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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."
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
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!
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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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)
...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
And then we realized the problem. They'd be too lame to figure out how to hit the target.
From what I've seen, most teachers actively resist teaching computers to students. When I was in elementary school, we had 3 TRS-80 Model III machines. Only about 5 students got to get any formal computer instruction time. I wonder if the rest of the group became software engineers....
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.
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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.
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
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...
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 ...
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
The teacher can always try a plausible Google search, or even pick a stylistically distinctive phrase and Google /that/...
Another, probably more brutal, tactic would be to randomly pick students and demand 5-minute extemporaneous oral explanations of their theses, along with Q&A. If they hold up under that and demonstrate understanding, it's much more likely to be their own work.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
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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
Are you sure they're essential part of school? For which subjects would that be so?
/know/ that they have to organize their thesis and supporting concepts before the write, or risk having to start over with additional paper and the clock still ticking.
/no/ computers in its classrooms, I don't think there would be much justification to call the students deprived -- so long as the faculty and staff are competent enough to not need technological crutches.
In biology or chemistry, I think I'd rather put the resources into a decently equipped lab so the students could get some basic experimental skills -- and the experience would probably pique their interest more than mere lectures.
In mathematics, it's the concepts that are important more than the medium. Mathematics is an inherently abstract field once one gets past the basics of addition and subtraction -- and a blackboard should suffice to illustrate, whenever illustrations are needed. By the time students reach the level of calculus, they should be quite competent at abstract reasoning, and shouldn't have to resort to computational aids to demonstrate understanding.
English, history, and similar courses heavy on comprehension, analysis, criticism and discussion of source material would benefit more from a live in-person chat that goes at the pace of speech rather than typing -- and forcing the students to speak or write may encourage thinking ahead and developing coherent thought by reducing any dependency on the backspace key. Need to teach, say, medieval European history? I'd suggest that Coulton or Tuchman would provide much more in-depth readings than most anything likely to be found online. Hamlet? He's in the library; Brutus, as well, and if you want to do an in-class reading, that's probably easier from paper instead of a monitor.
And with in-class essays, there's an additional benefit to requiring pen and paper only: the students
Music? Well, computer-generated music is an area of active research, and it might be interesting to see the connections between mathematics and music -- but that's generally not what schools have in mind, is it? Instead, they normally prefer more practical matters such as singing or playing instruments, where again computers aren't terribly important.
And so forth. Even today, if a school district had
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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 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?
> I really beleive administrators should crack
> down
Administrators are 3/4 of the problem. I recall an adminitrtator telling us that we had to increase enrollment in our college transfer programs. We were not allowed to advertise that we have college transfer courses because that wasn't conisitent with the college's business focus.
Que?
-- Rick
First, you probably agree that students need to know how to use computers. Claiming "computers in the classroom is an educational fad" is like claiming that telephones, televisions and automobiles are all passing fads. Computers are obviously here to stay. The real world bears this out as well. You almost can't get a job that doesn't involve computers at some level. Auto mechanics use computers extensively. Factory workers use data collection computers to control quality. You can't even ring up a sale at McDonalds without using a computer.
The way the real world works is: Here is your computer training. Now, using this computer like we just showed you, this is the job we want you to perform. How well prepared would an auto mechanic be if he walked into a job never having seen a computer, and the boss said "Great to have you, your work tickets are on that computer over there, the maintenance manuals are on that set of CD-ROMs, and you can order parts on this web page?"
So I see a need for some computer training in the schools. Sure, the kids need to learn their multiplication tables without them, (among a thousand other things,) but there comes a time when the computer becomes a part of most of these activities. Teaching an English class without having all the students use a word processor has become difficult for two reasons. First, there is the "haves vs. have-nots" gap, ensuring only your rich or privileged kids turn in pretty papers. Second, the act of writing using a word processor is fundamentally different than writing on a typewriter or with paper and note-cards. You cut and paste thoughts and shuffle them around dynamically, you don't type rough drafts once, hand correct them and retype them just once for a finished draft. Using the computer has made writing an iterative process. And this process has to be taught, and that requires computers.
So, should teachers use computers, and teach with them? Yes. Should every teacher have to hand out the basics of word processing to every student who walks in the door? No. That's where we get to the change needed. Schools need to make sure that "computer fundamentals" are taught early on so that kids aren't left behind. (God, I hate to use that Dubyaism.)
The big problem is that computers leave both kids and teachers behind. "State of the art" hardware and software now changes hourly. (Six projects have shown up on Freshmeat in the last 60 minutes.) The schools have had to make do by purchasing a flock of computers, buying the current software of the day, and sticking with that for four years. They invest huge amounts of time and energy developing a curriculum based on that level of software. But the software world doesn't stand still, and the haves keep up at home while the have-nots stagnate on the school provided equipment.
This is a new problem. Change used to occur at a more humanly comprehensible pace. Keeping your math classes up-to-date with advancements in math happens at a fairly slow pace. Keeping up with the new software-of-the-day is a full time job for those of us in the software industry. Now, look at the teachers who have to be instant experts in front of classes full of students. Teachers have not yet learned how to simultaneously keep up with technology and still do their day job while retaining their sanity and their personal lives. That's a tall order for anyone. Nobody has a great answer yet. It's no wonder that students who have far more free time than their teachers are able to outpace them.
John
> 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.
So now the Apple ][s and PC-XTs are in the dustbins with the filmstrips and cassettes. Keep in mind that the Apples replaced Teletypes. And they've since been replaced by Macs and Dells.
Don't make the classic mistake of confusing the medium with the message.
Computers have been in the classrooms since at least 1972 when I was in the 5th grade using them. Classroom computers may have been seen by some as a fad back then, but they were still taken seriously. Computers are not a fad now. Computers are a tool used by modern human society, and as such our society has decided to teach our children how to use them.
In high school, we spent some time at the start of our science classes learning how to use the (provided) calculators. Calculators in the classrooms were just as controversial a topic at that time, and for the same reasons you continue to suggest. Some of the people back then were also unable to recognize the difference between the use of a tool to learn vs. learning how to use that tool.
Schools have changed dramatically since I was a student. They try to keep up with modern society. But modern technology has outpaced our teachers' abilities to simultaneously keep up with every innovation and teach it. Kids don't have the responsibilties that keep them from learning the newest tech. That's the point of the original article. And this has been true since at least 1978, when I was denied my request to take our school's "computer class." The teacher knew me well from the science classes I had taken, and because I spent every day after school in the Teletype room. He acknowledged that I knew far more than he did, and that it would be a waste of my time to take his class. That was quite a shock to an 11th grader who had always been taught that teachers know more than the students.
In no way is any of this an argument against computers in the classroom. It's simply an observation of the problems involved in trying to use computers in school.
(Oh, and driver's ed is a required class in my son's 9th grade curriculum, and it's still a required course even if we choose to send him to a private driver's training school. Apparently, acknowledging the existence of automobiles is no longer a fad, either.)
John