and set the language to dutch. Presto, there she had all the info she needed ready to cut and paste into word and put her own name underneath. This is of course flagrant plagiarism and illegal most of the time (which I told her), but does she care?? Not one bit, at least not yet.. and no teacher is going to find out. Probably this situation will last for years to come and we'll grow a nice generation of frauds until the teachers wisen up on the not-so-legitimate use of the Net by students.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Both the study and article are about two weeks old...
TWO WEEKS OLD?! In this internet age, it's already outdated!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Since being a good teacher and being a good techie are often mutually exclusive for various reasons (job content, personality, time available, etc.), it is not realistic for one person to be all to every student.
Teachers are best converting knowledge into a form that a student can understand.
If you want more technical answers, then a side-techie or help-desk is more appropriate.
Thus, don't go asking a teacher, "Does MySQL support recursive microkernal back-propogation transaction reconstruction?" [phony technese] and then gloat when they don't have the answer.
Ask those kind of questions of a technician unless they are important to *most* of the students in the class, not just you.
A teacher's job should not to be your personal technical help-desk.
Table-ized A.I.
Well if im not mistaken the computers at my school were locked with fortress. You can't click on anything but the internet explorer and a folder they made where you can access your saved documents. They left the address bar available though in IE and the folder though....lol. Anyways, its frustrating to me that a 5th grader can already make a webpage and yet I don't have one.
My mom is starting her first full-time job as a teacher on Tuesday. She's, umm, middle aged and was a stay-at-home'er. But she took a couple classes over the years and learning Windows 3.1/95 and office. In her previous private school part-time jobs, she typed every one of her lessons. So she STILL HAS THEM. She uses Power Point (I'm actually not a big fan in the classroom), but to spice up her Latin for these high school kids she used a Smart Board. This is essentially and interactive chalk board. At her new full-time job, the school (where money is tight) bought her one. She asks me questions a lot. I try to answer them. She is in no way an expert, but she achieved competent user level.
She is so far advanced tech wise for most teachers it is incredible (sad that is) and she's pretty sure it's the reason she got hired for a job that will be a stretch for her first year.
The saddest part? Her new school's admin seems so technologically inept, it's going to be quite difficult. They make her use an iBook (she knows Windows. She's trying to concentrate on learning Latin 4 this summer. Not Mac OS 9.1). It has a (broken) CD-R, but the admin doesn't believe her. (It says so in the Hardware and it screws up cd-r disks. Try to do that with a regular cd-rom) He says e-mail your files to yourself, but if she updates 10 files, she has to e-mail ten files. Not very efficient. It reads her files poorly and transferring them was a nightmare.
My point I guess? A major failure here is the need competent people to help teachers along. Most teachers were running the classrooms. Not taking computer classes. Computers make things much harder, unless you know a good way to set things up. I'll tech my mom to use FTP, get her a zip drive, find a copy of DAVE client or figure out something else to make her life possible.
The school gave her a partially broken computer that makes things nearly impossible to back up or move. Their advice as she picked up her new computer was "It's a Mac. You'll love it."
Oh and if you're interested in the Christian Science Monitor. (As in why should I read a "Christian" newspaper.... go here before you complain about this news source.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I'm 26 now. Last year, my girlfriend's cute and popular-seeming 14-year-old-ish cousin thought I was a nerd because I didn't use any instant messenger stuff.
In high school, when I *did* use that stuff, kids thought I was nerdy BECAUSE I used that stuff!
Man, I can't win!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Assigning aim/icq/yahoo accounts to students and "study buddies" is such a brilliant use of the technology. But what I don't get is:
1) How to encourage the buddies to help each other out? (Threat of "Your kid doesn't use his online time productively"? It doesn't always work.)
2) Leaving yourself available to be asked homework questions is a pretty miserable way of eliminaating your life outside of work. Even system administrators only get paged when there is a problem.
3) I can just imagine the spamming that must go on with those messaging clients.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Wow, if this is news I must have been way ahead of my time. I was the kid in the class that the teacher asked for advice and pointed other students to when they had questions from grade school through high school. Those who can't do something, teach it.
This post will be modded down for no particular reason by a sweaty 14 year old who is not allowed out past dark.
Most internet and computer users first encountered the world wide web at their PLACE OF WORK... How many teachers do you know with laptops on their desks? And if you do, how long have they had those things? Not long I'll wager... Technology funding is seriously lacking in most public schools. My school district cannot seem to pass anything reasonable, so my son is relegated to a 'computer lab' where he is bored out of his mind making powerpoint presentations... Of course what he does at home eclipses his school curriculum, but until technology bond issues are passed that put a significant number of computers in classrooms with broadband access, not much will change... so VOTE FOR IT!
that I'm drunk and that I can;t toucj type at all.
who cares, slashcot sucka amnyway.
han my IP see if I (my ISP) cares.
fwiw: slashdot is for faggots!
I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that kids today are brought up in a more technology oriented world. I, for example, was born back in 1982. My senior year in High School, I took a class in Cisco Computer Networking at the local community college (On my highschool's tab, of course). The thing I found was that our teacher, a very smart and very tech savy man in his own right, was getting outpaced by some of the students (Myself included) towards the end of the year. I think it really has to do with the age difference. He learned about the internet in the middle of his life while all the kids had grown up with it. While he was very good at what he did (He did have a CCNA), to us computers and the internet were basically second nature, we were raised on them and ever evolving technology. I still remember Gopher and original Hotline on my old Apple Performa (Still runs great). Anyway, by the last few months of the year, we were doing things with routers he didn't even know about, answering a few questions of his, and doing sick things with IP addresses by hand. I can still subnet a class A address in my head. I then got my CCNA a few months later without any other classes, and a few of my friends from Cisco got theirs not to long ago, but now the economy sucks, they can't get tech jobs, and I joined the Air Force, so in the end, a good time was had by all. Now what I'm interested in, is what the kids born today will be doing 15-20 years from now with technology and where my generation will be...
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
Teaching students programming or other truly complex or specialized skills related to computers is a good thing, of course, as these subjects are ones that actually require some instruction to acquire in many cases, although not all cases by any means. But basic use of the Internet? Playing games for cryin' out loud? This is a waste of time and resources, especially when American students are falling behind in essential academic subjects like reading and mathematics. You see schools cutting back on subjects deemed "non-essential" simply because they do nothing more than enrich the students physically or culturally, like phys ed and the arts, but making all-out efforts to put computers in every classroom and to string cat5 all over the buildings.
Even in impoverished areas where it cannot be assumed that the students have access to a computer at home, I would argue that we would be better off exposing these kids to music, drama, or the plastic arts rather than putting computers in their classrooms. The Internet -- and especially the part of it most people see, the Web -- is very easy to learn with modern tools, and any moderately intelligent kid can pick it up in a week or so. This is not a "life skill" we need to spend very much time on. And when the students arrive knowing more than the teacher, there's no point in even trying.
And the brethren went away edified.
(Parent translated - Yes, I can understand j00, even if the moderators don't.):
{translation}
That's because my on-line skills are superior to a normal computer denial of service attack.
I can transmit the odor of my flatulence through your web browser.
{/translation}
If only Babelfish could translate 1337speak, the parent may have been modded up as funny.
that's right! linux sux and linus is nothing more than an egotistical maniac.
Why do i say such things? SHIT! Linus...Linux...he named an OS after himself...how PATHETIC!!!
LINUX IS DEAD, THE PENGUIN IS DEAD, AND I WISH LINUS WOULD DIE OF EBOLA (but i would settle for anthrax or west nile)
I can see it now; more fodder for alt.sex.stories.moderated...
"Dear Ms. Teal, it wasn't right of you to tell my parents what I do or don't do online in my spare time. It was only fair for me to break into your AIM account and see what you've been doing in your spare time on your computer. You've been a naughty girl, Ms. Teal. I've read every naughty letter you've written to the phys. ed. teacher. Don't bother deleting your notebook contents. I've already made copies from your hotmail account and copied your hard drive. It would only be fair if I told the principal what you were doing in your off-hours, wouldn't it? If you don't think so, we can talk about it afterschool; meet me on the playground. Your student, Dick Hardt"
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Ebola and Anthrax = High mortality rate
West Nile = Wussy ass mortality rate
Preferably, I'd like him to be anal fucked to death by a penguin, it'd be a fittingly ironic death.
I am a recently graduated High School student and I will be attending UCSD this fall. Now I don't want to sound like a jerk but, learning how to use a computer should be something everyone has to do..on thier own time. Computers are an essential part of business, and yes..that includes school. Imagine if we allowed teachers to be hired without knowing how to drive...would the school system offer a course on driving?? I think not. Now I understand there is no DMV for comupters, and its a broad comparison. But if a student can take some of thier "free" time to learn and farmiliarize themselves with computers, I think the teachers can too. Plus, what good is a teacher if they cannot interact with what thier students are learning?
You obviously don't get it. The point of the writing is that everything listed is all supposed to be of equal importance, which is, all the utmost important. There are, I don't know, 50 things mentioned there?
That's the point. There's too much stuff to do and no better way of organizing it, which I think is beautifully portrayed by this rant.
Thank you.
This story doesn't deserve the hype As a student, I always used to gripe But no other class was as important, alas As the the one that taught me to type
I remember a program back in the .bomb days that involved offering companies some tax credits in exchange for having employees teach classes at the local high school. The story, in general, focused on an IBM employee who taught a programming class one day a week. For him, it was a perk for someone who'd been a dedicated employee for many years...a chance to do something different. For IBM, it was a tax break. For the students, it meant learning programming from someone with 25+ years of industry experience.
Maybe the key is having teachers who do something in addition to teaching. I know I would love it if I had the chance to teach a class 1 day a week and work a normal job the other 4 (alas...sometimes 5 and 6).
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
It's late here, so I'm just going to pose the question. Is it relevant to children's education that they know how to operate a pc at a young age?
I only started using PC's in the last year of my high school in 1993. Now I'm quite computer literate. I learned most of these abilities in university and just by figuring it out myself. Now I can understand that it might be handy to teach kids some basic skills, but what I see from kids is that they are quite eager and smart to teach those skills to themselves. What is important for school is to teach kids Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (yes, with capital letters). Those are the elimentary skills. Now you don't need laptops for that. Computers might help some dumb or smart kids, but in general I don't see any real use for computers in learning the three R's.
I do think however that we should teach kids a skill which a teacher can learn them even though he is in his sixties, old and wise but with zero knowledge of anything that runs on electricity. It is how to use data and judge the value of it, so that when they interpret the data and shape it into something meaningful, they learn to draw the proper conclusions.
Well, it turned into a rant anyways... but please give me your opinion.
Use Adsense for Charity
I can remember back in the days of my middle-school teachings...
The Apple IIe was the newest computer out, at least, the most numerous in the schools. While using it, we learned how to do simple programming of a "turtle" which for some reason had a pen in its belly, and could raise and lower it at will. While this was simple, it was very educational in learning how the computer uses certain commands to create different things.
Now we jump ahead a few years, to High School Junior. Finally, a year were we got to choose which classes we wanted to take. BASIC Programming, hmmmm, sounds like a class that would teach you how to program in BASIC, right? Good course to take, besides it being a prerequisite for C Programming and Advanced Programming. And it was, until I started the class by doing some simple, rote procedures in QBASIC (for some reason, the program chosen) and being suspended for a week for "tampering with the school system's security." Notice what I programmed was a very simple password-generation program, using a very simple algorithm. Nothing in the program could have been used to "violate the school's security", but it scared the teacher because she didn't know what half the code meant, let alone what it did.
Jump ahead to today. Computers are becoming more and more a part of our everyday lives. Basic computer skills (word processors, use of the Internet) is almost a requirement for most jobs not involving the handling of food or small amounts of cash. In the classroom, they load down the computers with so much censorware and removal of programs that could be used "for illicit purposes" (read: installing Quake) that they can no longer even browse to many legit educational sites. I have even seen schools that have programmed their firewall to block access to any site that does not have a .edu TLD. While the abilities for teachers to adequately teach their students how to use a computer, or more importantly, how to do research on it, is stripped away by all the "required" censorware and other such nonsense. If the schools truly wanted to use computers in the classroom, they would:
- Hire a true IT department
- Not buy the "latest and greatest", but instead buy what is needed for their students
- Disregard regulations requiring censorware and other programs designed to block access to certain sites. Have the teachers monitor their useage, not just deciding to "lock out" a wide range of sites with "unethical or immoral content"*
- Actually allow the student to use the computers
- If a piece of software that comes along is better than what is currently used, replace the outdated software
- WOULD NOT limit the equipment and software to those vendors or companies with an "educational discount" policy.
If you're going to teach computers, then teach EVERYTHING about them (Mac, WinBlows, Unix, Linux, etc), not just what you found for a discount (read: any product by M$)* = Note: This is NOT advocacy to allow pr0n or corrupting content into schools, but there are better, easier, and more secure ways of doing it than with censorware
Just my thoughts, I could be wrong (Sorry about the long post, please don't mod me down for it)
--CypherDragon
With the exception of the sciences, sometimes, when has there been an instance where the high school or middle school teacher been smarter than the students that try?
I have relatives that are teachers and its scary to see who they work with, most of them cant even pass the tests they give out.
As long as a kid doesnt die or get severly injured a teachers job is always secure whether they teach or not.
Where are my mod points when I need them???????
Example: 15 years ago, my Mom, who taught Junior High Math and Science, decided that the students knew more about the computors then she did. So she went back to school and did'nt stop till she got her CS. Most of my sons friends can not really use computers as a tool, other then in the most rudimentory ways. BTW my son will be 20 in a couple of days YEA!
re: the internet-thing. Saddest thing I saw lately was a middle-age librarian, sitting in front of a computer, with a modern search engine site displayed on the screen, waiting for library patrons to ask her questions. There was no one in line to talk to her. This was at a big metropolitan library, where the traffic has gone down, due to competition from the big bookstore chains, that let you read anything for free, and provide comfortable seating, coffee, pastries for those with $. There she was, with broadband, and her years of informational knowledge, waiting to help. All the kids are gone, with PC's of their own, or over at a friends house, and they all know how to put a keyword in google in their sleep. Down the hall was a computer room, with a few machines, broadband, determined but disadvantaged intercity college students at every one. Show your drivers license, and have a seat.
I'm sorry, but the U.S. Federal government has made it pretty damn clear that they would much rather spend money on the war on some drugs, the war on terrorism, and building more prisons than they would on educating the populace and stopping these sorts of problems at the source.
Teachers are too busy keeping dirty pictures and bad words out of their impressionable wittle hands to actually use computers for any valuable purpose, whatever that is. AFAIK the primary use of computers in schools is to replace the physical assets of libraries and books. Oh and it replaces actual teaching skill on the staff's part.
1) Teachers suffer from low pay and low respect in most of the country. I blame much of this on the power of the NEA, which is a classic example of a bureaucracy that exists to perpetuate its own existence. If the NEA advocated in favor of more rigorous screening, performance reviews, and salaries based not on seniority but on parent reviews, student reviews, peer reviews, and testing performance, teachers might have a chance. But as it is, the NEA aggressively fights to "protect" teachers. Of course all this does is perpetuate stereotypes about teachers being slackers who want to work 9 months out of the year. Try being a full-time teacher in the US without also being a member of the NEA - it doesn't happen.
2) District-based funding, coupled with per-seat attendance rules mean that schooling is about cramming as many students into the classrooms as possible. School districts, be they rural or urban, rich or poor, almost always suffer from bloated bureaucratic structures and mismanagement. An atmosphere of entitlement ("We dedicate our lives to helping children, so you can forgive our mistakes") permeates these organizations. This of course stems from antiquated concepts of tenure and lifetime employment in the education system. Hell, even the US Government doesn't offer the kind of guaranteed work for life contract that most school districts provide.
3) Ultimately, American K-12 education is more about socialization and keeping children out of trouble than it is about truly educating them. Because family structures have fallen apart, teachers are expected to be caretakers first, and educators second. How on earth can teachers focus on using technology effectively when they barely even get the opportunity to teach?
I've done technology volunteer work for schools in places all over the country, and one consistent trend I see is that charter schools make far better use of the money they have, and leverage technology better than traditional public schools. Too many Americans are content with the status quo, because they figure the NEA and the national political parties know best. They're afraid of changing the system for fear of ruining American K-12 education. The thing is, it's already screwed up, and the time for change is now.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Then why not throw a few "OMG LOL!!" statements in there as well, and change each period to fifteen exclamation marks.
Lots of the replies touch on a variety of potential reasons schools don't hire pros to teach CS coursework, but they all miss the A-1 big reason: There is no Computer Science teacher certificate in most States. Office Technology, Industrial Technology, sure, but not CS. I would have loved to have been teaching, indeed that was my original chosen career (math if you must know, but me and advanced calculus didn't get along as well as was needed). Problem is most schools are allowed to hire people without certification (and those who can still require that you be nearly certified, which is impossible when such certification does not exist).
Find me the certification, I'd love to teach! My wife (a teacher) makes more than -I- do right now (stuck doing tech support, Eris help me).
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
'Educators have a choice: Either they need to adapt or they will be dragged into a new learning environment.'
I left the commercial world to work for IT in school systems 7 years ago. This statement was true then and unfortunately it still is. Some teachers, given the proper training, are up to it, and have come a long way. Others still don't know how to turn their computers on. This is one of the reasons for the continual attempt for things like the Childrens Online Protection Act. Schools won't get federal funding for technology if they won't install a Internet filter. I am against such strong-arm tactics, but I do know that there are many teachers who do not pay attention while kids as young as ten are giggling at p0rn. And if a student simply minimizes the browser, the teacher is lost.
Had nothing to do with working together but everything to do with being online. The teacher just threatened to tell their parents what "browser history" was, where to find it and that http://www.goatse.cx/ was not a foreign language site.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Those who test by FTPing large files and watching the transfer rate, should understand these limitations (kindly explained to me by J.Spencer Love).
I had a similar problem trying to host a large-bandwidth video clip. It turned out the bandwidth of my 10Mbps line did not saturate at all (in fact, it was utilized at mere 5%). The bottleneck was the internal buffer in client and server software.
This also means you may not need that much bandwidth to push the speed of your FTP/TCP-based tasks to its limit.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
will everyone who this suprises raise their hand? Hello? anyone...?
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
Damn right this isn't news. All of my elementary school teachers and almost all of my high school teaches and some of my professors were scared of computers, and with reason. They are in a profession that is one big sacred cow, an d they fear change. I remember getting "taught" BASIC on the perennial favorite of elementary schools, the lonely grey dust covered TRS-80 at the far corner of the room. The teacher sure would get irritated if you got ahead of her and stuck an arithmetic expression inside of your PRINT statement. This was a class for the "Gifted and Talented", which basically meant that most of the kids in that class already had computers at home and knew more than the teacher learned from her one day retreat. And that was the year 1983. Pitiful.
When I was in Jr. High, myself and at least another half dozen of my classmates all knew more than our teacher... that is, any of the kids who'd had ANY experience with computers.
:D
Of course, it'd probably have been better if our teacher wasn't chosen from the pool as being the person showing the most aptitude at getting the flashing '12:00' off the school's VCR...
Grade 12 in high school was different. We had a former MIT grad teaching. Got us all manner of cool things to play with. First time I'd not known more in computers than the person allegedly teaching me.
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
The real danger here is that teachers, administrators, and parents fear that students know more (they do on this and other subjects) about things and so what happens is that the technology is limited through firewalls etc.
That students hack through some of these things is a matter of course, but often gets kids in trouble.
Me, I'm a teacher who knows at least a few of my limitations and enjoys watching kids take apart the network.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
This ended up in my email box last week. The important last phrase was:
And you want me to do all of this and you expect me NOT TO PRAY?
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
There is a lady at my high school who is a net admin who works on the computers in Library. We are not allowed to check our email and if we are caught for checking our email, we would be suspended from school. I checked the email on a G3 computer while the Net Admin was around me. I wasn't caught. This lady is not even a good Net Admin person.
Ok, here you go... Who has more time to use the internet? A teacher with 30 or so students and eight classes to prep for tommorow or a student who's PC is nearly an extention of his arm? Not that it's an excuse to stay behind, but unless computers and networking are that teachers full time job of course he/she is falling behind the average student.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I'm a technologist in a grade school.
....... talk too much and complain that they can't understand this 'technical stuff'
In my opinion, teachers have more technology at their disposal than they can actually use right now.
While some teachers do some amazing things with computers in their classes, I'd estimate that about 30% or more are totally clueless. It's really bad when you have to explain to supposedly trained professionals what a "browser" is, or explain that using a e-mail list is easier than photocopying 50 sheets of paper and stuffing them in other teachers' mailboxes. Top-notch hardware and software gathers dust!
It's really embarrasing that teachers complain about students not wanting to learn new things. Every time I've held training sessions for teachers after school, they
I really beleive teachers are a special breed, and I've been impressed with them in so many areas, but make no mistake about it...this article is correct; teachers using technology is a colossal failure.
I really beleive administrators should crack down and explain that they will be expected to maintain technical proficency in their chosen career...like everyone else has to.
I agree with your comments about tiny schools being kept open due to political pressure. Part of the problem there is that schools are these vast, immovable fortresses that have so much sunk cost that nobody wants to "abandon" them to other uses. One of the great things about charter schools is that many of them use extant facilities that have been converted for use as schools, but can be easily re-converted to other purposes if the school shifts location.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Age is not the Issue.
My father will be 79 years of age next week.
He has two computers on his desk. He triple boots them between OS/2 Warp 4, Windows NT and whichever flavor of Linux he happens to be experimenting with this week.
He uses Linux to access the Internet via ADSL, even though his Internet service provider does not support Linux.
He has networked his computers to the one he set up for my mother.
He's figured out all this stuff by himself, but he won't learn to program. He claims it's too hard.
"It's the bureaucracy -- I have parents and friends who are teachers, and there's no way in hell I'm putting myself through that."
Yet white-collar people think nothing of facing that very same monster, everytime they go to work.
I'll keep this simple. People need to be re-introduced to the idea that playing is learning.
One spent a great deal of their youth playing, experimenting, trying and we can walk, talk, and do other wonderous things. If we used what is presently passing for teaching. We all would still be quivering embryos. What is fun to learn is something that is being played with.
In 7th grade I changed all the Winbloze startup screens to hardcore porn... Got suspended for 2 weeks and was restricted from computers until High School.
| - | - |
in my middle school (it was a technology magnet school too) the netware consoles password was the district tech's name, all the bios's used the default password and with that you could easily disable FoolProof on the systems, passwords of the last few users were always left on the systems and were easily crackable
there were template accounts left on the system, you could log in as a teacher via the template which used same thing for user and pass and on a mac with the teacher account you could copy the data from anyone elses user account
now that I am in highschool its not too much different except, in my freshman year I was in a computer lab all of 2-3 times because the teachers did not use them oh, and our netware login names became first 5 letters of last name first 2 of first and grade number and password was your student ID number (not allowed to change them, some people found a way to change them and were suspended)
A friend of mine who has more time in the labs found a complete list of the student body (first name, last name, grade, student ID, basically the user/pass for every student) now most student information is available through a website here it includes lots of information including a full transcript and even how much lunch money you have.
frankly, from what I have seen on the inschool networks I dont really trust this system for the teachers to do my grading and then have it available on the web
Bottles.
Does MySQL support recursive microkernal back-propogation transaction reconstruction?
I know you were just pulling this question out of the air, but in case you really cared:
MySQL attempted to integrate recursive microkernel back-propogation transaction reconstruction, but ran into conflicts with their multimodal deterministic linear-time conflict resolution server back-end. They were able to get batch-iterative multi-threaded XML-based commit reordering working, but that is a poor substitute, since it does not properly support full back-outs of partially ordered preemptive locking, as I'm sure you are aware.
Postgres of course avoids this problem entirely with journaling of semi-completed indestructively-modified operands (based on partially dynamic hashing), which is a much more elegant approach in my opinion. Unfortunately, MySQL's virtual memory globber just will not support that due to it's static nature. Since their VMG has such nice features, such as fully inheritable table semi-structures and difference transcoding of query templating, I do not forsee them changing to a fully transparent globber soon.
This week's editions of the San Jose Mercury News have been carrying the story of one of its own reporters who jumped into teaching for a year.
The chronicle begins here, continues here, here, here, and here.
And people wonder why some teachers don't have time to learn new technology?
---Me, A SysAdmin-turned teacher
Finally, someone with some sense.
Please mod up the parent post.
Teachers want to teach, and not learn. ever
tried to run a serious business AND invent/ code / document / distribute your products at the same time ? I doubt it. you probably wouldn't be here. (Very Time Consuming). well thats what teachers have to do. basically.
First post bitches!!!!
Oh shit...
http://www.citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
It's fantastic.
Take the "www." out of the URL, and you'll get the proper address.
I don't know why I even bothered to read something that came from a thing called "The Christian Science Monitor".
I've noticed that whereas the youngsters learn about new technology quickly, they have a very shallow understanding of computers in general. In short, they tend to be the "skript kiddie" as opposed to "coder", to put it in l33t h4x0r terms.
Both the study and article are about two weeks old, but an interesting read nonetheless.
I know everything's running at "internet speed" these days (insert obligatory dot.bomb snipe here), but is there really an assumption that a 2 week old report is inherently uninteresting?
BugBear
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
I don't have much respect for Psychology majors and (cough! cough!) Education majors. There was a reason why those people could take 22 hours each semester and stay out drinking until 3AM. The courses they were taking were BULLSHIT.
Both of my parents are teachers. My mom is a bio teacher, and head of her dept. I'm considering becoming a tech teacher, and when I asked her, she said almost the same thing as the above poster. After she graduated with a BS in biology, she started taking classes to become accredited, but quit after seeing how pitiful and useless they were. As it is now, they no longer even give accredition credit for people who teach outside the public school system (that wasn't so 10 years ago).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Well, first I would explain your quotes on Christian by remembering all readers that Christian Science is not Christian nor Science, but a mistaken self-assigned name for a gnostic heresy.
Second, why would I trust a publication by a religious organization based on bad philosophy over publications by corrupt corporations? I mean, what's the difference? Even idealistic publications have problems to get things right.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
and this morning, when I pointed this article out to my students, some of them said that they had already read this article a few weeks ago. :-/
Karma: NaN
The reason for students outpacing teachers is not that they have less money or less free time. It's that teachers are failures. They could not -- or chose not to try to -- succeed in industry, so they decided to teach.
Most teachers only have just enough skillz to get by in their chosen subjects, and they have no interest in learning computers beyond the basics.
I know several teachers at many levels in the school systems, and not one of them is interested in pushing the envelope of their own learning experience. They just want the last bell to ring.
is the system, the administration and above.
Disclaimer: Not a teacher. Don't want to be a teacher. But married to a teacher.
The administration on a local level isn't really concerned about the kids. They're usually ex-teachers, with little to no management skills or training, and the most biased, loud, and nasty crowd of people to be responsible to (parents). They could give a rats ass about whether the teachers really understand computers, or fake it, UNLESS the parents decide that's the #1 issue for the day. Then, for that day, and only that day, they make a big to-do about computers and teacher levels, make gradiose sweeping gestures that will solve all the parents problems, when in reality the teachers just have to take one more cirtification, on thier own time, with thier own money, that usually set up by the school, the district or state as a lowest-bidder contract, with a real world value level of zero.
News for you slashdotters... Teachers don't work 8-9 hours a day. It's 10-14 hour days, each day, often working weekends, YEAR ROUND. Sure, they get _TWO_ months off in the summer, where they're required, to keep thier job (not get more money like our IT certs do for us), to take classes, week long seminars, get thier 2nd or 3rd masters, etc. etc. etc.
Enough ranting... I had a teacher in high school, Mr. Spradlin, my computer programming teacher, whom was constantly surpased by his students. He loved it. He had us teach him (and the rest of the class) those things we had found out. He encouraged, even demanded, that we learn on our own. Then taught us how to do so. He gave me the skills I really needed, not the esoteric fly-by-night knowledge of the day. How useful are my basic, qbasic, and pascal skills today, that knowledge I would have (and did) learned in school? Not very. But I use the skill of self-education every single day.
(Thanks Sprad!)
And treating ALL students like The Enemy.
In my school district, there were two guys responsible for my high school's network/computers/etc.
First there was Mr. M (Name hidden), the head of the business department. Nice guy, reasonably knowledgeable (Knew Netware, which was a key skill around then, but not too much about Unices and the Internet), but KNEW HIS LIMITS, and most importantly, was a good judge of character. In return for a relaxation of school rules (During an independent study AP CS class, my friend Ross was playing GTA. Mr. M walked in, commented, "Amazing graphics programming you've done there." We also ran a Quake server on our webserver in the evenings, and the only students with school email.), about 5-6 students in the school assisted him with setting up the school's cool new webserver, IP Masquerading, and general network/machine maintenance.
Then there was Mr. S. also known as Elvis because you saw Elvis more often than you saw him - The "Technology Coordinator" for the school district.
Moron.
Treated students like The Enemy.
Thought he knew everything.
The September after I graduated high school, the network was FUBARed for over a month, because Elvis decided he was going to install Win98 across the board on every single machine without testing it on one first. ooops. Win98 and the machines didn't get along. Poor Mr. M was left to fix it with most of his assistants off to college.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
hey, i've got a great idea let's go to war and spend more money on it than we do on all of education so that i can stuff my suv full of fuel for the trip to mickie d's! you know those tv's in every room need plenty-o-power! please children don't exhibit the violence we teach, and go to church on sunday to avoid doing the drugs we do!
oh, "funding won't change anything," so please cut my taxes! my @ss! That is exactly why i live in one of the best funded districts (yes, high taxes!), and by some strange coincidence it is one of the top school districts!
priorities--priceless.
1. it's an intergenerational thing, bubby
2. those tutors that have that level of experience are all doing much better jobs.
i go to uni and i still know more about the field we're meant to be studying than those that are meant to be teaching me:
the first exam i had there was multiple choice javascript questions via a browser.
the perl script that was meant to log submission and forward the result (percentage) was broken and so we had to show the onscreen results to the adjudicators present.
of course, they didn't count on judicious use of the back button.
result: 100 percent (up from 95 so shut up already)
Sorry for being offtopic, but do you really expect me to read that? I'm not going to bother even though it's 5 Informative right now.
"always make sure that I give the girls in my class 50 percent of my attention"
Whats that supposed to mean? What are you, a muslim?
...oh yeah, its just like it was (in the UK) 20 years ago. Whats that saying again?
"Those you can, do; those who can't, teach."
In college, our program was noted for often picking crappy teachers during the summer semesters. As most of the experienced teachers went on holidays then, there were a lot of spaces to be filled when regulars were out.
What a lot of people have to learn is that "teaching degree != ability to teach any given material".
This was a heavy IT course, yet the administration kept picking from a list of B. Ed's etc who were using to teaching English or French.
The web class teacher (obviously a MS lover) taught us NOT to use ending tags in tables etc, since it just took a little extra time, filespace, and wasn't needed by Internet Explorer. Because of this, I ended up assisting a lot of my fellow students on the side, to make up for crappy teaching (I got on a teacher's blacklist once when a student who said that I should be teaching the course and embarrassed her in front of the class).
One semester, they couldn't get any B'eds. We ended up with somebody from a local corporation, an expert programmer who had a love for computing. He ended up as being the best teacher in the program. Everybody loved him, and we all learned a lot from his classes. This isn't to say that all programmers can teach, but neither can all teachers teach programming.
Teachers don't have to know everything, but they should know (and like) what they have to teach. I don't need my math teacher to know IT, but my IT teacher should know how to teach tech. Somehow I don't think I'd be getting a "quality education" when the IT instructor was also the Phys-ed/English instructor too...
> News for you slashdotters... Teachers don't work
... leftovers.
.... Hmm, where do I start? :) My students range in age from 17 to 75. In my experience, the younger ones *do* have more basic computer skills, but it's a rare student (young or old) who can figure out how to plot a graph of temperature vs. time in either Excel or OpenOffice Calc without help. Some of these same students at least *do* have basic browsing skills, but seem to mainly want to use AOL instant messenger or winamp.
:) ).
:)
> 8-9 hours a day. It's 10-14 hour days, each day,
> often working weekends, YEAR ROUND. Sure, they
> get _TWO_ months off in the summer, where they're
> required, to keep thier job (not get more money
> like our IT certs do for us), to take classes,
> week long seminars, get thier 2nd or 3rd masters,
> etc. etc. etc.
I teach at a tech school, and we teach over the summers - usually to folks who weren't quite able to cut it at large universities where the size of the chemistry class is 400 students instead of 36 students.
During summers, a lot of us work 10-14 hour days - every weekday - then get to spend part of some weekends grading tests / assignments / labs, etc.
I enjoy the work (which is why I do it), but I do get irritated at people who say it's "no work" or it's a "cushy" job. Teaching is anything but "cushy". Sure, since I'm college level, I have some amount of what they call academic freedom to organize the course as I see fit, etc. (I hear from friends that this is not true in the primary/secondary schools).
As for technology... At tech schools we're stuck in the divide between primary/secondary education (where most "public" education funding seems to go) and 4-year schools which also receive big dollars. We get
Most of our classrooms are traditional, as we only have limited funds to wire up rooms for Internet access and data projectors. We can trek across campus to borrow a data projector for class (if there's one available that day). Up until this year, I had a Pentium 200 on my desk that some poor IT droid had hobbled with Windows NT. You can check out a laptop for presentations (with the same issues as checking out a data projector). You are left on your own as far as hooking to the network and hooking up this equipment - which, for me, is not a big problem - availability is. We just don't have enough of the USEFUL equipment to go around.
Now as far as students "outpacing" teachers with online skills
I have a course web site on my personal (non-school) internet account - mainly because the school's "webmaster" left and apparently none of the IT staff can properly set up web and ftp services on a W2K box - uploading anything to the server has been broken for a month. (I'm almost at the point where I'm considering offering them an old Alphastation of mine preconfigured with Red Hat running apache.
Now it's true that all teachers aren't tech-savvy. Heck, probably half of my department isn't. But then again most students that we get aren't tech-savvy either. Using online chat services and playing Tetris on cell phones doesn't equate to knowing how to use computers as problem-solving tools.
Oh, and those fancy calculators they use for math classes? Don't get me started on the percentage of students that can't properly enter numbers on those things - mostly because they don't know anything about order of operations - and screw up nearly every calculation they're asked to do...
-- Rick
You can choose to program at a small business that doesn't have thousands of bureaucrats above you. You can't choose to teach at a school like that.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
I took a job teaching an intro to computers class to adults. I'm not a professional teacher, but have been programming, hacking, and learning computers since the mid-80's.
The school district couldn't find any teachers that would teach this class as up here in Maine there just weren't that many around that knew more about computers than Yahoo! chat. And the IT guys used blockware on the computers (which was in an elementary school), that I would have to hack and disable on each machine so my students would be able to use Wordpad and Paint instead of Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail.
Like in another article I read here, I received no books, no course outline, nothing from the administration on how I should conduct my class. Like I said, I'm not a professional teacher so this was very difficult to come up with my own course from scratch, and it showed in the (lack of) quality in my teaching.
Some of my students received some value for their money, but for the most part, I don't feel as if I succeeded. I could'a been great! but without any support, it was predestined that I ended up just shy of mediocre.
I can just imagine what its like to be teaching to kids without this support. Not a job for me! Unless you just want me to guide your kid through the intricacies of Mario Teaches Typing.