Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
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
* 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.
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."
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
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.
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
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.)
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>
-30-
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.
-30-
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.
>|<*:=
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde