Good and Bad Uses of Tech in Public Schools?

skot asks: "I am a high school math teacher and recovering journalist working on an article about innovative (and insane) uses of technology in the classroom. I have seen schools plunk down thousands of dollars on handheld computers that teachers and students basically use as notebooks - fancy, expensive notebooks. I have also seen teachers try to forbid their students from using the internet in a research project. I'm sure many Slashdot readers have lived through experiences like this - and more. If you want to share your stories, I'd love to hear 'em."

Comments

Damn kids (FP!)

[F1_Fan]

Kids today forget how to use a library and rely on internet sources that don't receive the peer review of real books.

I've seen it first hand... inaccurate facts in papers... "but it was on the internet!"

Re:Damn kids (FP!)

[sporty]

Books can be as misleading as any other periodical, website or interview. Code books w/ mistakes, articles with incorrect facts or people just saying wrong stuff.

Trusting where your sorce blindly is just plain bad.

Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[Dr. Bent]

Good:
Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption

Bad:
Holding a lecture in a computer lab and having the class "follow along".

Good:
Requiring that students use a mix of sources in thier papers, including electronic and print.

Bad:
Not grading them on their sources "Bob's Website of SuperFun Stats says that..."

Good:
Requiring that students turn in a digital copy of thier papers along with a print version for markup.

Bad:
Not running plagarism checking software on those digital copies.

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[illuvata]

Good:
Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption

Bad:
have the teacher try to give a powerpoint presentation, but not get power point, or just being really unfamiliar, and thus slow.
i really hate poorly done powerpoint presentations that teachers just done because they feel they have to

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[trompete]

Good: Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption

I had too many business classes that were taught on PP Slides that were RIGHT FROM THE PUBLISHER. I mean...why even pay the professor when he is just an intermediary between us and the publisher.
Those classes were skipped whenever possible. All you had to do to get a 4.0 was to show up on review days and see which slides to study.

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[Alomex]

Erh, believe me, if the professor wasn't needed on top of the slides, he wouldn't be standing there, sonny. Surely s/he'd rather be in his office surfing the web for pr0n^H^H^H^H research material than stand up in front of students with an attitude like yours.

By the way, have you ever thought about the fact that most courses use textbooks RIGHT FROM THE PUBLISHER, instead of in-house notes? Why is it acceptable for the textbook but not for the PP slides?

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[trompete]

It is acceptable to use textbooks because the profs do not hold up the textbook in front of the class and read the subheadings and bullets to us. This was in my business and MIS classes.
In my CS classes, the teachers HAD PREPARED their own notes, and the textbook was just a reference (sometimes obscure).
As to my attitude, school becomes more and more expensive every year (it isn't inflation, it's lack of state funding in MN). Yet, we still just get powerpoint presentations for lectures. No wonder classrooms are being replaced by online courses.

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[MattCohn.com]

And for the love of god, PLEASE! Just because you can put in sound and slide transitions doesn't meen you have to!

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[Alomex]

It is acceptable to use textbooks because the profs do not hold up the textbook in front of the class and read the subheadings and bullets to us.

The don't do that simply because books are meant to be read on your own, but PP slides have been designed to be used, guess what, in front of an audience.

If a publisher has gone out of its way to select the salient points of a topic, embellish them with well thought out colours and charts, made expensive animations, why would that be inferior to some slides put together by the prof for the exact same purpose?

In my CS classes, the teachers HAD PREPARED their own notes, and the textbook was just a reference (sometimes obscure).

This is just an inane "grumpy old man" grudge. The fact that it was that way when you went to school does not mean its better. When I went to school we had chalkboard, does that mean professors shouldn't use now whiteboards instead? of course not.

Yes, when you went to school professors had to prepare their own notes. So??

As to my attitude, school becomes more and more expensive every year

Look, if school expensive then complain about the friggin tuition fees instead of taking it out on the use of PP slides.

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent UP - no one I know - relatives, HS classmates, teachers - even the Comp. Literacy dumbass uses them. :(

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[the_ed_dawg]

I tend to agree with many of the above points. However, I would like to extend my experiences with one of them. I attended a two day seminar in the newly designed (at no small expense, mind you) classrooms at my university and participated in a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to evaluate the effectiveness of using the Internet to instruct collegiate-level students. I managed to graduate Summa Cum Laude, so don't give me any of those "you're just a [stupid|cracktarded|etc.] person" replies, please.

Good: Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption.

My experience has also shown that most professors tend to avoid using the technology. We had a classroom with SmartBoards, LCD projectors, and all sorts of multimedia crap, and every professor I had in that classroom ignored it. They always grabbed the markers and wrote on the SmartBoards in whiteboard ink... including the ABET president.

My B.S. degree is in Electrical Engineering. I have found that many topics can be discussed using PowerPoint, but examples are typically lost in translation. Most professors that use PowerPoint talk around the examples with an inadequate level of depth such that the printable notes are not sufficient to replicate the work outside of class.

Personally, I don't foresee many fields entirely leaving the realm of chalk/marker and board in the near future. The "traditional" learning style requires that instructors pace themselves with handwriting, whereas a preprepared slide collection usually results in a mind-boggling flight through material. My suggestions to those faculty insisting upon using PowerPoint and other technological conveniences are thus:

1. Technology is meant to be an aid, not a crutch. Having material on a slide does not absolve an instructor from explaining said material at an appropriate level.

2. Use animated graphics rather than static ones when describing the motion of an object. One example is to include arrows rotating around a magnet to indicate field lines.

3. Slow down. Some people out there like to have time to read the slide.

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[Some Woman]

If a publisher has gone out of its way to select the salient points of a topic...

I view professors as a way of getting another viewpoint. If you go to a class where the PP slides are structured and presented exactly like the book, you're missing out. Sometimes information has to be presented in two or three different ways before you really get it. If you can't follow the textbook, the class with the publisher's PP slides won't be any better.

The fact that it was that way when you went to school does not mean its better.

When I went to school (that'd be now) my professors use chalkboards and very little technology unless it's a Mathematica example. I think the ways that technolgy can be used depends heavily on your major. For very math intensive majors (like mine), PP slides are of very little use. Doing an example on the board with chalk (or a marker, for those more technologically advanced schools =0) is the only way to go. It's easier to follow along if the professor has to write as he goes- it slows him down a little.

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[Alomex]

If you go to a class where the PP slides are structured and presented exactly like the book,

Sure, and if the slides are awful one shouldn't use them either. However (1) slides are usually prepared by somebody other than the author and (2) what the professor _says_ is still a lot more than what is written on the slide.

I agree that certain things should be done live on the board to get the true feel of it. By the same token, other things such as animations of an algorithm or the chart of a function are much better understood from a computer presentation (you never truly "get" a taylor series approximation until you see each the approximations overlaid on the original function. It is also quite striking how good the approximation is for very few terms).

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[domovoi]

There are competing issues here, and you've hit on a couple.

One of them is that the ed tech is designed, developed, and tested by companies who have only half a clue about higher education. The tech is then selected and implemented (at mind-boggling cost to the institution) by desk-jockey administrators who have no real contact with students or the instructors/profs in the trenches. So they make WebCT, Blackboard, or Banner (just three examples of closed-source coporate-edu-computing) the flavor of the month on campus.

These systems (in my experience) really shoot to be idiot proof, which is fine, but that also makes them as nimble and flexible as a hippo in molasses. They're bloated, stupid, and have too many unnecessary wingdings for the tech-savvy; they just end up being intimidating for the less tech-savvy. Because of IP issues (if you publish your notes/study guides/etc. on the site, it becomes the university's, typically), many of the profs who are able to deploy their own material on their own sites do so. Of course, they have to be fairly savvy and their students, at least initially, need to adjust to a new course materials CMS. That's the exception. Most of the time, profs don't put jack on the official CMS, even though they could if they wanted to fight with the counterintuitive GUI and lose any rights to their own intellectual property.

So I guess what you're seeing (I've certainly seen it plenty) is that administrators jump on every new tech wingding that comes down the pike, they spend good money on it (instead of crazy stuff like, say, a real library or paying their adjunct faculty a living wage) and it sits, cluttering up classrooms. They feature their sleek new all-wired classrooms in their alumni magazine, but don't say that they're used 2 hours out of the day. They pay oodles of money for proprietary, university-wide CMSs and nobody even cares, because they don't offer any real advantages over paper and chalkboard. I don't use the Blackboard deployment for my classes because it makes more work for me to do so, rather than less. When that changes, maybe I'll use it. Right now, screw it. I'm not going to bust my hump to use Blackboard when my students (middle-sized campus of a state university system) can't reliably attach files to an email, and don't really care much about it until I require it.

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[ottothecow]

we all got screwed by jesse didnt we...where in MN do you go to school?

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[trompete]

I graduated from Augsburg this year. We didn't get hit by the budget cuts as badly as the U, but we got hit.
Where did you graduate from?

Re:Good use vs. Bad use of computers

[ottothecow]

Still in highschool in New Hope(mpls suburb) and despite being in one of the better off districts in the state (we passed our refferendum the first time), there are still many areas that were hit hard

Begging for cheaters.

[Elwood P Dowd]

I have also seen teachers try to forbid their students from using the internet in a research project.

This brand of stupidity exists independant of computer technology. I've had professors give take home exams that were:

1) Closed book, and
2) To be completed in 1 hour, honor system.

That's the teacher's way of saying, "Honest people deserve lower grades in this course." Situations such as those are the only ones in which I've ever cheated in school. I don't consider it to be any morally different from cheating on an in-class test, but I certainly didn't hesitate to open up my text book and find the answers.

Anyway. I realize this has nothing to do with technology, but there you are.

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[ghamerly]

Your moral compass is spinning wildly... it's making me dizzy. What a rationalization.

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[Fareq]

Ok, now this is interesting.

I am a student at Univ. Calif., Irvine

at UCI, this sourt of honor system would not work, in my opinion, as well as that of many of my fellow students.

At Harvey Mudd (sp?) in Claremont, CA. it is a common practice for final exams to be given this way. I have yet to find a student that would admit to having taken even five minutes longer than allowed, or having opened a book or looked online, or asked for help.

Also, nobody admitted to ever being asked for help on such an exam.

So... it can work, in the right academic environment.

Morally, cheating is cheating. Do what you will, rationalize it how you like. I'll take my B and know that I have some small degree of integrity, thanks much.

You go ahead and get your A. I won't really be mad at you, but you'll know that you cheated, and I will to. And that really makes the difference.

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Morally, cheating is cheating. Do what you will, rationalize it how you like. I'll take my B and know that I have some small degree of integrity, thanks much.

You go ahead and get your A. I won't really be mad at you, but you'll know that you cheated, and I will to. And that really makes the difference.

I agree completely. I'd still prefer a system in which we all get grades that reflect our understanding of the subject material.

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[Elwood P Dowd]

You'll have to explain that comment for it to mean anything to me. Dunno if you care, but... what did I rationalize? Where did my morals change?

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of Honor System absolutely can work. At my college tests are by rule unproctored. We had an adjunct professor try to stay in the room durring a test our sophmore year, but we insisted he leave. It was very common for our professors to give us closed book time limited take home exams, and as far as I know, no-one ever went over time or used resources we weren't supposed to. I am not saying it can work at any school, but when the student body buys into the system, it works really well.

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[Fareq]

precisely, and this is why I do not believe that it would work at my school. Most of the student body would cheat, because they feel that most of the others would to, and so they would be at a disadvantage if they (and only they) did not

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[ghamerly]

Your morals didn't change, but you chose to go against them -- to rationalize that it would be ok to cheat.

You said that you still felt it was morally wrong, but you still did it, because otherwise you *may* lose. That's a rationalization. How can you say "Cheating is wrong. If I don't cheat I may get a B in this class. Everyone else is cheating. Therefore, I will cheat, and it is somehow ok."

Or am I missing something?

It's pretty standard practice to use self-administered tests, and just because others may cheat doesn't justify cheating. My fiancee went through a her PhD qualifying exam, where she had to write four papers in about 5 hours, timing herself, and only using certain resources. She didn't cheat, even though it meant she might not pass, and get kicked out of the program she had been working on for two years already. Thankfully, she passed with a clear conscience, knowing that she didn't cheat.

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[Elwood P Dowd]

You said that you still felt it was morally wrong, but you still did it, because otherwise you *may* lose. That's a rationalization. How can you say "Cheating is wrong. If I don't cheat I may get a B in this class. Everyone else is cheating. Therefore, I will cheat, and it is somehow ok."

Or am I missing something?

Ok, I see where you're coming from, now, but I don't think that was my thought process exactly. Most importantly, I didn't argue that it was somehow ok. Also, I didn't mean to imply that my reasoning was, "Everyone else is cheating, so I should too."

As I recall, it was, "Crap. I *know* which author used that argument. Ah, fuckit." And then I looked it up. In retrospect, I lament that honest people may have gotten lower grades than me (even though it wasn't a curved class)(even though it is highly unlikely that many honest people got lower grades than me).

Re:Begging for cheaters.

[Cyrano47]

I go to Pomona College, in the same Claremont University Consortium as Harvy Mudd and that honor system does indeed exist, as well as here and at the other 5C colleges (Pomona College, Scripps College, Pitzer College, Harvy Mudd College, and Claremont McKenna College).

On the other hand, my school's "fight chant" for sports games goes something like "Break their fingers, smash their knees, we've got higher SATs!" Let me also point out that we're in the lowest possible sporting bracket.

Fiber

[PsndCsrV]

My mom teaches at a public elementary school, and they have a "technology committee" that decides all things technology for the school. That's ok, except that none of them are career IT'ers, and none of them have much training in IT except a seminar or 2 about things, or maybe a couple cisco classes.

So lately the committee has decided that in order to solve all it's network ills, they need to install fiber throughout the entire school! Woo hoo! Right? Theoretically it's a good idea, but in reality, they don't even need it. They're external internet is a T1 (1.5mb), so even a 10mb network will swamp that. Internally they don't even use the network for much besides the internet... just a little storage for the teachers who know, and a few apps here and there. Stuff 100mb ethernet would handle fine.

Seems pretty stupid to me, and a big useless expense. Especially with all the layoffs and budget crunches going on. I'd rather see them spend the money on a new PC for each teacher, or some classroom spending money. <sarcasm>But they're the technology committee. They know what's best.</sarcasm>

Re:Fiber

[millia]

Is that fiber to the classroom, or just between closets? Fiber to the classroom is still overkill, but between closets is certainly not unreasonable, especially since it'll give plenty of bandwidth for growth.

Re:Fiber

[PsndCsrV]

It's fiber to the classroom, AFAIK. I agree, running fiber out to the farther buildings would be reasonable, especially looking at growth, but the school district is in a town of 10K people, and isn't growing very rapidly. I think the whole reason they're wanting it is because a lot of the existing network is chained hubs, running at 10mb. It's a little slow for intranet stuff sometimes. But instead of just upgrading stuff to 100mb (hubs/switches mostly), they want to replace it all with fiber. It's overkill for what they use on it. "Man, this BB gun isn't killing that deer. Let's go get some armor piercing anti-tank weaponry." :-)

Re:Fiber

[Chasing Amy]

That's an example of why I advocate a much more old-fashioned education program than most here would like. Believe me, I love computers and find them to be an important part of my life, a hobby and passion as well as a tool. However, I believe they deserve a limited place in our schools because the money could better be used on more teachers for smaller class sizes, and higher teacher pay for attracting and retaining better teachers.

Basically, elementary school kids IMHO don't need to be using computers in school at all. They aren't doing the kinds of essays and reports that require extensive amounts of detailed information, so the time and expense should be spent on more traditional teaching--reading, using basic indexes and encyclopoedias, etc.

The argument is made that this gets "rich kids" who can afford computers at home an advantage by being introduced to computers at a younger age. Poppycock--I went to school during the period when most of the people I know never used a computer beyond using an Apple ][ as a glorified typewriter until they reached college, and yet they all picked up on good computer use within a month of being at college since by then it was necessity. So, don't tell me people who start on computers in elementary school will have an inherent advantage over those introduced in middle school. Besides, this is the era of the $200 Wal-Mart PC, so even most low-income families can afford a computer at home.

It's in middle school that computers should be introduced into the curriculum in order to prepare students for the need to do more detailed and thorough research on essays, etc., that they need to start doing in middle and high school. Shifting the focus off technology and back onto the basics in elementary schools would, in and of itself, save a fortune in elementary IT spending that could be used on better teachers and on making sure all middle and high schools have adequate computing equipment and excellent instructors to teach their use.

Just my opinion anyway. Too many of the kids I know know more about computers than they do about basic vocabulary, indicating a very misplaced priority in our schools. What good is the ability to look up information on the Web with great efficiency if you can't understand it in detail, much less analyze it thoroughly? Kids are graduating high school today knowing more than they need to about PCs and less than they need to about language, reading, math, and analytical thought. The latter things clearly need better emphasis, and the time to spend teaching them needs to come from somewhere. A good solid liberal arts education is still the best way to prepare students for anything, and they're not getting one.

The evidence of that is everywhere, from the need for the College Board to "dumb down" the "new" SATs to the rising numbers of college freshmen in remedial English and math classes. I went to a college where there was a proficiency exam requirement before first-year placement and for second-year advancement--and the professors administering it complained that every year fewer students placed well or passed the advancement exam the first time around, despite the fact that the college's population numbers and general makeup were static. The only conclusion for such a situation is that high schools were preparing the students less and less in terms of fundamental language and math skills.

Computers are wonderful and teaching their use is a necessity at least in high schools. But they are being over-emphasized at the expense of the fundamentals.

Re:Fiber

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't actually have a problem with fiber to the desktop in principle; it will last longer than copper in the long run. In actual installs though, the cost of the fiber cards tend to outweigh the benefits. After installing that fancy new fiber network, you then have to buy fiber NICs or conversion boxes for every workstation, and for a high school with several labs (as we have in our district), it gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. It seems like a lot of wasted money when every manufacturer is shipping all their machines with built-in copper 10/100 or 10/100/1000 NICs.

Re:Fiber

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that a lot of what you say is true, but the problems are the fault of teachers and parents, not actually having the computers in the classrooms. The two big problems I see are:

1) Teachers teach computer classes rather than using the computers to supplement existing classes. This leads to wasted time where the kids are just learning "computers" and not anything else. I've seen teachers who have done some really cool learning projects and utilized computers as the medium, grading spelling, grammar, and other content.

2) Parents don't give a damn. Many parents are just as poorly educated as their children and don't care enough to be strict with their kids and push them to learn.

My parents corrected my grammar for years, but that has really aided me in my professional communications in the business world. I look through some of the postings on the Internet (including a number of the posts here) and just cringe at some of the spelling and grammar. I'll be honest; I don't give as much credence to an opinion that is poorly written. I tend to laugh and say "there's an educated argument."

Well, I rambled a little bit, but my point is that teachers (including parents in the "teacher" category) are the problem, not the computers themselves. Computers are a tool, and being in their second generation in education, should not be treated as a novelty anymore. This argument brings to mind a quote that a co-worker has next to his desk: "Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer deserves to be."

Re:Fiber

[dkizzier]

Let's take a look at the problem here. First of all, I don't think you probably have all the information that the tech commitee had when making their decision. There are a lot more factors to take into account than just internet access. I am the I.T. department for a K-12 school. We have fiber to the desktop in about half of our building. The rest of the building has fiber connections, but we are still using CAT 5 for the network. BTW, I do have a bit more than a couple of Cisco classes under my belt. You mentioned that the network was mostly 10mb hubs, etc. Okay, I can see your point of moving to switches, that's a good move. However, what kind of cabling do they have and how old is it. Maybe they're using CAT 3 currently and need to run new cable anyway to transition to 100/1000 mb. At that point, I would seriously consider fiber as an alternative. The fiber will have a longer life, is stronger and less prone to EMI. You can also install longer runs with fiber, which offsets the cost of secondary wiring closets and additional switches. Remember, wiring is an investment. A little extra effort upfront can reap huge rewards down the road. Maybe they don't need the bandwidth right now, but who's to say that they might need it in a year for some sort of video conferencing, or streaming video feeds? My fiber lines are 7 years old, but I don't foresee having to replace them anytime in the near future (5 - 10 years).

Re:Fiber

[k12linux]

Fiber to the classroom gets expensive fast. Not only do you have the fiber NIC prices, but there is also the fiber switch costs... a lot of fiber ports on a switch isn't cheap.

Fiber for limited use like gigabit backbones between closets is extremely reasonable. It's not hard (or very expensive) to get switches with one or two gig fiber connectors on them. The fiber itself isn't very expensive.

Re:Fiber

[Anonymous Coward]

I've volunteered as tech support at my mother's elementary school for three years now, and I have plenty of horror stories to share. But in particular the words "Technology Commitee" strike fear in my heart. While this may not be true at many schools, the teachers at this particular elementary school have absolutely no knowledge of computers. The commitee has 7 members, one of which is my mother, the other six are teachers who enjoy a two dollar stipend for contributing to school commitees, and have very little insight to offer. One of these women asked me to fix her printer, and I discovered her problem was that she had run the power supply behind some file cabinets and forgot to go the extra distance and plug it in. Another one's husband is a Gateway sales rep, so of course her only suggestions revolve around buying more gateway equipment, and the rest of them have no real input other than to complain that they don't like the slow machine they have on their desk. A few of these women don't even have home machines, they simply signed up for the commmitee to complain. The decisions they make clearly direct a sizable percentage of the school budget, yet none of them have any knowledge of the network, the software library, or even the internet. The most use we see on the network is the secretaries in the office who surf personals ads a good portion of the day. Some of the problem is that these teachers do not use computers at home, some of it is that they already have a fairly full curriculum without these machines, that has been tried and tested for as long as they've worked. Another big problem is accessiblity: Some classes don't handle being walked down to the computer lab so well, and despite the generous donations we've recieved from the local utlilities company, I can't really provide them with more than two or three computers per classroom, and excusing two or three students at a time from other lessons is something most teachers don't want to deal with. The only solutions we've found is to request that the principal mandate use of the labs, and we also recently convinced the tech comitee to get behind buying a classroom set of ibooks which is loaded onto a cart with a few base stations tacked on the sides. Even still, you can't teach old dogs new tricks, and in a school such as this, in a fairly impoverished area, the most computer experience these children can hope for outside of school is eventually using the touchscreen menu behind the counter at burger king.
I think if there's any hope for change it lies in the merits of educational software, which currently is about at the same level as math blaster was when I was in school. When we can create learning enviroments as complex as the streets in Tony Hawk 4, with rewarding educational lessons and interesting environs, perhaps teachers will begin to understand that the reality within these computers can be just as appropriate for learning as the reality of the classroom, perhaps more so. Another hurdle associated with this is that the teachers won't be out looking for this kind of thing, it will have to be shoved in their faces, and they'll have to be able to play with it themselves. I recommend allowing teachers to check out computers as painlessly as possible, and I have even begun using spare parts from donations to help fix the personal computers of some of the teachers, to encourage their pursuit of digital education.

Re:Fiber

[phoenix_rizzen]

Hear, hear. We definitely need to shift the teaching focus away technology, and onto learning. It really bugs me to see classes being taught MS-Word in elementary school, as opposed to "wordprocessing topics", for example. Or how to use Internet Explorer, as opposed to how to use the web for research. We are moving more and more toward an application-specific teaching system, and away from a skills-based teaching system.

I definitely agree that we should pull computers out of primary schools (K-3), possibly out of elementaries (K-7) completely. Let's get the basics down pat (reading, comprehension, logic, math, science, research, language) before moving onto the extraneous bits like how to use Windows, or how to tear down a PC. Leave that for the IT classes in junior/senios high.

I even see these kinds of problems in the local college. No longer are the students being taught how to program, or how to diagnose hardware issues, or even how a computer works. Nope, it's all "push this button", "tweak this knob", and so on, for specific apps (mostly MS).

[shrug]
I'm just glad I'm off that treadmill.

Handhelds = Cheaper Than Notebooks?

[JLester]

The handheld vs notebooks argument seems strange since most Palms and Pocket PCs are cheaper than almost any notebook.

Jason

Re:Handhelds = Cheaper Than Notebooks?

[PsndCsrV]

I think he meant notebook, as in a bunch of paper bound together on one side. You can use a pencil or other writing utensil to write on it. But I too had to re-read that a few times to get it.

Re:Handhelds = Cheaper Than Notebooks?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Huh. That's odd. My notebook cost $1.50, and I bet schools can get them even cheaper in bulk.

Re:Handhelds = Cheaper Than Notebooks?

[SuDZ]

I think they meant notepooks as in the paper kind. You know, the ones people used to use that had a pen that actually used ink.

SuDZ

Effort and utility

[Rares Marian]

Most of the arguments for no Internet research, palm notebooks, and such are based on bias.

So what are those biases based on?

The net seems to obscure the fact that many people contribute to an idea. This is especially true of research.

As for the palm computers, many people think that they are being thrifty if they get something for one purpose. But everything is backwards in terms of computers. The more general the cheaper the product, yet the more general the more powerful it is.

Re:Effort and utility

[fuzzybunny]

Because publishing a book takes a certain amount of effort, and it's thus likely that someone with at least half a brain cell at least skimmed through the contents once, unlike most of the crap you find on the net :-)

Re:Effort and utility

[Rares Marian]

Publishing a book costs much more than holding a blog for anyone to critique.

And I happen to do tech writing. I can tell you first hand I've seen nothing but plagiarism from partners in certification manuals. Big time partners.

LTSP, filtering proxies and mail server upgrades

[stanwirth]

One school here in NZ has their mail server set up to reject all mail from .com domains. Decent spam filter, but it makes it difficult to communicate with the principal about converting it to linux and putting more effective and accurate spam filters on it!

One request I've seen is for a configuration of squid (or some other cache/proxy server) that can (a) cache a large number of pages on a certain topic (gathered by hand if necessary) and then limit the access of the students to only those pages.

Another popular item for schools is an ltsp setup . But you *have* to let them know that despite the word "terminal" in the title, these are not dumb terminals per se, but rather a thin client arrangement, more along the lines of the old diskless sun workstations! You don't want them going out and getting a bunch of old VT100's and thinking they'll be able to bring up a graphical display on them! (well, maybe if you put them in tek4014 emulation mode, but it's it's not exactly what they expect!)

At the NZ Open Source Society we're focussing on schools as a highly appropriate place to place open source deployments, on charity. Think about it. If you donate your time at market rates, you can claim it back on your taxes at a rate that's still a living wage. This is an excellent way to reduce your tax burden from a windfall in previous years, keep busy and expand your skills in a lean year, and do something good for the community--all at the same time.

A friend of mine's kid uses linux exclusively at home, and when the kids on the schoolbus found out, they backed away from her in shock and informed her that linux "was illegal" and she could be arrested "for being a hacker using that." An idea brought to a school near you by the MS FUD Factory.

This is the level of misunderstanding of open source in the schools, so it's an important mission to at least dispell some of the FUD surrounding it.

Frankly....

[dacarr]

At the risk of quoting the Backin-Myday act of 1901, I'll list my own take on the whole thing.

You should know how to do things without the machines (IE, by hand) before you learn to do things with.

A good example is math. Many people know how to do "2+2=" on a calculator so it spits out 4, but these days I watch kids freak out as I work (say) 3/492 on a piece of paper. They are awed; I am scared.

Re:Frankly....

[MerlynEmrys67]

So I am old school and learned how to do math in my head for the SATs etc.
My younger co-worker (who will probably read this and laugh) and I play darts. He is young enough that he could use a calculator on the SATs so didn't need to do math in his head. Bottom line is that I do the addition because it is not a trained skill for him. As far as I can tell the only disability suffered is the ability to do simple math in his head. I would bet he can do more complex math than I can anymore because it has been way too many years for me.

I actually don't want my daughters school to have computers, she gets enough of that at home. I want teachers that can teach - on presentation or not. One of the best ecconomics classes I had in college (yes there was two ecconomics classes that engineers had to take) happened the day after the ecconomy crashed in 1987. Did the profesor stay on topic. Hell no, we had a lecture/discussion group on what caused it, what it mean, and what the future would hold.

Re:Frankly....

[Fareq]

Here, Here!

I agree whole-heartedly (as if my heart has anything to do with the process except providing my brain and fingers with blood)

I was greatly disturbed when my highschool math instructors informed me that, sans a TI-82 or better calculator (at the time, about $75 - $80 -- its a graphing calculator) that I would be at such a tremendous disadvantage that I'd likely not pass the course.

See, we learned how to do matrix multiplications, we learned how to graph some pretty spiffy functions, we learned how to find the roots for all sorts of goofy functions, we learned to take logs and nth roots.

Or, at least, we learned the commands to do so on the calculator.

Quick poll: who here is under 30 and ever EVER learned how to take a square root sans calculator?

there are so many wonderful uses of technology, a calculator that factors for you being used instead of learning factoring and synthetic division is jut NOT one of them

Re:Frankly....

[Zarquon]

Ooh. Me. In the back of the book there's this big table... :) Or there's this nifty log rule, lemme pull out my slipstick.. :)

Honestly, it was covered back in alegebra II, but it wasn't used much. One or two tests, then on to bigger and better things. When you get a scientific calculator for $10...

Last time I had to do it on paper I used an iterative method, fairly slow but workable. (This BTW, was on a physics final where my calculator was broken on the way there... I managed to pass. Lacking trig tables and the time to rederive them, I also had to leave some of the answers in trig form.)

In case it matters, I'm 23.

Re:Frankly....

[TC (WC)]

I'm 19, and I learned how to take a large square root by hand years ago... I still use it fairly frequenly, as I tend to forget to take calculators to things.

Re:Frankly....

[nuggetman]

See, we learned how to do matrix multiplications, we learned how to graph some pretty spiffy functions, we learned how to find the roots for all sorts of goofy functions, we learned to take logs and nth roots.

Or, at least, we learned the commands to do so on the calculator.

My Algebra 2/Precalculus teacher did it right. He made us make sure we knew how to do it without first (multiply rows by columns, a logarithm is an exponent, etc), then show us how to use the calculator.

The funniest part was his example always failed somehow and one of us had to figure it out.

Re:Frankly....

[confused one]

I'm not advocating that the calculator requirement is a good thing; but...

I'm one of those (rare?) people who was nearly held back in grade school for math (had to get tutoring after school), still can't do the basic math (add, subtract, mult., divide, etc.) well, yet have NO problem at all with the advanced stuff...

speaking to you with Physics degree in hand...

Re:Frankly....

[dacarr]

At the risk of sounding like an idiot, perhaps an abacus is an option? Yeah, it's old fashioned and ridiculously antiquated, but at least one sees the mechanics of 2+2, rather than feeding the request into a computer and getting a response.

Re:Frankly....

[rilian4]

I am 29 and I was taught how to do a square-root sans calculator. I don't remember how now but I distinctly remember being taught.

Re:Frankly....

[k12linux]

The argument (from a math teacher no less) is that being able to manually add, subtract, multiply, etc. isn't of much value these days.

I don't buy it. The odds are really good that you won't have a calculator or computer handy at all times.

I bought something at Home Depot last week. The total was $2.70. I handed a $5 to the check-out girl and she punched it into the computer/cash-register. I had a couple of dimes I wanted to get rid of and didn't want more, so I told her to wait a second and gave her the extra $0.20.

To my horor, she could neither subtract $2.70 from $5.20 nor (worse) add 20 cents to the $2.30 change due that was shown on the screen. She stared at the dimes for a second so I told her the change was $2.50. She got a calculator out of her drawer and sure enough, I was right.

I'm just glad that she had a working calculator handy or I suspect she would have had to void the sale and start over.

On a related note, where I used to work, one salesperson was the favorite of most of our customers. Even though he generally had slightly higher mark-ups on his sales than average, he was still who most customers asked for when they called. When I asked a friend who was also a customer why he liked this guy, his answer was that he always could get a price estimate right away on the phone without waiting.

It turned out that the salesman could do most of the math in his head. He didn't try to be spot-on with the prices and let the customer know that it was just an estimate. They liked the fact that they immediately at least knew the ballpark the final quote would be in.

Re:Frankly....

[budgenator]

surely you jest, you need paper for 3/492? If you use a calculator, don't you at least have to be able to estimate the answer in your head so you know you didn't hit the wrong key?

technology is not an excuse for ignoring the literacy part of computer literacy or following directions or critical thinking.

Re:Frankly....

[budgenator]

I had an organic chem instructor and she used to guess the cube roots of 4 and 5 digit numbers in her head in front of the class, then ask some one in the class for the calculator answer; she was always amazingly close

Re:Frankly....

[dacarr]

surely you jest, you need paper for 3/492?

If the point is to awe kids these days, yes, I need paper. "Wow, you know how to do that without a calculator?!" And if I'm still not sure, I break out the calculator and then run the problem. (Then again, that's something my dad taught me....)

We're basically talking the same crowd who never learned to read an analog clock because they've always had digital clocks to tell them what time it is.

Re:Frankly....

[treat]

So I am old school and learned how to do math in my head for the SATs etc.

I was punished repeatedly in school for doing math in my head. Often I had correct answers marked wrong because I did not show my "work".

The school system is only an instrument to keep people dumb.

Re:Frankly....

[cellocgw]

My Algebra 2/Precalculus teacher did it right. He made us make sure we knew how to do it without first (multiply rows by columns, a logarithm is an exponent, etc), then show us how to use the calculator.

The funniest part was his example always failed somehow and one of us had to figure it out.

You had an excellent teacher. As one prof. told us back in my TA days, "If you haven't made a mistake by the 3rd class, make one on purpose." Nothing like getting the kids to be observant and to demonstrate their understanding like putting mistakes on the board & hoping they'll notice.

Re:Frankly....

[budgenator]

read an analog clock
I had trouble figuring out if the big hand was the short fat one or the long skinny one, they both had about the same surface area!

Re:Frankly....

[Alan Shutko]

Considering the answer is .006097560975..., yes, I sure do need paper.

With some of the responses in this part, it seems people have forgotten that you divide by the number to the right of the "/" sign.

Re:Frankly....

[Anonymous Coward]

I say that to a point Internet use is acceptable on Term Papers. I think that teachers should allow a certain percentage of online refrences and require a fixed amount of text refrences, ie: encyclopedias. Children need to understand that you can't believe everything they read is the truth.

Re:Frankly....

[aliasptr]

I'm 20 now and after learning calculus I'd taken it upon myself to learn the Newton-Rhapson method for finding square roots. I find this more intuitive than using a more "algorithm" based approach. Also I am a very big "fan" of series expansions and enjoy them. With that said, I've played with approximating trigonometric functions, logarithmic functions, approximating Pi using the simple (and SLOW) arc tangent method, and of course approximating e using it's simple series.

On another note, I hated math from Kindergarten (there's really not much math in Kindergarten though, right?) up to 12th grade. After failing my Calculus 1 (Basic limits and derivatives Riemann sums and basic antiderivative leading up to basic integration) course I didn't give up and retook it and really engrossed myself in it, I got an A second time around and left with a very deep understanding (and appreciation) of basic calculus, I then took "Calculus 2" (basically series and more advanced integration and all the goes with it) and really fell in love with math.

Anyway... to reiterate my answer to your question, yes I can find the values of many commonly used functions by hand. Unfortunately I am not very good at basic arithmetic. As I said I hated math for a long time so I never practiced basic math skills. I don't really blame this on my school, I chose to not put any effort in to it and I paying for it now. It's alright though I do math in my spare time and finding Pi to the 13 decimal place by using the arctan method gives you a real work out in basic arithmetic.

A kind of conclusion to this convoluted post is that if the kids want to learn they will try to find the resources to do so. It's truly sad when kids (and adults) who passionately want to learn something simply don't have access to the people or resources that would enable them to do so.

Re:Frankly....

[phoenix_rizzen]

Heh, heh, been there, done that.

I used to get in trouble for having my hand up with the answer before the teacher had finished writing the problem. "There's no way you know the answer, you haven't written anything down yet."

I used to fight with teachers over showing work, because I tended to group multiple steps together. Why show 10 steps to solve an equation if you can do it 4?? Got to the point where I would write a generic example with all ten steps at the top of the page, then just put a note "See example at top of page for all steps" on my tests. That didn't garner me any extra marks. :)

Showing your work a few times to show that you grasp the concept is one thing. Having to show work for every single problem for 3 weeks is overkill.

Re:Frankly....

[phoenix_rizzen]

We had a chemistry teacher in high school who wrote all his own text books and notes (even published a few that are in use in other schools). He had a competition on in his classes to see who could find the most mistakes in the notes. Talk about cheap editing. :) And a great way to see how closely people are paying attention.

The winner was supposed to get a free pizza lunch at the end of the year, but he forgot, so I got $10 instead. Was so nice to know I paid closer attention to detail than the resident 4.0 genius. :)

Re:Frankly....

[mrpuffypants]

Even though I could just fire up Calc to figure out the answer to your mind-boggling math problem I'll just reven in knowing that I am one of the people you describe.

3/492 on paper? I stand in awe in your presence!

Re:Frankly....

[ottothecow]

we learned how to use the abacus in around 3rd grade...im not sure if we were supposed to know how to multiply and divide then (maybe only 1 digit numbers) but we could sure add and subtract with them...and it was easier than carrying around 10 apples and adding 3 pears for the total # of fruits

CORRECTION! NZOSS is HERE

[stanwirth]

NZ Open Source Society is here

Start as you mean to go on...

[fingal]

I had the honour of being introduced to computing by Francis Glassborow back in '84 who (among other things) was responsible for:-

• Starting us off with a version of Forth running on a Sinclair Spectrum (written by himself, 1K core kernel, 4K if you wanted an editor with emacs compatible key bindings...)
• Moving us onto Pascal as soon as we started getting too attached to being too low level
• Made anyone who showed the slightest aptitude for cracking systems into system administrators and held them responsible if the network was compromised (resulting in a very low incident rate)
• Insisted that there where only two rules to programming (and pretty much anything else):-
  • If you really don't know the answer to something then you should ask an expert
  • An expert is anyone who knows more about something than you do.
  This would quite frequently be accompanied by the assigning the more competent members of the class to teaching / bug fixing coding for the rest of the class (you very quickly discover that there is a difference between being able to sort of hack something for yourself and understanding it well enough to be able to give a reasoned explanation to another student)

Been in education for 13 years now...

[millia]

It still hasn't killed my zeal, but it does get tough. It's the only industry left in this country that is perpetually understaffed with regard to IT staff. How many 1,500 employee person corporations would have a 5 person IT department?

My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?

Only in the last several years has there been a clear move to use the computer as an integrated tool, and not to use it as a reward or a game machine.

Disclaimer: I work at a regional center in Georgia that teaches such integration.

Towards that end, I've seen a lot of neat uses. It takes more than just a powerpoint slideshow to actually enhance learning, though. Having the students do research and then create their own powerpoint is more effective. (as long as they don't use a sound effect for every letter entry...)

The key element is to get the students involved. The instructor can use a tool such as Inspiration to do concept outlines, and then make those available as notes.

I'll think of more examples later...

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[GuyMannDude]

My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?

Or you could simply use any standard $2 calculator, a pencil, and some graph paper and have the kids plot the function themselves. The kids would be responsible for using as many or as few sample points as they needed. Instead of mindlessly typing in an equation and watching the gizmo do its thing, the repetition of manually evaluating the function over and over would drive home the important fact that a function is a mapping of inputs to outputs. Instinctively, the kids will want to minimize the amount of work that's required to graph the function and so they'll try to find the sampling that gets the right shape with the smallest number of points. To do this, they'll need to concentrate on the shape of the curve that they're generating with each new data point. Not just a quick glance -- they'll really have to study the shape to make sure they're not about to miss an inflection point or other "gotcha" that might lie between two of their sample points.

Yeah, it takes a few more minutes to do it this way. But when you factor in the amount of time needed to learn how to use a graphical calculator or software, I'm not sure it really looks that bad.

GMD

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[Sparr0]

You take the name "graphing calculator" too simply. Modern graphing calculators are computers at heart, capable of doing things in seconds that would take hours, if not days or even weeks, to do by hand.

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[xtal]

My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?

Never used a Hp48, the real deal, have you? :-)

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[claudius0425]

I must heartily disagree with your statements on graphing calculators. The instant you show me a piece of software I can put on my Palm that will come even close to matching the functionality of my TI-89, much less my HP-49G, I will stop using them. However, the past few years of constant searching for such software (not so much to save money as to save devices) has proven to me that Palm software just doesnt exist for symbol manipulation. Certainly for some students (those who are fine with a TI-83+ sort of calculator) a Palm might suffice, but for higher level math, the software just doesn't exist. (Now if there were a port of GNU Octave...) There is also an issue in that PDAs are almost universally banned for students taking math tests, as there is no workable method of forcing the students to clear the memory to eliminate illicit notes, but I will leave the proof and implications of that as an exercise to the reader.

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[Kid Brother of St. A]

I share your peeve about graphing calculators. One reason high schools use them so much is the AP Calculus test, which actually requires a graphing calculator -- to be chosen from a specific list of models, none of which (as of the 2002 exam) includes gc software on a handheld. And then you see a lot of college using them because even more high schools use them.

The college I work at uses computer algebra software (Derive on the lower levels and Mathematica for sophomore-and-above courses) along with a smattering of cheap or free stuff (Java applets, open-source software, Geometers Sketchpad, etc.) I like the fact that technology can be used to get across the mathematical methodology (experiment-conjecture-proof) and I think gc's -- even the TI-89/92 -- are just too limited.

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[schlyne]

A friend of mine was a TA for a basic gen ed college chemistry class at a fairly large university. He was going over the basic stuff in the first couple weeks (scientific notation, simple graphs, etc.)

He had a couple of US students that had no idea how to plot graphs at all. I'm not really sure how he got students that had never plotted out a graph by hand, but he did. This happened in 1998 or 1999.

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[kevinqtipreedy]

as long as they don't use a sound effect for every letter entry
Wow... I was dropped a whole letter grade on my project for not having a sound effect for every letter entry

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[BenjyD]

What about graph-sketching? Is it no longer required? Just taking sample data points is a pretty poor method of drawing graphs in many cases.

Re:Been in education for 13 years now...

[NeoSkandranon]

Or you could simply use any standard $2 calculator, a pencil, and some graph paper and have the kids plot the function themselves

That's fine for learning how to graph (which is middle-school level math) But after that, esp once you get into advanced classes, it is a pain in the ass and a waste of time to do things by hand when the graphing part isn't even the problem you're trying to solve

Crazy teacher

[aeinome]

We had a crazy English teacher in freshman high school. One project, we were not allowed to use a computer to find information. Now, this seemed okay at first, because there's a lot of information in a library. However, she really took the "no computer" as far as it could go - we couldn't even look up a book on the library's online catalog! And since the library didn't have a card catalog anymore, we had to find the books by scanning the shelves.

Needless to say, I didn't really like that teacher much.

Re:Crazy teacher

[MerlynEmrys67]

You are lucky... My first computer assignment in college (circa 1985) had to be turned in Punch Card format.
Now the interesting thing is that there was 1 working punch card "puncher" and one working punch card "reader" left on campus... of course there was an approximate 2 mile walk between them, so your edit compile debug cycle was
1) walk to puch card writer wait to type up your punch cards
2) spend 15 minutes walking across campus to reader, submit job to perplexed operator
3) take output to quiet room to figure what the hell was wrong
4) Walk back across campus to the writer
I got a good impression on how bad it used to be, so I have learned to take advantage of all of the modern tools in the world to help me do my job. Turned out to be an interesting class, just don't get me started on my assembler classes where I wrote C code, and turned in the compiled output

Re:Crazy teacher

[GuyMannDude]

We had a crazy English teacher in freshman high school. One project, we were not allowed to use a computer to find information. Now, this seemed okay at first, because there's a lot of information in a library. However, she really took the "no computer" as far as it could go - we couldn't even look up a book on the library's online catalog! And since the library didn't have a card catalog anymore, we had to find the books by scanning the shelves.

This is just so sad. Not how "crazy" your teacher was but the fact that once you were forbidden to use any electronic gadget, you seemed at a loss for how to do anything. Here's a couple of "unplugged" options you could have followed rather than performing an exhaustive search of the library's shelves:

• Look at the poster of the Dewey Decimal System that's hanging on every friggin' wall in a library. Identify the range of numbers most likely to be of interest to you. Go to that specific bookshelf.
• Once you locate one book that seems to have some useful information, look at the bibliography or references section of it. It will give you some other leads on useful sources of information.
• Ask the librarian for help! That's what they're there for, for chrissake!

Needless to say, I didn't really like that teacher much.

The ability to deal with unexpected and difficult circumstances is a valuable skill that will serve you well in life. Your teacher was trying to see if you could demonstrate that ability. Perhaps instead of silently hating the teacher you and your classmates should have thought a bit more (or asked him or her) about why they set up those rules.

GMD

Re:Crazy teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because it was an English teacher - a technophobe "Technology is bad" liberal arts teacher

If there was a card catalog, I'm sure they would have been allowed to use it

Re:Crazy teacher

[stanwirth]

Mod parent up!!! It was actually worse than that!

For example, you left out the step where, after walking across campus in the freezing cold, you have to wait on line with 200 other freshmen (half of whom have the flu--several different varieties brought back from Thanksgiving holiday) in a stuffy, moldy, underventillated, overheated basement room to submit your cards to the card reader.

And the other step where the person three ahead of you in the queue had one slightly bent card, that (because this is a modern high-speed card reader) sent several hundred cards shooting halfway across the machine room.

Oh and the other step where you stand on line again waiting for your output to come out of the batch queue printer. (Remember green-and-white striped pinfeed fanfold paper with that highly professional looking ALL CAPITALS dot matrix font? Fetching!)

And of course there's the optional step where you fall asleep over your printout at 4 in the morning and wake up to find that both your jacket and the wallet that was in the pocket have been stolen, along with one of your more costly science textbooks.

And if you don't like punch cards, well, there's always paper tape....what narked me off about the punch card debug cycle (besides having to use it for every assignment) was that back in high school, we had interactive terminals, WYLBUR scripting language, and access to several real-world compilers and interpreted languages on a local company's spare UNIVAC cycles. Debugging at 300baud is vastly better than debugging via carrying decks of cards across campus! Well, the use of the UNIVAC was free and easy, learned a lot fast -- but there in university, an IVY LEAGUE institution no less, paying top tuition dollar, we got a vastly worse system to work with.

Real World Lesson: the more money an institution has, the more tight-fisted they are, and the less they care about the people at the bottom. Other Real World Lesson: Prestige is worthless when you're hungry. You Can't Eat Prestige.

ps did you get away with turning in your .s files straight out of the c compiler? GOOD ONE!

Re:Crazy teacher

[MerlynEmrys67]

No, it was in texas, so it was boiling hot, but at least it was flat (no comments about uphill both ways)
Yes I did get away with it, all though I used an early optimizing compiler that generated some cool optimization that I had to explain to the TA why I did it (think fast young padiwan). But no, not straight .asm files either... did doctor them a bit to remove function call overheads, etc.

Re:Crazy teacher

[stanwirth]

This reminds me of the Monty Pyton sketch "When I was in college, we used to live in a shoebox in the middle of the road..." "LUXURY! We DREAMED of a shoebox!" etc.

Or the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert says that when he started out, they had to write all their code in ones and zeros -- and Wally answers that when he started out, all they had was zeros.

But the story about letting the C compiler do the basic conversion to assembler for you is a good one! Think fast, young padiwan, indeed!

Re:Crazy teacher

[budgenator]

(Remember green-and-white striped pinfeed fanfold paper with that highly professional looking ALL CAPITALS dot matrix font? Fetching!)

you sir are an obvious troll, those printers were chain printers, the characters were on a steel tape that circulated and were struck with a hammer when the character was over the correct column position sort of like a daisy-wheel printer. The printer had 132 hammers, one for each column except the last which was for the linefeed character.

Re:Crazy teacher

[mrpuffypants]

1) walk to puch card writer wait to type up your punch cards
2) spend 15 minutes walking across campus to reader, submit job to perplexed operator
3) take output to quiet room to figure what the hell was wrong
4) Walk back across campus to the writer

Solution? Get an English degree and sleep for 4 years.

Back to basics

[GuyMannDude]

I don't have any first-hand experience with technology in the classroom but I would like to point out that although American schools have the best technology and computer equipment available to students, we still rank pretty much dead last in terms of math and science education amongst the industrialized countries. I think that fact by itself pretty much wipes out any arguments in favor of cramming our underfunded public schools full of gizmos.

If I were running a high school, I'd concentrate on making sure the kids learn basics. Like how to think. Deep thinking. Independent thinking. Creative thinking. Critical thinking. This can all be accomplished with pen and paper. Give these kids a solid foundation of how to use their brains and they'll be able to pick up application skills more quickly. I'd also ditch all the so-called "advanced" subjects that are all the rage in high schools these days. No more Psychology classes for high school juniors. No Film Studies. Philosophy might be useful since it teaches logic -- a skill missing from most people these days. Math. Science. English literature. History. That's all you need. If they need to do research, then they haul their lazy asses down to the public library. I'm sure some people will claim that there's a lot more information available on the internet than at the public library. The fact of the matter is that high school students aren't going to be doing research at such a deep level that they have to worry about limitations of their public library system.

I know my post isn't what you were looking for but I think these are things that anyone considering the role of technology in classrooms needs to keep in their minds. Learning isn't supposed to be a gimmick. Just use basic tools and work hard.

GMD

Re:Back to basics

[schon]

although American schools have the best technology and computer equipment available to students, we still rank pretty much dead last in terms of math and science education

Can you provide a reference to American schools having the "best technology and computer equipment"?

I work closely with a couple of school districts in Canada (who ranks in the top 10 WTR science and math), and they have a very LARGE contingent of computer and technology equipment - new computers, networks, etc - including wireless access, high-speed internet, and more (the Alberta SuperNet project - due to be completed by the beginning of next year - will provide a minimum of 10Mb access to every school in the province, including ones in rural areas.)

What is it, exactly, that American schools have that these schools don't? What magic straw camel's-back-breaking technology do you possess that's causing your problem?

Perhaps it's not the technology that's causing your problem (as you imply), but administrative policy instead?

Re:Back to basics

[schlyne]

I often don't feel that the US education system is streamlined enough.

I recall very vividly that math in middle school (5th, 6th, and 7th grade) was exactly the same thing, for three years. I know I went to a poor dinky little grade school in the middle of the midwest, but you'd think a curriculum wouldn't repeat exactly the same material for three years.

I'd like to know what the typical age is for children in other countries to start learning alegbra. I was put into the section of my class that took alegbra for 8th grade math. The rest of the class was still doing pre-alegbra.

I'm sure the repeat math experience has happened to other people.

I can tell you that the best english teacher I ever had was in my junior year of high school. She ran English IV like it was a college course. Our first nine writing assignments were to write papers that had to be rewritten until we got an A over A. You had to get an A for grammar and and A for content. Everyone wrote a thesis paper in her class. For the last semster we studied literature.

I took the AP test for college. I had to take the 2nd class of the required college english classes. I hated that class. After going through English IV, I felt that sitting in that college course, with required attedance, was a waste of my time and my money. I had to sit through discussions of things like "what makes a good martial arts scene" brainstorming sessions.

One of my friends, once got a note sent home to his parents, becuase he was reading a book in class while his english teacher was taking attendance. He went to a different high school than I did. Apparently the english teacher didn't want him reading in her class. I think he was reading Stranger in a Strange Land at the time.

Face it, the american education system is just getting worse.

The first university I went to decided that every engineering and computer science student would be required to get a laptop. Almost every laptop class I went to, in which the laptops were supposed to be brought to class, had the students clicking through the professor's powerpoint slides as he went over the slides at the front of the classroom. Since we were also required to have a wireless connection, we had free access to the internet at the time. Most of my fellow students played games, while our professor went over the notes. Having a laptop didn't make a difference.

Re:Back to basics

[Anonymous Coward]

If they need to do research, then they haul their lazy asses down to the public library. I'm sure some people will claim that there's a lot more information available on the internet than at the public library.

Unless you live in San Diego where there is more information in my earwax than there is at the Public Library. Our library system is a sick joke.

Re:Back to basics

[flamingantichimp]

Unfortantly, you run into kids who don't really want to be at school. Like, a lot of them. Then there are the tests that you have to teach to. Sometimes technology excites them and makes them want to learn. Those smart boards with those projects are "SOOO cool, ya know?". If you're kids fail the standarized tests, your in danger of definatly losing some funding, likely losing part of your raise, and possibly eventually losing your job. The truth is "teaching to the test" does exactly what it's meant to: increase test scores. I had a teacher in 7th grade who taught to the test and did intense horrible vocabulary work and I hated it. My End of Grade readomg scores jumped up 12 points or something (very very rare to see that much increase). In 8th grade, my teacher taught us to make websites about reading books in frontpage. A lot of kids learned a lot, we did a few presentations including one to a team of governors peoples and that was great. She read to us at the beggining of class and took the vocabulary as a joke. But then she got mad at me when my scores dropped. Of course it all starts at a younger age level than High School. I really hate doing away with advance classes because I would drop out of school if they didn't exisit. I've been fortunate enough to get into a lot of honors and honors+ classes and spend time with students who care about things. When I go to classes where we are all "mixed"-ie high achieving and low achieving students, I get headaches. There's nothing but trash there. The kids don't want to learn. It's a challenge and while I can overcome it sometimes 7 times a day would be too much and I'd collapse. Your ideas sound great and theory, but they'd be tough to apply.

Re:Back to basics

[NeoSkandranon]

The fact of the matter is that high school students aren't going to be doing research at such a deep level that they have to worry about limitations of their public library system.


Some of us live in districts in which mantaining a well stocked library is not a primary concern of the town council. If a reasearch topic is something relatively new, there may not be any books on it. Then what?

Re:Back to basics

[ottothecow]

I COULD NOT agree more.

I just finished my sophmore year and the classes I did the worst in (statistically it was Honors/IB spanish but im just not good at language and I still did quite well) were the classes that were mixed. Only in my situation, its less of a mix more of a me and 2 other kids who care vs an entire class that wants to sleep. In my american history class, I didnt have a single problem and I always recieved 100% or better on the tests, yet the sheer bad "vibe" I was getting ruined a few assignments and with a strict late policy, began to bring my grade to its knees. 2 assignments (little ones...a worksheet from a movie and something else) and one day my grade was an NC, by the end of the semester I was able to bring it up and my semester average was a B+ even with a final that was given as follows:
1: Hand out practice test entitelted "Practice Final Test"
2: Give normal test time
3: Have class take out books and correct and fill in inncorrect/missing answers
4: Send test home and continue process until all answers are correct, must bring next day.
5: Hand out scantron sheets
6: Have students take out practice test
7: Have students CROSS OUT the word Practice
8: Collect filled in scantron sheets

the sad thing is...im pretty sure there are people in that class who failed that test. As I have seen other slashdotters say in responce to previos articles, maybe its not our education system thats lacking, maybe its our students with no motivation , no will to learn that are bringing the system down. Look at our role models...Avril Lavigne is a highschool dropout, 50 cent admits to killing people and selling vast amounts of crack in interviews...so far we have:
Requrements for pop-punk goddess: no degree needed, oh but it does help to win a contest and sing with Shania Twain and be one of the TINY fraction of people that make it that big in the record industry.
Requirements for hardcore rapper: no degree needed, past life of crime that should have you locked up for life is a +, and once again, being in the tinmy fraction of people who make it...yeah...that helps.

The comment that comes to my mind, is one referring to the mindset of south koreans who view an education as a valueable and admirable trait. Oh and wouldnt you know it, the girl who was #1 in my freshman class (not anymore due to the fact that music classes do not give A+'s) was born here but to asian (at least one korean but thats just an example) parents. Young children shouldnt be given 50 cent albums...at least with avril you cant tell she dropped out, you are just told that you shouldnt date people until they are rocking on mtv, then you should change their mind.

As to technology in public schools (I did go to a middle school who's supposed focus was on technology) I really like the way I learned it. In school there was the looming apple IIgs lab with the library of MECC games at every computer. Im not sure if we used those in kindergarden but I think we started for sure by first grade. Those games were educational and fun (graphics sucked but kids werent used to computers at home so it didnt matter). Then at my dads studio he had a 386, it had at some poin a copy of window 3.x but its main use was running "Studio Manager" a dos quickenlike program that excelled at fiscal management in a studio setting. Somewhere in there we got a nice speedy sexy 486, we had a whopping 8mb of ram, a cd drive and a 14.4 modem and it was at HOME, learned some basic compuserve usage. Now back at school, still went to the IIgs's once a week but now I was more curious than before, I really wanted to make that mouse do something, I wanted to see files and structure not just games. At home somwhere in this time I discovered Mosaic...ooh the glory of www.*.com, then at school still the IIgs and now some Performa's in each classroom for the teacher. we started learning to type for real in 4th grade, basically using little red boxes with a tiny lcd with 1 line of text and a keyboard. 5th gr

Time to Pimp...

[MightyTribble]

I work for a company called Co-nect that tries to teach effective use of technology in schools. While our website may suck, our products don't. Honestly. We have something called "Co-nect Tech" (yeah, imaginative naming, I know) that is specifically geared towards teaching teachers how to use tech (whatever tech they have) effectively. You can check it out here:

Co-nect tech product page.

We usually work with 'failing schools' that qualify for some kind of government grant, although the tech product is geared towards any school that can pay us, as it seems poor technology teaching isn't limited to poor schools. ;-p

Simple

[Glonoinha]

// pretty simple actually.

int x;
int y;
int z;

x = 3;
y = 492;
z = x / y;

cout "z = " z;

- : output : -

z = 0

Re:Simple

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Hope they don't change the X and Y to something not Integer divisible... maybe a better idea would be to use

float x;
float y;
float z;

to ensure flexibility in your knowledge base?

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

3/492 does not produce an integer; you should cast z to a float.

Re:Simple

[Glonoinha]

Maybe that was the point of my humor. I can do incredible feats of long division in my head, if you don't mind me declaring the variables as integer.

int x = 5436 / 93458;
cout "the value of x = " x;

the value of x = 0

tablets

[nuggetman]

My school (a 950-student Catholic school) is investing in 50 tablet PCs that will allow 50 of the CP freshmen (College Prep is the low classes, then Honors, then AP) to take part in a test program. They'll be split into two groups of 25, and have all of their core courses (religion, english, algebra, world history, gym/health, biology) together. The teachers will be taught how to have them effectively use the tablet PCs and wireless network connection.

The idea is it's a monkey-in-space experiment. If the stupidest kids in the school can do it, then AP Seniors should have no trouble.

How long til they develop pen-based Quake skills?

Re:tablets

[nuggetman]

Oh... and they don't get them free. They have to spend $2999 on them.

I'm going to bring my wireless laptop and see if I can take advantage of the network.

Re:tablets

[NickDngr]

...core courses (religion...

Religion as a core course... no wonder Catholic school screws kids up so horribly.

Re:tablets

[nuggetman]

Frosh year is essentially sex ed.
Soph year is bible history.
Junior year is Social Justice, which is basically a preparation for Christian Service senior year, where you get to go out and do community service (hospitals, etc) instead of sitting in class. It's rather cool actually.

And senior year there's also a look at world religions and a spirituality in the arts class that discusses movies.

Re:tablets

[Anonymous Coward]

How is Christian Service different from the altruistic behaviors of Muslims, Jews, Buddists, Wiccans, pagans, atheists, agnostics, humanists, etc?

Re:tablets

[nuggetman]

By the fact it's a Catholic school so they're not going to call it Muslim Service. It's good deeds for the community. It's basically a Godless religion class.

Re:tablets

[KillerHamster]

They're lucky. The Catholic schools I went to are still using Apple II's.

Sources

[fm6]

Bad: Not grading them on their sources "Bob's Website of SuperFun Stats says that..."

This is a particularly important point. Some teachers who don't like the web as a research tool point to all the web sites with a conspicuous bias. But fact is that all sources have biases. It's just that the bias is a little less conspicuous in the Enclyclopedia Britannica than it is in, say, the Green Nazi web site.

That's one of the most exciting things about the web. When I was in K-12, it always bothered me to see my classmates accept everything they found in standard reference works as the purest gospel. Nobody recognized that dictionaries and encyclopedias are written by fallible humans, subject to peer and political pressure, cultural bias, and a permanent tendency to oversimplify. When I see kids educating themselves via the discordant voices of the web, I envy them a lot

Re:Sources

[op00to]

When I see kids educating themselves via the discordant voices of the web, I laugh when they quote horribly inaccurate sources.

Re:Sources

[fm6]

Do you then try to explain to them why their sources are bad, or do you just wallow in your comfortable superiority?

Re:LTSP, filtering proxies and mail server upgrade

[fuzzybunny]

For your web filter, you might want to have a look at SquidGuard or Dan's Guardian. I implemented both test-wise at a school, and they liked it.

umm... yeah...

[Fareq]

Well,

see, I have encountered the opposite problem. Professors who say "information gotten off the internet is less good than information in books"

and therefore, my printout of a Supreme Court opinion (from the Supreme Court Website, mind you) got me docked, because this source would have been better gotten from the library reference series that contains these things. Incidentally, since the case was very new (the opinion about 2 weeks old -- from MPAA v 2600, by the way) it was not available in printed form anywhere I could find.

Incidentally, this happened as well with my copy of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which I took from a web resource (PDFs) instead of from a book...

Just because it's printed doesn't meen it's true, just because it's electronic doesn't mean it's bogus.

Re:umm... yeah...

[ashughes]

"I have encountered the opposite problem. Professors who say "information gotten off the internet is less good than information in books" and therefore, my printout of a Supreme Court opinion (from the Supreme Court Website, mind you) got me docked, because this source would have been better gotten from the library reference series that contains these things."

I'm going to give the Prof the benefit of the doubt and venture that the problem wasn't where/how you saw the material, but rather how you cited it.

Professors prefer you to use sources that are repeatable and web URLs and many web published articles change or go away and can't be referenced later.

But items such as acts of Congress and Supreme Court rulings have specific, persistent citations that you could have used with nary a blink from your prof. Just take some time to find out the proper way to do it and you won't lose points in the future.

Re:umm... yeah...

[Fareq]

actually, he secifically told me that is was because the sources were electronic.

See, we had to turn n copies of the "important parts" of our sources. One of my book sources I chose to scan & print because I was at home already, and don't own a copier. Well... he docked me because the printout "looked" electronic.

my current experience

[skeeter17]

in this past year, i had 5 very different experiences for my teachers.

in statistics the teacher was very technology savvy, we use graphing calculators and he has written some very good demonstration programs for them, however, for some of the things that the graphing calculator cannot handle, there is a LCD screen in the room hooked up to a box on the net. This is one of the most useful tools in all of technology savvy teaching. he found some java applets on the net and used them for many class lectures. my school is currently in the process of installing these lcd displays in every classroom, and it allows all the teachers who want to use them to use them.

a slightly less good use of technology was in my chem class. he would give us videos of demonstrations which he could simply have done for us, where he could show us the demonstation significantly quicker better to explain for all of us if he had done the demonstration physically.

A new initiative that my school has undertaken was to create a website that even the most technophobe teachers could write for. i helped to teach the teachers how to use the new system in june, and most of them picked up pretty quickly, but most of them were stuck for things to put up. eventually, it was found that the extent for things to put up would be syllabae, solution sets, and links. not quite as useful as would be anticipated, but useful none the less, perhaps some will find more uses.

Schools can take it too far too

[EdMack]

In my school, there is a race to outfit every room with ceiling mounted LCD projectors... I've yet to see more than about 3 of them used, and over here at least they cost £1,300+++

Many of the teachers have laptops, but all you hear is minesweeper's beep coming from them every few minutes.

Some science teachers get us to do ppt presentations, but that's a 'treat'.

So, no our schools just waste money. The student pcs are about 155 mhz too...

A few stories...

[nifboy]

First of all, the moral of the stories: teach the teachers. If they don't know, the students most certainly will, resulting in chaos.

One of our more "Gifted" students used the netsend part of the command line as an impromptu messaging system and taught others to do the same. Then we found you could use a wildcard to send messages to every computer in the building. Then some genius started swearing over it. It was quickly shut down, but it made several of the staff very angry as their computers started swearing at them.

Teachers in comp labs should make sure all moniters are off before speaking. In my high school, the comp lab was set up so that the teacher's computer at the front could remotely control any of the other computers or moniters. My C++ teacher used it to turn off all the moniters, and had the immediate attention of everyone in the room when he did. My "computerized accounting" teacher didn't, and had to repeat directions over and over because people were fooling around while she was talking.

My world history teacher demands printed resources attached to all research papers. He then checks the resources against the paper to check for obvious signs of plagiarism. Yet he still catches people every time a paper is due. Many people figure the obvious solution is to copy a resource and not turn it in, but the teacher also checks against the resources of students doing the same topic. It still amazes me that people still get caught copying.

Don't use so-called "Distance Learning" unless you know exactly what you're getting into. While learning about the electromagnetic spectrum, we did a so-called "distance learning" whatsis with a couple of people who essentially turned out to be artists. They talked about things like the "color wheel," which had no bearing on what we were doing in class. Additionally, the other time we did "Distance Learning" we were constantly having technical difficulties, giving us sound but no image.

Re:A few stories...

[mrpuffypants]

Some recent solutions to monitors always being on (at least in a lab of Macs) would be:

1) Apple Remote Desktop - In one click a teacher can lock every screen in a lab and put an end to kids fooling around with AIM while he/she's talking to the class

2) The new iMacs. Recently a university I read about installed 100 new iMacs in a lab. When the professor wants to talk to the class he just tells everybody to "turn their monitors" and all the students rotate the displays 90 degrees. It's a clever and simple way to keep college kids from fooling around on the Macs

It's OK Re:LTSP, filtering proxies and mail ser

[WolfWithoutAClause]

A friend of mine's kid uses linux exclusively at home, and when the kids on the schoolbus found out, they backed away from her in shock and informed her that linux "was illegal" and she could be arrested "for being a hacker using that."

No, she should tell them that it's OK. Her parents are licensed Linux users, and the license (GPL!) covers her too.

;-)

One thought

[DamienMcKenna]

While working at a public community college in Florida one thing I noticed was that in some departments the managers and directors had better equipment to type up their letters, email and hot-sync their Palm organizers than the labs did. Nothing quite like making the most use of equipment...

Re:One thought

[MightyTribble]

This was the case at the university I attended - the 'senior team' had new, good kit while the lab equipment was old and breaking down. The directors were on a 18-mo (if that) replacement cycle. The labs were on a 42-mo replacement cycle. Nothing like trying to work on a P166 while the bosses use PIII-650s to play solitaire.

at my high school...

[getoblstr]

the administrators would have the latest and greatest equipment to run Powerpoint or Word on, while the students had old Pentium IIs. They also paid a lot of money (15K$) for a content blocker to make sure we didn't look at porn, but we could turn it off pretty easily. Mega waste of money.

You forgot the part about...

[cr0sh]

...where you were so tired from staying up so late punching cards, plus after carefully walking them across campus in the snow, and down the stairs - on the last step into the basement you stumble - and your cards go everywhere (at which point you either find a card sorter, or you sort by hand - arghh!!!)...

Re:You forgot the part about...

[stanwirth]

Ah, that's why you took that big thick highlighter pen and put a diagonal stripe along the edge of your card deck! So you can sort them more easily in case of this particular mishap!

Re:You forgot the part about...

[k12linux]

My favorite story is of a friend who had two 3-inch tall stacks of cards (about 800 cards I think) sitting on his desk in his dorm room. They were carefully rubber banded because they were not numbered or marked.

His room mate (a jock type) walked in, saw the cards, unbanded them, shuffled them, banded them back up, then left. My friend sat there for about 5 minutes with his mouth open then crashed his head to the table. I almost thought he was going to cry. I didn't stick around to see what happened next. It was just too painful to watch. lol

One Word

[Anonymous Coward]

Powerpoint.

Power Fucking Point.

Powerpoint

[KillerHamster]

One of the most annoying attempts at using computer technology in the classroom that I have seen was in my "Usability Engineering" class last semester. The professor had written a textbook for the course, which we all had a copy of and were supposed to read. She then put together PowerPoint presentations on every chapter, which basically listed all the section headings from the book most of us had read. Then she printed out all the slides and gave them to us. And then she spent most of every class session showing the PowerPoint slides and basically reciting the textbook. I'd love to mod the class -1, Redundant.

The lesson: use technology to teach, but don't use it just to use it.

Remember that teaching is the goal, not technology

[k12linux]

I have a fairly extensive technology background, but basically zero teaching background. This means I can do a great job of proving servers and infrastructure, but not in evaluating how tech should fit into the classroom. As a result I can't really train our teachers on that aspect either.

That is something that needs to be done by someone who knows how to teach. This also means that simply installing new tech and showing the teachers how it works is not enough. Money has to be budgeted to provide real curriculum integration. Money to is needed to provide training, and to get the teachers to attend the training.

Unfortunately from what I've seen during this era of budget cuts, these integration inservices seem to be getting slashed early on. Worse yet, when they are offered, they are after hours and teachers aren't willing to attend... even for a stipend.

We have a very good tech infrastructure in our schools and a lot of tools that our teachers could use. Unfortunately only a handful know what's available, know how to use it, and know how to fit it into their curriculum correctly. The worst ones try to make the computer be a teacher instead of using it as just another tool.

I'd be interested in hearing what other schools have done about these training issues.

I'm in shape... "pear" is a shape, right?

why computers in school....?

[nicknameaaron]

One of the weird things for me is to visit schools in California and the principal, time and time again, walks up and says: "Let me show you my wonderful computer lab." There are rows and rows of Apple Macintoshes, and PCs. My first question is not: How fast are they, or how many are there? My first question is: What did this computer lab used to be? The answer is telling: "Oh, this room? It used to be the music studio, but we don't teach music here anymore." "This computer lab? Oh, this was the art room. We don't teach art." "This multi-media system? This used to be the library, but we got rid of the books and installed computers."

Quote-Clifford Stoll

Graphing Calculators

[millia]

a) yes, people should learn how to do it by hand first. amen. people also should learn their times tables and how to divide longhand. i'm with ya.
however, i think after that point has been reached, there are some legit educational uses for a graphing program or calculator.

b) i came along after all the fancy calculators came out, and didn't use them in college, so i can't speak for anything but their use in K-12. it would not surprise me that they are better suited at a higher level than general software on a palm- but for algebra on up to calc ab, i have seen some decent palm software.
hadn't really thought about illicit note usage, but i betcha there's a way you can lock a palm into using only one program.
note: i thought i was hip with my casio that did integrals and derivatives- and never learned RPN. so i might not be nerdy enough to really comment.

c) i'm flabbergasted that the AP Calc exam requires a grpahing calculator. Why? What on earth for? Granted, i took mine in '85, and maybe there's been a change in what's required or taught, but i sure wouldn't think so.

Re:Graphing Calculators

[Carnivore]

Are you sure that the AP Calc exam _requires_ a graphing calculator? When I took it in 1997, we were allowed to have one, but they wrote all of the questions in such a way that it was useless--you'd have an image of a graph, and they'd ask conceptual questions about it.

Re:Remember that teaching is the goal, not technol

[millia]

Somebody please mod that up. Please. Amen to that.

Only in the last 5 years, say, do we have teachers that can show others how to integrate the technology. And they are only effective if they can be allowed the time to teach without being hamstrung by hardware problem solving.
Near me is Gwinnett county schools. Each elementary has at least one integrator and one techie. Now, the integrators do help with troubleshooting, but for the most part, the two each do their appropriate mission.
Gwinnett is the exception. That's probably between $70k and $100k per year per school. Very few schools or districts can afford that.
Heck, in our area, they can't afford to pay substitutes so that teachers can be out of the classroom for 7 days to take our integration courses. And that's 7 days spread over several months, too. Teaching teachers, after their full day of teaching, is marvelously ineffective.
Using computers correctly in education will cost money. We're fairly lucky in Georgia that at least for the past 6 or so years, we've been able to get some quality instruction done- but with the tight budgets, that gets harder and harder to justify...

Recovering alcoholic drinking?

[FurryFeet]

...[I am a] recovering journalist working on an article

Sound to me like your 12-step plan is flawed...

Worst and Best

[octalgirl]

The worst was a health teacher who just sent the kids willy-nilly into a lab to do research on SEX! Unbelievable! Unsupervised! 10th graders were searching sex, protection, diseases, etc. Nothing but porn was popping up! (this was before filters) We were all just dumbfounded in the tech dept.

Best was a home-ec teacher who asked first the best approach to bring her class in for the first time. We explained about proper research, and that the Internet was just another tool for research, not a replacement for the library and other means. And also, that a teacher should do a few searches that they expect the students to do, so they can see for themselves what type of hits they'll be getting. So she came in with magazines and newspapers, and a paper typed up with good search words to use for the research, 3 links that she deemed worth looking into, and a requirement that one of their sources had to come from the library or one of the magazines she brought in. It was very well put together, and the students responded in good academic fashion, unlike the porn kids where it was utter chaos and embarassment.

Let us actually USE technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated high school two years ago. I do agree with the points that people of my generation do not know how to research out of books. I also believe we do not know how to research at all. Our internet connections at school were so filtered I could not get to any decent websites. I was also a rebel geek and brought a laptop to school. However, I was not allowed to plug it in to any ethernet ports nor printers. I also had a PDA to keep track of homework, but I was not allowed to use it in class. The only real technology we used as a learning tool was PowerPoint, which was force-fed to us anytime we needed to do any sort of presentation. I believe this also killed our ability to speak, since everybody just reads the slides. The technology is there, two computers in every room, AV setup, lab in the library...but we're rarely allowed to use any of it, and when we are, its too restricted and guided to be of any use.

IT money usually a waste

[TheIzzy]

The biggest problem is most schools deploy IT just for the sake of being "technological." At my high school, we have over one hundred computers (which just replaced the old ones from a few years ago), fiber optic lines to every class so that they can access the internet at T1 speeds, and we recently just purchased half a million in video equipment so that we can have "video announcements" one day a week rather than over the intercom. At the same time, the buildings are falling apart and teachers are being laid off by the bucket loads.

In my experience as a student, technology in schools is a pure hype and misdirected money. Most of my teachers do use technology effectively in education, but after a certain point the money is better spent elsewhere.

What you're really supposed to learn in school

[JimmytheGeek]

It has nothing to do with mastering subjects. The real education is a sort of metalesson in conformity and obedience.

We've known for 100's of years that the way to teach science is to do science. The way to teach writing is have students write.

Instead, we warehouse kids. Schools solve the same problem as prisons, which is "how to you contain and control a population". The problem of how to develop thinking skills is a distant second or third.

Internet is a means, not a source

[Anonymous Coward]

I think when teacher say they don't want students using the internet, they really mean they don't want students citing the internet in their reports. The internet is a vast source of mainly unverified information, however it's also a great tool for delivering real info. Here's an example - Little Timmy has to write a report on aardvarks. Being a child of the 90's he opens up his web browser and heads to google and enters "Aardvarks" and sees what turns up. The first page that turns up is "Julie's page of aardvarks and other silly animals" (hosted on Geocities of course). The site consists of pictures of Julie's trip to the city zoo where she makes her own little assesments on aardvarks, which ends up with her concluding that aardvarks are some kind of small, brown, furry elephant. Timmy returns to google and goes to the second website returned, the hompage of Francis Smith (hosted on AOL). Francis is an associate professor of zoology at the state university. Prof Smith has on his personal website a PDF of his latest article which was published in the Journal of the American Zoology Society. Timmy now has two potential sources for his paper, both found on the internet. If he used the former source, he would be using the internet as a source of information. If he used the latter, he be using the internet as a means of accessing information he wouldn't otherwise have access too (The county library just isn't going to have many scientific journals, espically ones that are specific to a certain field). It is the former that teachers are trying to eliminate in the work of their students which is why they say no internet sources. The latter source would be referenced from a peer reviewed journal rather than a website, which would be acceptable even though it was accessed over the internet. There's no way to legitimize referencing Julie's website in your paper, so you don't use it, thus effectively eliminating internet sources from your work.

Middle School Woes

[shapiros]

At my school, we have a laptop program set up where all of the kids in grades 7-8 have laptops and access to the school's wireless LAN. For the first three months, teachers had to repeatedly tell kids to turn off their computers when they came into class, because we might not be using them that day. Basically I have not seen a difference in productivity or new and exciting ways of doing assignments. We use Word and PowerPoint mostly, and get some of our assignments over e-mail, but nothing that couldn't be done on a normal computer, and we dont do those tasks enough to warrant carrying a computer around with us. Our school also has 2 computer labs with 30 Gateway boxes hooked up to our T-1 line. And here's the worst part: I got in trouble for installing redhat 9 on my comp. I guess that's what happens when you go to the same school Bill Gates went to!

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic math has never been my strong point, yet I can do booleans in my head.

I was on the math/science team in high school. They had "mental arithmetic" competition (no working it out on paper allowed), and a "calculator" competition (which I entered). I compared notes with the mental math kids, and we were equally as likely to have mistakes - speed counted in calculator, but too much speed = typos.

Technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's technology in schools now? Why don't I ever get to use it for anything educational? I taught my math teacher how to check her email on her now PC. Later, I got in trouble for unfreezing one of the iBooks in history, which I only did because my history teacher coudn't do it. Then my science teacher (who was sitting at her desk sending an email to the teacher in the next room about their plans for lunch) tells me that my grade will be lowered a letter if I type the paper she had just assigned. "In the real world, you won't even touch a computer. Don't get used to using them now. It's a useless skill!" Thats the extent of technology in my school. All the new technology improvements are new PCs for the teachers who can't even use them.