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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.
First off, I'd love to have a kind of computer 450 of which cost just short of 1M$ -- that would be almost 2K$/computer. Not exactly a budget cut type of purchase, if you ask me :-)
Second, they would not be having the technical problems they do now, had they not gone with that infamous OS from Redmond, plus they would save much on the OS/support costs.
But this is all secondary. The most important fallacy in blaming the computers for dumbing the classrooms is in that the teachers don't have a clue what the computers are for. Where I went to school, the games were prohibited. You had do write you program using pen and paper. Then you had to prove (in D. Knuth's way) to the teacher that it works. Only after that you were allowed to type your code in and try compiling it.
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.
It's like bringing TVs to school. While they can definitely be a source of important information, hardly anyone would fancy buying TVs for the school to close information divide :-) How is the (internet and games enabled) computer different in that regard?
Alex
Only 450 computers? That seems a bit small for an area with thousands of children. Have any studies been done on the long term effects of computer use in a modern society? What kind of benifit do these devices bring to the children to warrant such a use of funds?
Learning to use a computer is just like learning a new language!
Expose the kids to computers, foreign language, poetry, or whatever--the younger the children are when they are first exposed, the better their minds are going to adapt to this type of input/output device.
Should computers be used for everything in education? No, of course not. Either should books, TV, lectures or anything else... the more variety the better.
Teachers can be lazy and use computers... just like they can be lazy and use videos.
...is what happened to the classical forms of education. Young stundents in their mid-teens could do complex mathetmatics in their heads, and knew classical Greek and Latin fluently in some upper-scale schools in the 1800s. Now it's not uncommon for students to graduate without a complete grasp of the English language -- much less math, foreign language, or anything else.
Honestly, I think that technology should be taught, but not used to teach, at least not up until a certain age. The classic forms of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic worked -- and they worked much better than any new fangled and more expensive method we have today.
It's not about the methods, it's not about the standardized tests. It's about the learning. Schools need to be reminded of this.
Instead, all they care about is high scores on the standardized tests. Damn the students beyond that.
dave
--> tech stuff with a cause
If we want public schools to improve, funding should go toward increasing teachers' salaries. After all, if you graduate from college with a degree in chemistry, are you going to teaching science in a rural or inner-city school system for $30,000 a year or go to work for that pharmaceutical company for twice as much?
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
But about how we USE computers in the classroom. teachers need to be educated about what to use them for and when. So often I see computers being misused or not used at all when they could be a valuable learning tool.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
You weren't supposed to remember sitting-at-your-desk lectures. You were supposed to be focused on the material and learning it. Which presumably you were, as you don't remember the sitting-at-desk part of those times.
However, you remember 'dropping balls from buildings,' which is peripheral to the 'lesson' presumably being learned at that time, material which could have been presented in a few minutes of a lecture.
If it a choice between teachers and computers, keep the teachers. Most schools already have computers. Unless they are really old, hold on to them for a little longer or upgrade a lot slower.
When they graduate they would at least have some real computer skills.
I wonder when businesses will realize they are losing productivity through giving everyone internet connectivity and computers. I've worked at many jobs with direct control and monitoring capabilities of computers and noticed a large increase in the usage of online software and email for purely entertainment purposes. Internet access isn't the only culprit as at one job I remember a lady who would play solitaire for hours on end instead of doing her job. Most of the time what happens is in a crunch, the job gets done late and the company hires more people to fill the 'void'. Lack of a decent work ethic is a major problem today.
And now physics is indistinguishable from a Hollywood special effects extravaganza, and carries about as much reality to the student. Hate to be a luddite, but there's no substitute for running your own experiments and demos in situ. Obviously some are going to be out of reach, but multimedia is no subst for the real thing when it's at all possible.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
In my primary education, I was introduced to computers in Kindergarten. Thanks to the wonderful products of MECC such as Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, etc. I was able to enjoy my math, history, and improve my typing skills.
LogoWriter introduced me to programming in third grade. From there, it was integrating BASIC.
I am of the opinion that these types of programs should still be sufficient for today's youth. After all, with crippled (censored) Internet connections, research is out of the question. (Ex: "breast cancer" -- a typical blocked search.) The whole point of the computers in the classroom is to learn valuable, transferable skills (math, programming, etc.) as opposed to "how to use PowerPoint."
The problem right now is the teachers. It's not that they're doing anything wrong specifically - I'm sure they're doing the best they can. But if they don't understand computers well enough (and more importantly how that integrates into the classroom) then computers will be more of a liability than a benefit.
For the most part computers in the classroom are a case of "now go use the computer" with little direction, or teachers having to rack their brains for some sort of lesson that will mean they'll use the computer somewhere in it all.
When the next generation slowly fills the teaching ranks things will change somewhat, because they will see the computer less as a tool that they need to teach children how to use, and more as just yet another part of life. Internet searches replace encyclopaedias, animated computer presentations can supplement stories etc.
That is, the computer will simply become a part of the classrom in the same way that books, and building blocks, and painting materials are now.
Only until that happens will computers in the classroom be worthwhile.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Sorry, but I've seen it. I'm a father of 5 children, and we home-school all of them. So far, to great success.
Within educational circles there's the concept of an abstract. An abstract is a concept that is highly divorced from reality. For example, the word "tree" is an abstract, the tree growing in your front yard is not.
Children don't really begin to understand abstracts until around 10-12 years old. Sure, they can point to a tree, but the reality of abstract doesn't really sink in until that age.
Which explains why algebra is generally very difficult to teach to children less than about that age.
Small children need lots of reality - for that's what abstract concepts are rooted in. Let them play in the sand, let them cut paper, let them stack blocks. Let their imaginations soar, actually work to preserve that dreamlike state that fosters creativity and intelligence!
You can nag about pencil and paper, but there's a real reason why these are preferable to a keyboard - the tactile feedback of writing a letter helps root these into the mind as a practical concept rather than a pure abstract.
Little kids NEED to write big, tall, 2" high letters as their size makes them more real, more practical.
Even as a computer programmer with 5 computers in the house, (mine, wifes, gaming computer, firewall, and laptop) I refuse to make computer training more than a minor part of my younger childrens' education before 12 or so, and I would happily and aggressively campaign against computers in the primary grades as a waste of money and a waste of human resources.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
One of my brothers' schools is giving out devices called AlphaSmarts, which are essentially keyboards with vi on a small LCD screen. The students are made to use these in class, and very little pen and paper work is done. There is also Literacy class-like English, but on computers.
What's the point? In a GCSE exam (upper level qualifications in the UK) he would not be allowed to even take the AlphaSmart into the exam room, let alone use it. And why bother with Literacy on the computers? Use a book. A book is tangible, you can annotate it, read it on the bus. You can't do that on a computer (laptops aside).
My brothers' handwriting is absolutely atrocious, and his spelling isn't too good either. How will a computer help improve his handwriting.
It seems that the main benefits here are not in the education industry, but the computer industry. Microsoft want their software in schools so kids know how to use Windows/Office and that software only. Apple regularly put full page adverts in papers like The Independent, championing the eBook for every class.
Another problem is the GCSE IT course. This course is not a "do a web page/spreadsheet/mail merge/database, then hand it in and see how good it is" affair, it's a "do a web page/spreadsheet/mail merge/database, then write a lengthy 30 page+ document with lots of pointless details about how you did it" affair. WTF!? If you do that, then you aren't marking students on how good they are at using software, you're marking them on their writing skills, and it's not really preparing them for the real world. I mean, how many times have you made a spreadsheet, after sketching it and meticulously planning it (yes, you have to sketch everything on GCSE IT)?
The classroom computers thing needs as a serious sanity check, and the IT courses at schools must be changed NOW, if only to make them relevant to the subject at hand.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
* The people who invented and commercialized that tv didn't have tv in their classrooms.
* The people who put the men on the moon didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* The people who invented the computer didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* The people who cured polio, mumps, rubella, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, etc. didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* The people who split the atom didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* Shakespear, Milton, Dickens, Twain, Dostoyevski, Joyce, Capote, Hemmingway, etc., didn't have computers in their classrooms.
A good teacher can teach without technology. In this day and age, many kids have computers at home, and if they don't, lots of libraries do.
My son got in trouble for enabling the IE bar on the taskbar - he got an inschool suspension over it. Why? Because the people who use the technology to teach with didn't understand that it was a feature of the operating system - not something he hacked. He also had to spend time turning a science report into a web page. I hardly think these are things that a) he couldn't learn at home and b) are necessary to a 7th grader.
A good teacher can teach without materials, books, technology - it is the teacher who does the teaching, not the tools/toys. That school district needs to focus on personnel and not technology that's going to be obsolete in a couple of years.How much does a SysAdmin make? Or even a Help Desk Technician? We should not expect teachers (or librarians, for that matter) to do the work of a SysAdmin and a Help Desk if they are not trained AND paid for this level of work.
Now, this of course raises the more significant question, which is why we pay more to SysAdmins and Help Desk Techs than to Teachers who are educating the future of our country...
I don't think the answer is keeping the technology away, though. I think the answer is instructors that do not allow the technology to become a crutch.
Yeah I agree, aside from me having to convert all
the ppt's to pdf's to read them, I think that
the powerpoints cause a disconnect in the material
and the presentation by the professor. Often it is
hard to figure out what part of the current slide
is being referred to by the professor. And sometimes I think that
the professor loses an edge on the material since they aren't reprocessing it
onto the blackboard or the overhead.
The best presentations I remember were for
calculus this one professor wrote on transparencies on an overhead projector,
one after the other probably
35 sheets, that guy was amazing and my notes were amazing also.
powerpoint type things are for presenting, not
for instructing.
I think it speaks well of the Slashdot community to see that we believe in appropriate use of technology rather than flooding the world with the latest and greatest. To see so many people arguing against the use of computers in elementary school makes me think that we are an intelligent group of people without selfish interests.
However, as the technologically elite, is the use of computers in the classroom something we should start considering and preparing? Do we need to start building applications designed to educate children of all ages? Could a major selling point of Linux and open source software be its ability to teach young students not only how to use a computer but also how to read, write, do math, communicate with people, etc?
I see a tremendous opportunity for Linux here. If some organization developed a curriculum and program that would get young students learning, then we could get children using Linux and starting out with open source. What better community to educate our children than the open community?
His older version of this was required reading for my tech-ed undergrads and grads. It makes sense to hear this opinion, to see how to balance what's going on.
These guns-or-butter argument is secondary to the proper funding of education as a whole.
I'm sorry - but I saw my first Macintosh immediately after completing college and a year of grad school, and seeing the undeniable utility of nothing more than MacWrite/MacDraw was astounding. Computers do indeed beling in schools. To not do so would be denying students the power that everyone else has in dealing with information. The world has changed too much to go back.
I'm going to use the language of apple/mac for two reasons - I know it better, and because apple has been able to deliver secure-able workstations and out-of-the-box tools that get stuff done. Easy productivity tools for students at a wide range of ages. If you want to substitute comparable tools and systems from wintel or OSS, great.
Todd focuses on things like kids learning powerpoint, kids using turnkey learning systems, and teachers being ad hoc tech mavens.
He's right - these are problems, but precisely because they are the wrong approaches, not because computers in the classroom are inherently wrong.
Powerpoint - Unless there's a separate app, the student edition of MS Office is just cheaper. MS Office used by kids borders on mental abuse. No student needs a WP app with 1100 menu items. Our kids use Keynote and swear by it and mastered it in very short time.
Turnkey systems - these are the least proven of anything anyone ever thought of for educational use. Almost to a unit, they do not use proven techniques or leverage sound educational philosophy or psychology, or do it on a superficial or cartoon basis.
Teachers as techies - the focus should be on using computers as a tool to find, assemble, process, and create information and understanding. This is all using retail level stuff that all teachers can get to know easily: browser, wp, ss, paint, photos, movies, presentation...
As for the comparison to construction paper etc. - when we were in school (the 60s) the two slits thru which you were allowed to express yoursleves were book reports and shoebox dioramas. Compare this to what can be done out of the box with Safari, iLife, Keynote and AppleWorks. W much wider spectrum without so much as cracking a manual.
Shut down IMs, email, and other distractions. Make it accessible across the board. Do it right. But keep doing it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Users would not have to accept the GPL, since they're not distributing the software (see clause 5).
But he probably meant free of license costs.
I remember the concepts during the actual experiments (ball dropping, etc) better than I remember the content from sitting at my desk during lectures.
The brain learns better by experiencing different things.
For example, studies have shown that diverse experiences improve the memories of alzheimer's patients. In those studies the lessons learned near the "new" experience were remembered better than routine lessons.
Reading/lectures are vital keys to learning. Experience/experimenting, however, beats it hands down.
material which could have been presented in a few minutes of a lecture.
It could have been, but would it have been learned? It's another fact to digest, but people will still assume heavier objects will fall faster, even though this contradicts the lesson. If you actually experience items falling at the same speed then it is a lot clearer. Practical examples work very well.
The article makes a big deal out of the 80 billion spent on school computing just in the last decade -- it sounds like such an outrageous number. Yet with 47.6 million school children in the U.S. and an average expenditure of $7,500 per pupil, public education spends $357 billion annually. IT spending accounts for only $8 billion annually -- a mere 2.2%.
An IT budget of 2.2% seems very small when you consider the information-intensive nature of education.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Paper and pencil sucks .. ever since that got introduced in schools 3000 years ago ..students have been dumb.
..dont listen properly ..and most students never go back and refer to their notes later on.
.. and fortunately the pen & paper are only a supplement. Somewhat.
Before that, you used to have to be attentive and had to learn by listening, watching, and doing.
The damn paper and pen has replaced all that, and what do we have? Dumber people.
Students take improper notes
The reason we have a somewhat OK educated people is cause the oral tradition remains
I'd say keep them out of the typical classroom unless they can be proven to be helpful.
For one thing, people learned how to read, write and do math long before computers were ever existed. Now, even in districts with all the high dollar video equipment and computers, one can graduate without good language or math skills.
Film projectors and TVs were thought to be the "magic bullet" that would be so educational but really just allow the teacher and student to turn off their brains. Another problem with TV is that a lot of schools got them in exchange for running the advertising to the students.
Sure, kids in their mid teens could do complex arithmetic in their heads in the 1800s. But how many of them could factor a quadratic equation? How many of them could explain the basic makeup of DNA? How many of them would know the makeup of an atom? I knew all this stuff in jr. high.
There is only so much time in the day to teach kids stuff. As time progresses, certain things become deemed more and more elementary and are delegated to automation, hence calculators taking over most of math. But this doesn't mean education is necessarily suffering - it's progressing. People who graduate from HS today have as much (even more in some fields) raw knowledge as someone who had a doctorate in the 18th century. Would you rather them spend more time on basic math and less on science and advanced algebra? Of course not.
If in 20 years, my son knows the fundamentals of string theory in junior high, at the expense of having to use a calculator to be able to do simultanious equations, I'll consider that a *good* thing. Leave the mundane tasks to the machines, leave the ones that require actual thinking to the humans.
If it's possible for you to download the semester's worth of PowerPoint presentations, spend a week going through the material and trying it out on your own, and you learn just as much as the old-fashioned taking-notes-with-pencil-and-paper method, then why should you go to class?!
... not that they should go back to teaching you less because of artificial anti-technology constraints.
School isn't supposed to just be a difficult obstacle course you have to maneuver through. You're supposed to be learning things. What you should be complaining about is that, now that the time-consuming black-board scribbling has been done away with, your professors should be spending this extra time teaching you more
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Is this not yet another band-aid we're trying to apply to our very sick public education system? Give 'em all computers and maybe some of the real problems (such as our distressingly low international rankings in math and reading) will magically disappear. The kinds of skills children need to learn in grammar school aren't very amenable to computers. How to read and retain effectively what's been read, the mysteryious workings of numbers, even the construction of a blobby salt map of the Roman Empire--all these are best left in the hands of a skilled teacher. A computer can't see the perplexed look on the face of a child in the back row.
It seems to me that computers can be added to the curriculum as they are required, and used for their logical and reasonable purposes. When kids start doing "reports" in the middle grades, computers become tools for research. Later on, they can serve many purposes, with those kids who show interest and aptitude learning to write programs, while everybody learns the basic word-processor/spreadsheet/database triad that keeps the office world going.
It seems to me that simply throwing them into an already-troubled system simply robs kids of "face time" with their teachers while lulling the rest of us into thinking all's well in our schools. All's decidedly not well.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
Not panaceas. I remember in chemistry class back in 94-95... we had a bunch of Apple IIe's, simulating chemical reactions. We weren't learning computers to learn computers, we were using them to do experiments that we otherwise wouldn't get to do- it was an interactive program, not just a demo.
Properly harnessed, computers can massively enhance the learning experience. Used just so you can use them, they will at best be a waste of money, at worst interfere with learning.
Don't throw computers at teachers. Make sure there is a lesson plan where the computers actually let the teacher do more than he/she otherwise could. Don't give it an internet connection if it doesn't need one. Dont' put any software on it that does not support the educational mission of that specific computer.
And don't buy brand new computers- except for computer science students(and even they don't really need it) you don't need top of the line, or even mid-range, systems to run useful educational software. Those Apples in chem class, they had been marked for the trash heap when my teacher grabbed them... ten year old+ systems, yet he made use of them to do things safer, cheaper, and more effectively than he could have done so without those computers. Got more out of those things than the 486's the computer lab had.
As with anything else in education, creativity and discipline is the key to effective use of computers.
Leonardo DaVinci didn't have electricity. Yet he was able to do a great deal of scientific work.
Imagine if a man of that intellect and motivation were to have access to the computational resources we have today. He really would change the world.
Either that, or he'd waste his days using his computational device to download pr0n.
wbs.
Huh?
Yeah, me too. And you know what? When it comes to teaching, the TV is a double edged tool. It can be used effectively, but there's also the danger of sitting back and letting the TV do all the work. I had a professor in college (!) who would lecture for 10-15 minutes, and then plug in a documentary. Some of them were pretty good documentaries, but they were still no substitute for a real teacher who can answer questions.
Wrong. We don't need any of them. Education could proceed with nothing more than a teacher and a student, and maybe a stick to draw in the dirt. Televisions and computers and even books are just tools to make teaching and learning easier. Used in moderation, they can be phenomenally useful; but you can't substitute a machine for a teacher, especially at the earlier levels. Personally, I'd be happier if the elementary schools in this country would concentrate on strong reading skills, strong mathematical ability, strong writing skills, and a general grounding in science and history. If computers are part of that process, great! But they should be a supplement, not a staple. There's plenty of time for more computer-centric education during the later years of education (eg ages 12 and up).
What really worries me is that these schools are getting ripped off. A million dollars for 450 computers? That seems awfully steep. Since the article specifies that the cash is divided among multiple schools, I assume that the 1 million is all or mostly spent on hardware and software, rather than salaries for support staff or such. That means they're paying approximately $2,200 per computer, which is absolutely ludicrous. That's the kind of money you spend on a professional workstation. Either these schools are buying systems that are WAAAAAAY over-powered for their needs, or they're getting totally ripped off on software prices.
Heck, I could build those same 450 systems for approximately $320,000 using off-the-shelf commodity hardware and Linux (perhaps Debian Junior, a kid-oriented flavor of Debian). Budget another $120,000 to employ a code monkey for a few years to work on any rough edges in the systems. The rest of the money could go to other school programs in need of funding -- music, art, PE, free lunches for poor kids. It really pisses me off to see our schools spending huge amounts on exorbitantly priced licenses for proprietary software, when those funds could be better spent on other areas.
The people who invented and commercialized that tv didn't have tv in their classrooms.
* The people who put the men on the moon didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* The people who invented the computer didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* The people who cured polio, mumps, rubella, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, etc. didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* The people who split the atom didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* Shakespear, Milton, Dickens, Twain, Dostoyevski, Joyce, Capote, Hemmingway, etc., didn't have computers in their classrooms.
* Pythagoras and Archimedes didn't need mathematics with zero.
I think that when judging the effectiveness of computers in the classroom we too often try to think of the computers as the teachers rather than tools with which to teach. We could write an article about the 10 billion (guess) that gets spent on furniture for classrooms every year and say that it isn't increasing our math scores if we're making kids sit on the floor and write on the wall.
Until teachers embrace the computers as tools to teach with and augment their teaching plans with them then there will always be complaints that we're wasting money on technology for technology's sake. Luddite companies do the same thing when they point to IT as a cost center and fail to utilize their investment to provide return.
Computers in and of themselves cannot fix our education system. But used correctly they are a ways to a means and can certainly improve the way we educate our youth.
The thing about computers is, you can sit down in front of one and pretty much create your own environment. Name any subject, and I can almost guarantee that you're only a google away from a ton of information.
I imagine that there are some schools so fundamentally broken that putting the kids in front of the computer could only give them a better learning environment.
The downside is, most students who are given a choice will create an even less hospitable environment for themselves than the classroom normally provides. Pointless websites, vapid e-mails between peers who care nothing for spelling nor punctuation, and Yahoo games, to name a few examples. Given the choice, most people will gravitate towards the least challenging, most immediately gratifying activity.
Which, in my case, would be Slashdot. I really should be studying for finals. Peace, OUT!
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
That's true, but neither did anybody else. In a public school, a significant percent of the students don't have a computer at home, let alone internet access. Sure, the great minds of 100 years ago didn't have computers, but science and technology has lept forward since then. Now they do. Put a computer in a public classroom, and a kid from the inner city can use the same tools as the great minds of today. That's the difference.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
When was the last time you were in a physics class that used video demos? For me, it was last Wednesday.
In a typical physics classroom, can you
-drop a pair of iron balls of differing weights from ten stories up?
-fire a rifle through a pair of sensors to find the bullet's velocity? (Think again - guns and school don't mix, even when it's a benign demonstration like this. I hate overprotective conservatives. But I digress...)
-do simple collision and action/reaction experiments in zero-G?
You can do all of those and more with video presentations.
Is it less "real" than if we did it ourselves in the classroom? Yes. Is it better than nothing, which is what we'd have otherwise? Yes.
Video in the classroom, as well as computers, is a tool to help teach. It's not a substitute for teaching, and it should be used correctly. Too often administrators are throwing out needless requirements that students will know how to use computers, and teachers are misinterpreting that and misteaching by requiring needless use of PowerPoint, or the internet, or whatever the fad of the week is. But the computer is just a tool, and throwing laptops at fourth-graders isn't going to accomplish anything but burn money that could be used for better things.
Save time now so you can waste it later
Just imagine what the next generation will be capable of! With the advanage of learning with the aid of computers, the next gen. should think up some great things.
The age of the technophobic teacher that laughs over her lack of understanding of technology MUST come to an end, just like it has been for most of the workforce.
It will but it will take another generation. A teacher with 30 years in more than likely will not take to technology at all. This teacher is also safe from any attempt to mandate a minimum level of competency with technology. Seniority counts for a lot in public education. It counts in ways that many people in the corporate workforce have never been exposed to. Corporate workplaces can mandate at least minimum proficiency with productivity apps on pain of termination. This is not true in the public schools. Strong political forces will keep it that way for the forseeable future.
This problem will simply have to solve itself as younger teachers and administrators come into the system. It's happening already. A child going through the elementary system now will have at least one and maybe two teachers who can use technology effectively. The situation is a little better in Middle and High school. The teachers tend to be older and more technophobic but the students have more than one teacher each day. The teachers who are more proficient tend to gravitate to the classes that make heavier use of computers. A student there will get at least two tech clueful teachers a day. (at least in places I've worked.)
As time goes on, teachers will become more tech proficient. Not up to geek levels mind you but they will know enough to use the tech in appropriate ways.
In a typical physics classroom, you can:
Drop a monkye and fire a toy gun at it, and notice the bullet and the monkey fall at the same time (a classic physics demo).
You can roll a toy car down a track with a stopwatch and figure out its velocity.
You can do inelastic and elastic collisions with billard balls and clay, plus the classic tennis ball/beach ball supernova collision/bounce.
Seeing someone else do an experiment on a vid is not nearly as good as deducing the same principles _using a more reasonable experiment_ yourself.
Science isn't passive, it's about trying things.
A.
I took my BS in Comp Sci and used it to become a teacher. Honestly you want to know the biggest fault of the system that I see RIGHT NOW is?
I have people who can't turn a TI calculator off telling me I have to use those same Calculators in my classroom. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the year I had to show kids in Trigonometry how to do long division, square roots, and exponents before I could even begin to touch on sin, cos, and tan.
Yeah technology is wonderful at helping people bridge the concrete with the abstract. But if they have no clue about the basics do you think technology will save them.
Personal observation #2: All you parents and future parents pay attention to this. The kids who succeed are the ones whose parents actually show interest in their kids work. Some things that accomplish this is to make sure they are doing their homework, know what classes they are taking, and actually go to parent conferences.
Final observation: It'll get better as the hierarchy at the schools themselves end up being more computer adept. You wouldn't believe how useful a Smart-Board and other technologies can be in the classroom if the teacher knows how to use them. Same goes with calculators and other technologies. Right now there is a feeding frenzy going on with the idea that every child needs to learn technology out the yin-yang while in high-school. Once people start realizing that most of what we teach them they will pick up on their own if left to their own exploration.
BTW: All you unemployed Computer geeks. You might want to look at your state's Non-Traditional Licensing office and go into teaching. It is a great job. (Except for the pay but hey, I get vacation out the wazoo.)
To a point, computers in the schools are good. But if it means laying off teachers, then computers become a hinderence. In my opinion, a good teacher is worth a hundred CRAYs.
Save Sam and Max!
Math classes (and computer classes) have become about the tool, not the problem. It's like spending a whole year in shop learning about one tablesaw -- it's not an useful skill. Teach a kid how to build something, and that the tablesaw is one bloody tool that you can use. Hell, make 'em use a handsaw for the first couple of projects so that they understand what the hell they're doing.
And I respond: Fuck you. Yes, I know, classic argument technique, but school shouldn't be about fucking productivity. If you rely on the spell checker to tell you when you make a fucking mistake, what the fuck do you do on paper when you don't have that tool? All of your examples are about knowledge, not a tool. Think about this: The computer is useless if you don't have a problem to solve with it.</rant>
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I bet Hitler didn't have a computer in his classroom either. Neither did Stalin or Sadaam Hussein. So by removing computers from the classroom we'll turn children into dictators!!!
Parent is quite uninsightful if you ask me. So is this article. They look at all the problems surrounding the use of computers in the classroom, but instead of looking at how to improve their use they want to simply get rid of them. I don't believe that computers should be the primary emphasis in education, but I do believe they can be beneficial. As a kid writing always frustrated me. When I had to write papers in pen, if I made a little mistake it could mean rewriting an entire page to fix it. Once I got a computer at home I was able to edit my papers and actually focus on the writing, rather than getting fustrated about making a mistake.
If the current software isn't effective, figure out why. Maybe schools are trying to use software to teach the wrong skills, or maybe they need new software developed which teaches the skills better. Stepping backwards by removing computers from schools doesn't solve anything. We need to look at how to push education forwards and, like it or not, computers are going to be a part of that.
Assuming about $500 a computer, and $45,000/teacher/year that works out to only 5 more teaching positions, for just one year. If you assume that you can use the computers for five years before they come useless, we're talking about one teaching position that is being lost in order to buy these computers. For an entire city with millions of people! I agree that computers in schools are kind of useless (and I think teaching kids to use PowerPoint should be made illegal in publicly funded schools...), but this one deal is hardly the end of the world, or even really that big of a deal at all.
When I was in elementary school, we all had apple-IIs and we didn't do much with them other then learn to type. I remember once in middle school, learning to use a database, and a word processor on some more apple IIs, and playing around with some Macs in Industrial Tech class.
In High school we had Macs, and they were mostly used for surfing the web, writing email, and writing papers. I don't think they are a substitute for a teacher, and I think we should rely on them less, but that doesn't mean that we should have no computers in the class room.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Without the calculator theres no way 90^ of us could do calculus.
...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.
Even with a calculator, 90% of us can't do calculus. Hell, I'd be surprised if 90% of Americans can do basic arithmetic with fractions even with the assistance of a graphing calculator, a computer running Mathematica, and a math tutor! Honestly!
Once you give a calculator to a child, then your bound to show them how to use it. That's twice as much work -- learn the math & learn the box. Each calculator has its own menus/features etc. So either every student has a different calculator (which makes it difficult to lecture how to use it) or the class standardizes on one machine (so that the student won't be able to operate the myriad of other calculators). We call that PROGRESS.
Without the word processor half of us could not write a paper with perfect grammar.
Again, even WITH a word processor, a significant number of people can't write a paper with PERFECT grammar. Word processors can check the spelling, and not much more. Do they fix run-on sentences, comma splices, improper selection of words?
What a laugh. Show me where they teach 8th graders multivariable calculus. What planet do you live on?!? Anyone that needs to learn this stuff should be more than capable of learning it with pencil and paper. I hold a M.S. in mathematics, and even the lowly calculator was forbidden in every math class, with the exception of two courses in numerical analysis. Give me a break!
And about the rant below, I apologize for the language, but I stand by the sentiment. You should be able to at least pass for educated without a tool to do it for you. If yoo kant spelll at all without the computer to correct you, I feel sorry for you.
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I think I realized this a while ago. Last year, as a high school freshman, I wrote this and turned it in as a rather insignificant essay for my English class. What I say is just repetition of many of the comments above, but I think its important that people see that some students feel the same way. I do, and have since more than a year before this article was up on Slashdot. I realize now how terribly-written my essay is which makes it even more curious that the comments I recieved from the teacher were not on the quality of my paper, but rather a half-page rant firing back at the viewpoint I tried to express. Her tone was along the lines of "Do you really think we don't need computers in school? What about the poor kids who can't afford them at their homes?"
My point: It all comes back to the excessive use of technology. I couldn't write a decent essay because I was distracted by IMing and trying to create a pleasing piece for my website while my teacher didn't care about my writing enough to actually try and understand my point since she was busy playing Flash games on her 17" LCD panel.
I should also note that it is interesting to me how a group such as Slashdot readers who understand tech on such a deep level are some of the biggest critics of its widespread use in public schools. Maybe we understand it as more than a wonderful cure-all to our learning needs.
My fondest memories of middle school (in Israel, though) were the physics/statistics/Pascal/dBase linked courses. You'd learn about forces and energy in Physics (well, mechanics really); you'd learn about standard deviation in statistics; you'd learn about loops and such in Pascal; and you'd learn about tables with dBase. Then, you'd encode the statistics formulae in Pascal, so that you could analyze the data in your dBase tables which came from the physics experiment you did.
In order to accomplish all that, you needed to actually understand all the material in all these classes, because no one explicitly told you how to combine your skills -- they just told you to do it, or suffer the consequences (bad grades, that is). Thus, it was not enough to merely memorize some formulae, which is what most computer-less students do nowadays.
Similarly, in high school and junior college (this time in the US), I dearly loved my graphing calculator, ye olde TI-85. I wrote some Calculus and Physics (mechanics again, and some EM/optics) programs for it, without which I would have spent most of my lab time on simple arithmetic. When I didn't understand some concept, I didn't have to wait for the test -- I knew it right away, because my program failed to work. And of course, there's no way I could have went through all that English without a word processor -- the white-out expenses alone would have put my family deep into bankruptcy.
So, basically, my education was greatly enhanced by computers, not reduced to mindless data entry or whatever the article seems to claim. In addition, I was fortunate enough to be computer literate, and thus I could move ahead a bit by skipping all the basic computer literacy classes.
Note, however, that my education was better than average not because of computers themselves, but because of teachers who used them effectively. This is a critical point that all these "technology is evil !" articles always manage to miss. A good teacher, armed with a good curriculum, can teach physiscs to his students armed with nothing but an abbacus; a bad one will ruin their education even if he had his own personal Beowulf cluster.
>|<*:=
It is not 'conspiracy ranting' to complain that Microsoft claims tax write offs of full retail price for software donations which cost them nothing more than a few cents for a bulk produced CD.
one might say that their donations have gone a long way to bolster support for computers in the classroom.
Actually, I would only say that their "donations" have bolstered lock in to their platform and increased sales of their other products. This comes at the expense of teacher's and administrator's jobs and the childrens' educations.
IHBT.IHL.HAND.
Learning what Newton did does not require you to be as smart as Newton by any stretch of the imagination.
The greatness of Newton (and all other scientists/mathematicians) is the creative spark that leads to their theories. Once the revolutionary idea has been put into place, usually the ideas themselves are simple.
The mindblowing part of Calculus was that someone had the idea of letting a slope's denominator "approach zero" when the idea of limits wasn't even really defined yet, and then relating this newly discovered derivative to a seemingly unrelated infinite sum when infinity was a relatively touchy topic as well (although it remains almost as misunderstood today by the masses).
Euclid's great contribution wasn't one of the simple proofs (geometric or otherwise) that he laid out in his Elements, that a high schooler can understand and prove today, it was introducing the idea of postulates and rigorous proof.
Non-Euclidean geometry isn't a terribly difficult idea to grasp, but for about 1800 years people were trying to prove Euclid's Fifth until Gauss came along.
Even in DiffEq, which is a mindnumbingly boring class geared towards engineers at my college, a monkey could apply the techniques to solve linear differential equations. However, the person who came up with that beautiful relationship with the eigenvalues of the coefficient matrix (especially in the case of an imaginary eigenvalue) was a true innovator.
"Doing Calculus" is pretty easy. Coming up with Calculus (and, to a lesser extent, rigorously proving the theory behind it), that's harder.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
I agree with you. In my state, Oregon, we have a state mandated testing program. It is in addition to the standardized tests you and I both had.
The requirements of this program are directly tied to funding at both state and federal levels. Basically this system assumes that:
- teachers need to be told what to teach because they won't do it right without help from the state, (I call bullshit.)
and
- the students and their parents need feedback that is easy to digest and quantify.
The result being:
- teachers have little time to really teach things that matter because they have to meet the testing goals early and often;
- students go through school learning a bunch of task based information that does little to foster critical thinking skills;
- the state of Oregon spends a bunch of money on out of state developed testing programs (figure that one out...) to get information that does nobody any real good because:
it takes months, on average, for the results to be returned ruining the feedback loop for the most part. (Students are already onto the next task by the time they get the results from the first one.)
This means:
the best shot for the teachers is to simply teach to the test, or suffer the consequenses,
and
teach to the lowest common denominator because of the funding and job performance issues.
To top this off, the state uses the schools as a lever to prop up its excessive spending in other areas while the teachers hands are tied and their compensation is low.
This whole thing sucks and most folks here do not even know it. Teachers cannot say anything negative about the system. Parents can withhold their kids from testing, but the school is encouraged to fight that because of the funding issue. Many schools do not even know parents have an option. (I read the statutes and printed them for the school along with a letter detailing my reasons. They 'did research' and found it to be true. They fight me on it all the time, even said it was because they get comped on the tests.
The schools cannot really inform the parents because they have a conflict of interest. The State is not going to do it because the program looks good to the powers that be, plus they get dollars for doing it. Teachers are all quiet, unless they know you and can safely speak their mind. Students are simply trying to do what they are being asked to do. All of the positive information you will find on the net regarding the CIM/CAM program is State produced.
Sure there are bad teachers, but where I live, the problems appear to come from higher up. One good thing to note though:
Last year my son asked me about Open Office. He was doing his powerpoint slides on it using the Linux LTSP lab at the school! Cost of software is an issue that is leaving room for multi-OS exposure which can only be a good thing.
The problem I have with the whole mess is this:
Most teachers are behind the times on computing issues. (Other issues as well, but I am not qualified for those.) The education they go through prepares them well for the three R's, but is seriously lacking in computing.
Our state has a ton of out of work computing professionals, many qualified to teach some of this stuff with authority. They can't actually do that because they don't have the education background!
If the state was smart, they would find a way to get folks into the K-12 classrooms for subjects not covered in the basics and give their future taxpayers an education that might actually give them a fighting chance at making some real dollars to tax...
Sorry for ranting, I guess I am trying to say it's not all the teachers fault... --at least here anyway.
Blogging because I can...
Well Hitler has a point here. I've been involved in publishing educational multimedia for about ten years now and anybody who pretends that Macromedia does not completely own the educational development tools field is apparently not aware of the kinds of multimedia teaching materials being used in classrooms today.
It's not that there are no cool open source educational resources, but it's more about a fundamental distinction between the motivatations of open and closed source developers.
For educational multimedia, it's just a basic fact that you want the educators themselves to produce the content. At first glance this sounds like it would make it ripe for open source, but the details compilicate things a bit.
Since you want the content specialists to do their own multimedia development, you want tools that are ultra-easy to use. That means the tools developers have to go way overboard simplifying their toolkits and doing lots of handholding. the handholding part has to be taken to extremes and you need motivation to handle the most moronic repetitive questions with tender loving care. This is not a traditional strength of open source although it is slowly changing. For instance, who would have thought the Linux Documentation Project would have come so far so quickly.
Back in the day, I use to go to the Macromedia corporate news groups and harangue them to produce Linux run-times for Authorware and Director and then when Wine came out I found that these two most common educational Win32 run-times could work under Linux I realized that battle had already been won in a sense.
Now the battleground, as I see it, is getting the classrooms, or more specifically the district network managers, to dump the Windows servers and the anti-Linux network "security" policies to create an nvironment where Linux desktops can replace Windows.
The apps aren't a problem. There's a lot of FUD about how Wine doesn't work. But FUD is precisely what it is and the only way to combat it is to speak up and tell people it's not true. There is no urgent need to replace the existing Macromedia development tools because those run-times use a very restricted version of the Windows API that works fine under Wine.
Someday, there will be genuine open source replacements that allow you to eliminate with Win32 run-times altogether, but there's no need to wait till then.
From 15 years ago in the UK, the only experiments I recall watching on video were anything moderately explosive. Like dropping the higher atomic number alkali metals in water. The videos, of course, starred beard and pipe smoking stereotype scientists. I think, we were allowed to experiment with sodium, the teacher demonstrated potassium and everything higher was on the video.
Like one of the parent posters, we did stuff like shooting the monkey. We also had one aged chemistry teacher who loved doing the experiment where you burn off hydrogen from a pierced can, until you get the right mix of oxygen and it explodes.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
You can do all of those and more with video presentations.
No. You can watch video presentations. Hope you understand the difference.
This article is right on target. I feel very strongly about this issue.
I read only the first para of that sf chronicle article before I decided to comment.
The governments are fucking stupid.
Roughly 4 years back when I was at michigan tech, I found out that a masters student(mech) was from some university of wisconsin college(hard to remember but I think it was Eau Claire). That college, had more computers per student than mtu. Increased productivity at his college. But only because the students using them knew how to harness them properly.
He told me computers in college do make a lot of difference. But in high school, its just eye candy for most. A conduit of porn and games. Nothing more. There might be exceptions but not at the cost of public money.
And in the past 2 years, MTU has had its budget cut by 10 % each year. Many people lobbied to keep the budget as it is, but no. The govt needs to cut down on aid to its most productive seector-college education.
A college education brings atleast 15-20 times more benefit than what the govt invests in it. Dumb fucking govt doesn't understand that.
MTU is losing good students because of this. Enrollment is dropping because tuition for an engineering college costs far more than an arts college. In 2001, the figure at my college PER credit hour- 371 $ engineering, 167 $, arts/humanities.
From 2002, engg majors have to pay 800 $ extra per semester.
The us is killing the goose that lays the eggs.
As lesser engineers graduate, the us loses more of its technical edge. Colleges can't get grants because they can't attract enough bright students.
And what else does the govt do? It sets aside a few million for laptops for school kids.
This, while the budget of productive colleges are being cut. MTU even has a link on the its mainpage. Laptops for college students brings about far more productivity. Guaranteed.
A few months ago, there was a story on slashdot about laptops for 6th graders in a Maine school.
A slashdotter then commented- in grade 6, forget about laptops, if I had my head attached to body at the end of the day, it would be fortunate.
Do you know how sorry the situation of higher education is in Maine?
At grades 6-12, the most important need is to DEVELOP THE BASIC SCIENCES.
When you go to college, how the heck do you expect to develop software if you don't know how the decent working knowledge of maths and physics?
Laptops, desktops are all fucking secondary and shouldn't even figure in.
What's the use of learning power point presentations in 8th grade? The fucking use is when you become a manager in a company, you'll use it to show how much your fucking company saved from outsourcing that work. You'll use it to show how to cut corners, how to cut quality, how fucking intellectually bankrupt you are.
Computers won't save you. Only a rigorous curriculum of maths and sciences will.
No wonder, the US needs to import engineers(not software people). Because there is a genuine shortage. There are more damn lawyers in los angeles county than in entire japan. Yup, you'll be busy making presentations on power point laughing with glee as to how much you'll earn through litigation while bankrupting a us company.
If you rather spend the millions on teachers and books, it brings more value 5-10 years down the line.
Mod it whichever way you want. I made my point.