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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."
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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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
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.
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!
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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.