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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.
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?
"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.