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Technology In Primary Education, Boon Or Bane?
code_rage writes "This article in the San Francisco Chronicle attacks the zealous use of computers in grade school. In a time of teacher layoffs, San Francisco schools are buying 450 new computers with federal and state grants. The effects on education go beyond the initial costs: educational methods are suffering, as children are learning PowerPoint and teachers are becoming unpaid SysAdmins and content censors. This article is a well-written and brief update to Cliff Stoll's book High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom." Update: 12/01 00:40 GMT by T : Ooops II-- "Classroom" is now correctly spelled.
At my school we have Pentium 4's - but then people started to play games on them (we use Windows 98 either, so nothing stopping people from installing software).
So they underclocked them so people can't play games any more.
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
Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classsroom
...and why dictionaries do.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
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
Kick ass.
In my high school physics class, we dropped balls from buildings. And we were happy to be out of the classroom.
The "irregular" teaching styles are the ones that I remember. I remember very little of the sitting-at-my-desk-being-lectured-to stuff.
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.
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.
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.
All the professors do is prepare PowerPoint presentations, then put the students to sleep with them.
Then they post them to the class website - why go to class at all?!?
I want a school that bans PowerPoint, I gotta take notes with a pen, profs should have to do the same amount of writing on the blackboard.
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.
the same was said of calculators in early 1970s and 1980s..
rather than focus on the computer we should focus on the fact that is a tool and that its cost is hgiehr than other more appropiate tools at the primary education level..
Both apple and thje wintel monopoly tout computers in shcools when it benefits them but often do not when it just benefits kids..
we should be asking who's hand is in the wallet of our education system budget now and why shoudl we allow them to take moneyout or dictate money choices to us?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I've been working for a school district since before I graduated from high school. Growing up during the 80s meant most of my schools either had C-64s or Apple IIs. One had a locked-down Netware network - read-only drives with WP 5.1 for keyboarding. Only the last one had any sort of network, and that was strictly due to the volunteer work of one dedicated teacher.
Yet, here I am, geeking out regularly, working to support a district technology department. This is in spite of not having much in the way of computers at school. All of it happened due to my experiences out of school, since the classroom was not a place to explore or go outside the strict curriculum.
I see it every day in the applications that are rolled out to the computers in our schools. We're buying these extremely expensive machines, and they're little more than video games or porn outlets. I don't have a problem with porn myself, but do it on your time at home, already. The kids just sit there and leech ISOs all day long, or go play games, or anything but what people had in mind when they voted for the bond proposal so many years ago.
I still believe that schools should be networked and that we should have computers in the classrooms, but we should stop pretending that they are some kind of magic bullet. They do let the teachers work more efficiently. They provide some degree of improvement when a teacher bothers to create a lesson plan which happens to use them. The problem is that most of these classes seem to be turned loose for an hour, and all hell breaks loose.
You can't encourage the kids to explore, since they're all using a brittle OS (you know which one I'm talking about) which breaks if you look at it funny. They add programs that "deep freeze" the machines, but then that conflicts with the antiviral stuff. You have to have the AV software, since the machines are so vulnerable to so many nasty things. If the kids do explore, they get caught and they get in trouble. So they either stop exploring (bad) or they start hating the people who run the schools and networks (also bad).
In the 70s, the trick was open concept schools. All of them have been rebuilt to have walls now. In the 80s, the magic bullet was video. How many schools have headends and satellite dishes that sit idle now? In the 90s, it was the Internet, and we're still playing that card. What's next?
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
2. Spend $1 million on computers
3. ??????
4. Education!
"Are you on some kind of medication?"
"No"
"Well, you should be."
--Bean
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."
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 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
I do this for a PK3-8th grade school on 80 or so machines of P200 vintage.
The administration likes the money saved, the kids like it better than Win 9x and some of the teachers like it. The rest of the teachers either tolerate it or hate it.
As for the teachers that hate it, they're lazy and hate anything that's different. I actually had a science "teacher" object to using an OpenOffice book as she didn't like reading.
While we've got all this great technology, teachers simply don't make good use of it. They prefer to "train" students for the job market (this school goes to 8th grade...) by making them do presentations (OpenOffice Impress) rather than teaching them to WRITE.
I teach 7th grade very basic programming using Logo. Better than teaching them to simply click buttons...
My parents are head of an Elementry Charter School in Mesa, Arizona. We are doing a program where we give an opportunity to the students to join the "Tech Crew" for the school. In this program they learn how to video tape with DV cameras, edit video on Apple OSX G3 powermacs that were donated to the school, setup lighting, and setup Sound equipment. They video tape the student councel and events the school puts on and make video clips that get broadcasted on the school TV's in all the classrooms every few weeks.
I think computers make a great place in the classroom when used with an actual purpose. Sure, teaching typing is useful. But you don't have to spend ALL the money on expensive computers when you could teach typing and letter formating on cheaper computers or even cheaper typewriters.
The school districts give computers to public schools, charter schools have to beg, borrow and bleed to get computers. But the charter schools actually can make better use of computers than public schools because its easier to integrate a new system into the curriculum.
"Using Computers in the classroom" is a far too generic concept. Give the kids similar projects that are to be done with and without computers. Show the good ol' way of doing things and how a computer can help with specific tasks.
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
i really worry about the excessive computerization of society; it's as for whatever problem you have there will be a digital solution of some sort that'll make you trouble-free, and worry-free. And we seem to be further instilling this mindset into kids.
I say this out of experience as i've depended on computing as a thought platform for 4 years till i recently adopted a different approach of going back to basics. If we are to teach kids anything of value, we need to teach them how to think for themselves, and thinking, actually, doesn't require computation at every move.
My life has been much better since i abandoned computation as a cornerstone of my work. Yes it's a useful too, but it's not everything. Kids need to learn how to use their memory, and how to use a pen and a paper. They need to use good ol' trusted methods of simplifying something until they are manageable and memorable, and seeking patterns and strategies that'll ease problem-solving. While computing might be useful, it might also hinder the development of such thinking.
* 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'm a first year teacher at a high school in Irving, TX. All the students in Irving ISD and all the teachers are issued laptop computers (Dell Inspiron or Latitude, depending on how lucky you are). I have tried to do as much as possible with the computers in order to successfully integrate them into the class. The main problem comes from the fact that all students, all the time have wireless access to the web. Even with web filters that have been installed and the limits put in place by their permissions under XP, they almost all find ways around it. Like in the article, we are having budget problems with many teacher lay-offs, as well, but that is due to a myriad of factors (the state's "Robin Hood" funding plan for starters), and the contracts with Dell had been put in place back when IISD actually had a surplus. Ultimately, I think that more tech is a boon, but most teachers will not know how to handle it just yet (give it another generation), and the people admins at the district level are more interested in what sounds good ("We've given all of our kids wireless net access! Hooray!") than what is the reality of the situation("We've given all of our kids ways to download console emulators and pr0n all day at school while they chat with their frineds on IM! Hooray!").
my pet machine
As a part of my job, I have been visiting schools in a pretty large district located in Southeast Los Angeles. I always ask the principal of the school I'm visiting what they need funding for the most, and usually their first answer is "technology". They always offer up so example of how technology is great, and it helps kids, and they mention the "amazing" power point presentations, or the "wonderful" iMovie films they edited. I believe that most of the criticism leveled against technology in schools in the S.F. chronicle article is very well founded.
Using a kids version of Powerpoint does not do much for a room full of schoolchildren.
I always ask the principal about the special things they do to make sure kids learn to read, or pass whatever standardized testing controls their funding. Invariably, they always talk about the positive effects of more one on one face time with kids having trouble in certain subjects - by taking kids out of class for an hour of tutoring in reading or math, or by having them stay afterschool an hour. None of the schools I visit ever have music programs, or dance programs. They can't afford to hire a new teacher, they need bathrooms that work, etc.
For as little computers do for kids in a classroom, their capital costs are incredibly high.
Which isn't to say that someday, or in some capacity, computers will truly serve an invaluable role in the education of our young. Their high costs, in an industry that is always cash strapped (at least in Southern CA) and whose staff and faculty are largely non-technically inclined, make them a poor purchasing choice for schools.
As a sidenote, I find it a little ironic that the S.F. Chronicle article spends a paragraph or two bashing attempts to objectively measure student/school performance - but then later on in the article points to a "100-point" jump in test scores as a sign that a non-computer learning program is doing well. They can't have it both ways. Attempts to objectively measure school performance have flaws, and are thus practically unusable, or they aren't. This sort of writing makes for a poor version of objectivity.
But 99% of them would ever use unix outside of school and that time would be wasted. You might as well have in class on memorizing digits of pi, that would be equally practical.
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."
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating that PCs should be yanked from schools all together. But thinking back to high school (I graduated in '99), I can't remember the majority of my classes ever even attempting to use a PC, and when we did, it was rarely effective. Entire class periods would go to waste because we were supposed to be down at the library doing research, and instead, the teacher was trying to trouble-shoot the printer because it wouldn't print, and the only admin was across town at the other high school fixing their PCs because the entire district shared him due to budget constraints.
But PCs were definitely nice in the library. The school had moved its entire book index onto the PCs, and it was easy to search and find materials, and allowed the school to rip out that massive card catalog and install shelves for hundreds of extra books.
We also had computer literacy courses that were mandated; nothing fancy, but it was a nice introduction to basic word processing and spread sheets.
My school also had a lab where it taught BASIC and C++. I took both classes; the teacher didn't really know what was going on, so it was really more of the play-Quake-over-the-LAN class.
But other than those 3 instances, I'm really pressed to think of a need for PCs to actually be in a classroom. Our math and science teachers wouldn't even let students use those $100 graphing calculators that they demanded we have, much less a full-blown PC. There were a few instances where our English and writing classes would allow us access to PCs to do research for papers, but in many cases, the content filters were so restrictive that many students found it impossible to do any research in school.
The point is: PCs in the school are great, but PCs in the classroom are a complete waste of funds. There's no reason for them to be there because most classes have no use for them, anyways. Schools should funnel some of that extra money they'd save into employing more teachers and making the figures on their paychecks look a bit less sparse.
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.
And your point is? Abraham Lincoln didn't have electricity, running water, or even a dry floor in his classroom. Maybe we should go back to holding class in the middle of a field somewhere. People who achieve great things do not always start out with the absolute best opportunities, but is this a reason to stop trying to provide opportunities to kids?
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.
Richard Stallman recently pubished an article about why schools should use Free Software exclusively:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html
I'm not a fan of computers in schools, well maybe one or two hours per week in a designated computer room is okay, but Stallmans point is important about how we shouldn't teach our kids not to share.
An audio and a video recording that includes most of this essay is also available on the GNU philosophy recordings page.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Throughout the country, computer technology is dumbing down the academic experience, corrupting schools' financial integrity, cheating the poor, fooling people about the job skills youngsters need for the future and furthering the illusions of state and federal education policy.
Yeah, you can say that again. With the typing skills I got in high school, plus the basic computer literacy they gave me, this is the number of jobs I could get: 0. As much as I tried to get a job in data entry or secretarial work, it just wasn't there, and I didn't have the skills to qualify.
Perhaps the sort of jobs that exist for the computer literate are the same kinds of jobs that have always existed before. It's just that now if you want to work in a grocery store or a warehouse, you have to know how to at least use a computer. But getting work that purely deals with computers? Forget it. Welders and mechanics are paid more than sysadmins, especially with how those fields are in demand and aren't flooded with qualified applicants. A lot of people of my generation bought the hype that we were fed in the 80's about 14 year old whiz-kid millionaires, followed by the hype we were fed in the 90's about a critical shortage of computer techs. In the meantime, the wrenchheads that took mechanics in high school and went on that path instead are getting paid twice what I am.
I think I just got 0wn3d.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Homer:"Having kids is great, you can teach them to hate the things you hate, and they practically raise themselves what with the internet and all."
I think that explains why we need computers and not teachers! Any questions? Look it up on that internet thing and get back to me...
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
When I was in grade school, apple gave the schools computers for very low amounts of money. I always assumed that they figured that we would learn how to use apples better... and I, or my family, would therefore buy one.
:)
I seems like a very logical business plan.
Should we be donating a bunch of *nix boxes to our local schools? I know that my learning curve would have been much more enjoyable if I had been introduced to unix in grade school than my senior year in high school.
By then I had little chance of being a jedi ninja hacker...
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.
When I was in grade school, people bitched about using TVs.
Yeah, and people probably bitched about filmstrips and movies as well. But all 3 were used very differently than computers are being used today.
Those TVs were well controlled in most cases and were probably only used for specified educational programming. They added to the educational process not took away.
We need all of these things to teach our kids!
The big problem with computers in the classroom is that they are being used the wrong way. Sit the kiddies down in front of some "educational" software and let the software do all the work.
As for networking the classroom, it's just not needed. Network the hell out of the library or computer rooms though. Teach kids these are tools not toys.
Primary school kids have no need to do "research" on the internet. They've not developed their BS filter yet and will be likely to come back stating something as fact that they read on some crank's website. Wiring a 6th grade classroom for net access in the name of "bringing the world to them" is the equivalent of dropping them off in a strange neighborhood and expecting them find their way home. Sure some rare ones can, but most are going to get lost and possibly harmed along the way.
As an employee of a school system's technology department, I speak on behalf of having computers in the classroom. At the school system I work at, GPAs have only risen since we have introduced computers to the students in classrooms, labs, media centers, and lunchrooms. Students are also more well behaved, and computers provide access to tons of education media. The school system I work also provides a way for students to understand technology. We have different kinds of computers (Dell, IBM, Apple, Sun, and even some Silicon Graphics Machines,) different operating systems (Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, RedHat Linux, Apple OS X, OpenBSD, and various others,) and finally many programs that enhance the teaching environment. Oh, also since I work for the school system as a Network Administrator, it would kinda suck to see if this stopped all of the sudden. I kinda like my job, and I don't want to lose it. My two cents..
"Snatching defeat from the mouth of victory on a daily basis."
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.
My 3 year old daughter is getting good at using a mouse and often plays colouring-in games and sometimes ma-jong, while my 6 month old son is having a lot of fun trying to eat his keyboard.
I haven't (yet) had much success teaching them how to hack or compile their own kernel but I'm working on it ;).
Seriously though, what students can do on these computers needs to be carefully managed.
- Restrict access on the internet to certain sites, white or black listed. ;)
- Lock down the machines and only allow certain applications.
- Run linux
30 years from now everyone will grow up with computers and with people teaching them who also grew up with computers, only then will the computer age really have saturated our society.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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?
The replacement should be to use computers. No we should not ship standard computers running windowsXP and just throw them in a classroom, but I'm in college and our teachers have projectors and smartboards which are internet ready, we have computers which are used properly. We have wi-fi networks. The problem is not that computers are bad, its that most school systems suck and we just toss computers at them when they dont truely know how to use them. Maybe they can learn something from colleges on how to teach hundreds of students in a classroom using computers to assist.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
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
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.
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.
Computers may be overrated in many schools,
but in some of the poorest and worst schools,
I absolutely advocate computer classes.
Here's why.
My best friend teaches basic computer skills
in one of the worst San Francisco high schools.
She regularly has problems with guns, drugs,
gangs, riots, pregancies, attacks, abuse,
lack of funds, bad admins, you name it.
In spite of all this, her kids are learning:
they learn to use the web, email, and Office.
These are the fundamental tools of research,
communication, and business presentation.
Why are these important?
Not because of what they are--
but because of what they inspire.
When these kids see that they can use these,
They are inspired, and see real-world success
as within their reach if they can work hard.
They gain confidence, which these kids *sorely* need.
They gain ways to learn more, even on their own time.
Should these kids learn critical thinking?
Read Shakespeare? Write essays? Of course.
But until they are inspired, all of that's moot--
and computers are inspiring these kids.
Would love to hear feedback about this,
or similar stories from other teachers.
Cheers, Joel (joel@school.net)
Just because Socrates taught under a tree does not mean we should never go beyond that, but then again it would be unreasonable to replace Socrates with a tree and call it education. This is in effect what is happening in SF. Lay off teachers and buy computers.
The fact that this is precisely what happened to Socrates, is an irony that he might appreciate. Not to mention the fact that he was killed by a plant.
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!
I am a 23-year-old high school teacher, and I was raised with a keyboard in hand. As someone with a technical background and not much older than the students, I am certainly comfortable with installing, using, and maintaining computers. However, I have grave doubts about their extensive use in the schools.
One point that has not been adequately made is that this will be a recurring expense. Computers obsolesce quickly, to a degree such that 5-year-old computers will generally not run new software. Not only are computers for each student a significant expense, but the investment must be made again in 5 years!
At North Hollywood High School, where I teach, each classroom was recently equipped with three or four modern PCs. Less than six months later, perhaps 80% of them were nonfunctioning, generally due to abuse by students or teachers. In some cases, kids actually opened up the cases to steal the RAM or hard drives for use at home.
Computers are an excellent research tool and can be a good source of explanatory animations for difficult concepts. However, they cannot teach students to think, which is the primary function of an education. They certainly have applications, but the idea that a regular curriculum should be largely supplanted by a computer-based one is absurd.
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-
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.
Last year, I worked at a private school as a first grade math teacher. Our principle was a technophile though he had very little understanding of computers and their uses. But he wanted computers in the classroom.
Private schools are businesses, and ultimately exist to make a profit, so like so many private schools his target customers were the elite, wealthy families of the area. He instituted a requirement that every child attending should bring a laptop to school. Part of this was marketing, of course: parents were keen on the idea of using computers at school, and so they were excited to be sending their children to a school that required them.
But these children were 6 years old. They came to school, toting their laptop bags, and I was under immense pressure to use these things to help them learn math.
The school had an IT department whose job it was to write flash applications to aid in learning and development. Now, I'm a technically minded guy and I often write myself programs to quiz myself on things I need to learn by rote, and so initially I thought, hey, I can have an influence on the programs these kids use, and thereby make sure that they are learning effectively.
That's not how it ended up happening.
When we did use the computers, I had to spend 90% of the time policing the children, making sure that they were actually using the educational software the school provided them, and not just playing games, watching moves, listening to music, or whatever. We got very little work done. 6 year olds are children; when one of them broke the rules and fired up winamp, it distracted them all.
Within a week I knew this methodology to be a bust. But I was under considerable pressure by my employer to use the computers, and so for several months I toiled with them, trying to "train" the children to use them responsibly in class.
With 6 year olds, even without computers, having a crayon in your desk that you can play with when you're supposed to be doing addition problems is already distracting enough -- we all remember getting our toys confiscated. A computer is just far too much of a distraction. Ultimately, our math marks were so low that parents became concerned. The principle told me: we need math marks up, I don't care how you do it.
So I stopped using the computers, and in a month, using the traditional methods with which I'd been taught, the children were competent at mental math, and were moving ahead quickly. And surprisingly, Math class was no longer "boring." Because they were actually using their brains, finally.
Once they were back on track, I started getting pressure to use the computers again. I told them that the reason their skills had been so bad was because of the computers and the distraction that they caused. I couldn't get anyone to listen.
So I quit at the end of the academic year.
Computers in classrooms? Ha.
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.
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.
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.
>|<*:=
As a former English teacher, what is needed most is development of reading skills. And many websites require a lot of reading, or at least more than TV watching, and sometimes more than using a textbook.
When I taught, the computers were kept in a separate classroom and only accessed once a week. It certainly held their attention, and the appropriate webpage can test their reading skills.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
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.
I haven't taken a math class in 15 years (nor used it on a regular basis), but I remember many of the constants that I used up through my 500 level courses. That, despite being too lazy to memorize my multiplication table until the 6th grade. Until that time, I could traverse an imaginary table in my head faster than the information was needed. Sometimes, though, memorization is useful, and mine freed me up to do more important things with my brain, jumping three grade levels of math in a single year.
The bottom line is that you need to know how to spell, whether there is a dictionary or computer nearby or not. You need to understand basic sentence structure without a grammar checker or syle book next to you, and you need to understand how to arrive at the non-numerical answer for a math problem without the use of a computer or calculator.
In fact, computers and calculators were allowed in every advanced math class I took simply because they couldn't help you. The profs were certain of that. Then again, that was 15+ years age, so...
To sum up: memorization is useful, though not a substitute for comprehension. We need them both, and to go to one extreme or the other makes for an individual who either:
- Can't think on his/her own; or
- Is helpless without tools to assist him/her.
Neither of these is desirable.As a side note, the great chefs that I have worked with can use whatever technology is available to them, but are not dependent on it. Making a hollandaise with a blender or by hand is a choice they make on a situation-by-situation basis.
Put identity in the browser.
When I got to junior high, I found there were lots of kids with computers, instead of just a handful of kids with forward-looking parents. (The country club area fed into the junior high.) Our 8th grade computer course was all about Logo for the Commodore 64. Because I only had a Vic 20 at home, I was suddenly in the same place as all the other kids who didn't have computers. I did know programming, so I managed an above-average mark of a B. But the kids with computers at home got A's, because they were able to spend extended hours working on their projects. As the years went by, these kids made great gains, as their affluence allowed them to move up to Amigas and PCs. Seeing that it was going to be a nighmare to get enough computer time for other courses, I bailed and took drama. I needed good grades to get into university, and these "rich kids" were wrecking the curve in the comp sci classes!
When I look at the kids from my inner city school and subsequent schools, it was generally the kids with computers at home who went into engineering and computer science. I don't think any of my other classmates went near the sciences.
Of course, the upper and middle-classes have more than just computers on their side. They have money for tutoring, weekend trips to science centres, parents who went to university, etc. Computers are just the start of this imbalance. If I were a school administrator, I'd put my money into making sure inner city kids have a mastery of the 3 R's as well as exposure to the arts and sciences. Computers are just a symbol, not a panacea.
-- SYS 64738 --
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.
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.
If you have the time and inclination you should try and get a copy of Richard Feynmans Surely you are joking book. There is a section where he talks about the folly of rote learning like this, and how the physics student in Brazil has a lot of mental "information" available but understand almost no physics.
Help fight continental drift.
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.
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.
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.
Without the calculator theres no way 90^ of us could do calculus.
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!
How does a calculator help with calculus at all really?? Seriously... I just finished my BMath, and in 4 university calculus courses... I don't think I touched a calculator once. We weren't even allowed to bring a $1 non-scientific to exams.
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
...at an elementary for quite a few years. While I still don't understand how this was possible, "computer class" mostly consisted of one class at a time coming into the lab to play educational games.
When the school bought new imacs to replace some of their older macs, instead of going into the lab the machines were claimed by some of the teachers for their classrooms, where they would collect dust.
At one point one of the teachers asked my mother for some help with her computer, as it wouldn't turn on. My mother went in, and traced the cable for the power strip that was wrapped crazily around the table leg and, in the end, plugged back into itself.
Even with all this computer spending, there is no reason to believe the students are even using the resources. If the teachers can't use the computers, why assume they can use them as teaching tools? While I can't imagine why you'd need a computer in the classroom (and I had a computer in every classroom since 2nd grade), it seems doubly ridiculous when the teachers can't use them anyway.
> Better teachers and smaller classes will do a better job in my view.
Can't argue "better teachers," that's a given, but I don't think that smaller classes are necessarily better. I don't see any valid reason that it would be, except the mystical student-teacher ratio, which I don't really believe makes that much difference anyway.
The argument goes, as I see it, that with fewer students, they get less one-on-one time with the teacher. Since kids always have to rush off to their next class, though, they don't have time to talk to the teacher 1-to-1 after. In addition, in a class of 5 (that would be a terrible idea, BTW), if one of them was confused, I would think he'd be LESS likely to speak out, as he would feel like the "dumb one" of five, instead of one of the "dumber" ones out of a hundred. Plus, with 100 people pondering the same data, it's more likely that someone shares your confusion and may speak up and ask (assuming you don't like speaking up in class, like me).
Also, if classes are taught in large groups, the student is more likely to find some people he relates to, and can study with. With the core classes (history, basic science, etc) taught in large groups, they can be covered easier and there are more periods available to teach more specialized classes instead of teaching the same class 10 times in a day, which is wasting time unnecessarily.
With 100 students giving back reviews on one specific teacher & course & period, the administrators can get a better feel for how the teacher is doing: %50 of 6 people isn't a very accurate statistic, but if %50 of 100 students have a problem, you can guess it's the teacher's fault and action needs to be taken.
"Show me where they teach 8th graders multivariable calculus."
I had the fortunate experience of growing up in an area with a really good public education system. It was a small university town in the midwest that had well qualified teachers (some of whom had their PHDs) and one of our local policies was to allow students to advance at their own pace. It even went so far as to pay for classes at the University if no equivalent was offered at the high school. Now, it could be argued that some of these students advanced at their parents' pace, but I know at least 3 people in my graduating class that learned multi-variable calculus in 9th grade.
Just my 2 cents...