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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."
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!"
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.
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.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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>
Experiments must be reproducible; they should all fail in the same way.
Huh. That's odd. My notebook cost $1.50, and I bet schools can get them even cheaper in bulk.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
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.
This sig no verb.
I had the honour of being introduced to computing by Francis Glassborow back in '84 who (among other things) was responsible for:-
- 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)The only Good System is a Sound System
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...
stored on computers from birth to the grave
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.
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
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
watch this
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
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.
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.
~skeeter
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.
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?
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
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
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.