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.

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>

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).

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?