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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.
So I wonder when people were crying that books shouldn't be in classrooms.
When I was in grade school, people bitched about using TVs.
We need all of these things to teach our kids!
computers can be an extrodinary tool for the teacher. We've come a long way since our 'computer class' in grade school was 45 minutes of Oregon Trail on those new fangled Apple IIs.
What they should not be is a means of replacing teachers. You don't install a math and english tutor programs, stuff 60 kids into a class room then let them fill in what they don't understand on a computer.
Orwell (although obviously living in the 20th century) had one of those "classical educations" you refer to. It doesn't sound very appealing at all -- mindless memorization and physical abuse were what it mostly consisted of. You can read Orwell's famous essay Here
This is a small anecdote based solely on my experience and not at all on reading the article...
Over the Thanksgiving weekend I stayed with relatives in Minnesota. My aunt is (essentially) a teacher's assistant for a rural school district.
Her (Kindergarten!) students would spend 2 hours of their half-days of school multiple times a week using computers. As she described the system, the computers worked quite well. The official pace of the class was set by the teacher. Students could practice letter identification, counting, money arithmatic, basic reading, etc. Students who were ahead of the class could keep busy. Students who were at or below level could be easily identified and the specific skills they were lacking would be exercised by the software.
I have no idea of what platform, software, initiative, etc. were at work here, but in the eyes of one Kindergarten teacher, this system was a good thing.
I was surprised. My instinct is that computers in the classroom are hard to get right--especially at such an early age.
-- Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
The high school I go to was designed to the high tech school of the school district. 80% percent of the computers in the school are the original machines given to us by Intel coroporation back in 1997. They are Pentium 133-mhz machines with 64 MB of RAM running Windows NT 4. Because of this, teachers have intergrated their use into their teaching. Its great and for a long time these machines kept up fine as well as the network. But once the district IT department wanted to move my school on to my giant Active Directory domain (we were on our own and had a private internet connection as well) and the school district cloud, thats when all hell broke loose. They forced the school IT people to put virus scanners on these old 133-Mhz machines, which slowed them down a hell of a lot. They also took away the school's computer purchasing power so they can get what each department needs. Now, any computer has to be a Dell OptiPlex. That hurts me where I work in the school's television station because for the same price as these Dells, an Apple eMac would do a better job. So my word of advice is, don't create a central IT department in a school district. It becomes a bureaucratic layer of crap that doesn't do anything.
I was listening to a former VP about Dell's health care. They axed most of the health care provided to the workers, but the executives still get all the perks. How is an ordinary worker suppose to live without health care?
How, precisely, is learning computer skills like learning a language?
Frankly, it isn't. Language is one of those fundamental skills that your brain is hardwired to pick up during the initial boot (0-5 years). Basic motor skills might be comparable, but computer skills are not. If you deny a child exposure to language for the first ten years of life, it is physiologically impossible for them to ever become as proficient as someone who was exposed to it.
Computer skills, however, are a whole 'nuther ball of wax. The specifics of any given computer task will be obsolete within a decade, and most end user software goes well out of its way to keep the user from having to deal with the system internals. Exhibit A: Every secretary who manages to work productively on a computer, even while thinking of it as a magic box.
Nobody is suggesting eliminating computers from the classroom entirely. All we're asking is for a sense of perspective about what computers are capable of, what students really need to know about computers, and how the rush to pump taxpayer dollars into sophisticated computer systems is harming other aspects of education.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
"As for the web, IM, chatrooms, etc, one has to be blind not to recognize this as entertaintment which is not the purpose of the school. I would not have internet connections from classroom computers. Local network is fine, but one would have to prove than (s)he really needs Internet access for that project before the access is granted."
You would have killed my grade. Our school library is too small to carry that much on any specific topic unless it is one that is explicitly studied in several courses. The internet is an astounding tool.
For instance, senior year I had a semester class entirely devoted to researching, writing, and presenting one research topic. The grade was based on a topic proposal, early bibliography, outline, rough draft, final copy, and presentation. My report (~35 pages of stuff I personally wrote, plus several pages of supporting photographs and a three page memo as appendices) was on the Challenger disaster. The school library system had exactly one book on this, and it was a secondary source and somewhat small. Many of my sources I got off the internet. (As distinct from "internet sources.") I searched NARA, NASA's photo galleries, etc. My main source was the Rogers Report, which is on NASA's website. In short, without the internet I would have been dead in the water. Once we actually got started researching, virtually all our classes were free periods spent in the library. Not having the Internet would have meant I would not have been able to use this time for what it was meant for.
I'm not saying that Internet access can't be misused or isn't misused. But IMO it's a far too valuable source to just cut off because some people choose to do so.
That said -- it may not be so unreasonable for the school(s) in question to spend the millions on the computers, even as teachers were being laid off. Should a school turn down free technology money? Understanding HOW schools are forced to spend their money and WHY is essential to understanding this (rather common) situation.
So, perhaps we need to bug the state and federal governments to redirect THEIR funding priorities. When we blame "the schools" for situations like this, let's understand who we're really blaming, and let's change the systems that really need to be changed.
Um.
You know that people have been learning all those things just fine without calculators or word processors up until 10-20 years ago, right? ever hear of a slide rule? typewriter?
Hmm. I feel a "kids today!" comment coming on, so I'd better quit.
BTW, it depends on the teacher; I learned more from my High school physics teacher than from 3 years at college level, because the guy was A) gifted B)insane.
Every day was a new violation of some policy or law.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
We need technology in classrooms, we know it is not a magic bullet, and we also know it is often poorly implemented. How is that much different than the rest of the aspects of schools? They do the best they can, and they often do a great job with the many challenges they face and the honestly bare-bones limitations they have.
I've mentioned this before, but Larry Cuban's book, "Oversold and Underused" is a discussion of computers in the classroom (and you can guess the slant. He's an education professor at Stanford, and the book is wonderful (as is his more general book "Teaching Machines" that looks at how the promises of filmstrips, TV, etc. never deliver in terms of shaping schools).
In my own experience, the deployment of technology is a large hurdle, and teacher understanding is also a problem. My school had iMacs, but they had some governing program so that only they could modify the machines, making it impossible to fix any problems, even small ones. The program also made the macs behave differently, very un-mac (this was OS 9). I had to lobby to get a machine "off the grid." (I was a music teacher and needed to really be able to add and subtract programs).
In terms of the cost, it really is small overall. Salary costs are over 80% of school budgets, and tech funds often come from and live in another part of the budget, so cutting the computer purchase doesn't free up more money for x by default. Hopefully, schools won't knee-jerk upgrade, as many of these machines can last 10 years or more (I had a teacher with a classroom of Mac Classic machines which the students used solely for word processing and editing of their stories).
Schools don't allow the use of calculators in any of the classes till 12th grade. And definitely not in the exams. You sneak one in and you are barred from appearing in the exam.
Yes, I am the Technician that services Aptos Middle School mentioned in the article. This school uses Accelerated Reader (AR), and the students are inspired to read because of it. They read a book, take the test, and they are motivated by getting good scores on AR. Every day thier library is packed with students ckeching out books and taking AR tests. I imagine this has helped kids to become excited about reading and discover the bounty of knowledge and mind-stimulation that comes from reading. So AR is a good program, IMO. They call me immediately if it ever goes down so it's a highly desired program. We bought a nice server to improve the reliability of AR, among other network programs in use. Aptos Middle School has a starving tech budget, noted by the computer lab with original Pentiums at 75Mhz, 100Mhz, and 133Mhz. 16Megs of ram, 2 gig hard disk. They get used every day and the computer teacher teaches them good stuff. Good teacher. Many of the students have some type of computer at home I believe. It's a more affulent area. All of the teachers have laptops to do electronic grading and attendance, and also to become more computer literate. I also service other schools in my district that have varied levels of teacher ability and varied levels of computer spending. Many of our schools have a good tech program but I don't see major correlation between tech spending and test scores. So what I'm getting at here is this: Tech spending is not a panacea. Computers are not a babysitter. Learning happens from the teacher and with parent involvement at home. Students need to learn Internet research skills along with traditional research skills. Schools do need to spend money on computers but if teachers are getting cut then it is not worth it. Teachers need to be tech savvy and to be able to teach basic computer concepts, and specialized computer concepts in the upper grades. Yes training in standard office applications does help for vocational training. It also helps those that move on to college as well.