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: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

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.