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

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

[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.

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.

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>

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.