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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."
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.
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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)
...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
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!
"...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.
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...
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 ...
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.
I just have a few small comments regarding your comments.
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.
You might be right in some ways, and the other subjects you listed are valuable to teach, but I think you are forgetting the value of the internet for research. You can't take the computers completely out of the classrooms. The resources available on the internet outpace those of a small school library millions of times over in the amount, quality and ease of information provided. And students should have access to the web for research. Otherwise they will not learn the power of the web for research, may not have as complete of research as those with net access, and will suffer if their library is underfunded. We can't pull the computers out of schools. I could argue strongly though that the way that they are being used in schools needs to change.
We do not need to teach computers to children in the schools! This is not a "life skill" we need to spend very much time on.
We may not need to teach a manditory computer classes in schools, but I think that it needs to be an option for those who haven't used them before. The class probably wouldn't need to take a whole semester. Perhaps a week, maybe even to occur before school starts similar to the way that ESL students come and focus on learning English before school starts. MOST kids will have more knowledge than the teachers and have used technology all their lives, but something should be offered for those that haven't. It needn't disrupt the other kids.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
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.
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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
'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.
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.