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Technology In Primary Education, Boon Or Bane?
code_rage writes "This article in the San Francisco Chronicle attacks the zealous use of computers in grade school. In a time of teacher layoffs, San Francisco schools are buying 450 new computers with federal and state grants. The effects on education go beyond the initial costs: educational methods are suffering, as children are learning PowerPoint and teachers are becoming unpaid SysAdmins and content censors. This article is a well-written and brief update to Cliff Stoll's book High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom." Update: 12/01 00:40 GMT by T : Ooops II-- "Classroom" is now correctly spelled.
At my school we have Pentium 4's - but then people started to play games on them (we use Windows 98 either, so nothing stopping people from installing software).
So they underclocked them so people can't play games any more.
Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classsroom
...and why dictionaries do.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
2. Spend $1 million on computers
3. ??????
4. Education!
"Are you on some kind of medication?"
"No"
"Well, you should be."
--Bean
Homer:"Having kids is great, you can teach them to hate the things you hate, and they practically raise themselves what with the internet and all."
I think that explains why we need computers and not teachers! Any questions? Look it up on that internet thing and get back to me...
Or... he would really post a lot to Slashdot and get laid off from his IT job.
Think of it this way. Sir Isaac Newton was a genius. One of the smartest men in the world and now we expect gradeschool students to learn the same maths this super genius was messing around with. DO you really think every kid, every teen, every adult is capable of being as smart as Newton, Einstien, and all these fellows? Hell no. And its not important for us to be a math genius to learn to use the math which these math geniuses may have invented. Without the calculator theres no way 90^ of us could do calculus. Without the word processor half of us could not write a paper with perfect grammar. Do we want to go back to the 1800s? Or move foward? I think some people want us to continue to teach the same way we did 100 years ago even when the material we are teaching is 100 years ahead. Thats just impossible, some things are impossible to teach the average class without the help of computers and as classes have hundreds of students it will be impossible to teach something like multivariable calculus to a bunch of 8th graders. Guess what though? Thats what we have to do if we are to keep up with Japan and China.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
PS - I believe the proper, politically correct term for "Windows" administrator is maintanance staff. In a less enlightened age, it used to be janitor.
...at an elementary for quite a few years. While I still don't understand how this was possible, "computer class" mostly consisted of one class at a time coming into the lab to play educational games.
When the school bought new imacs to replace some of their older macs, instead of going into the lab the machines were claimed by some of the teachers for their classrooms, where they would collect dust.
At one point one of the teachers asked my mother for some help with her computer, as it wouldn't turn on. My mother went in, and traced the cable for the power strip that was wrapped crazily around the table leg and, in the end, plugged back into itself.
Even with all this computer spending, there is no reason to believe the students are even using the resources. If the teachers can't use the computers, why assume they can use them as teaching tools? While I can't imagine why you'd need a computer in the classroom (and I had a computer in every classroom since 2nd grade), it seems doubly ridiculous when the teachers can't use them anyway.