Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Technology in Schools
citking writes "The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is running parts one and two of a three-part series dealing with the future of technology in America's schools. Part one asks whether technology in schools is merely a fad or, as some may argue, a necessity in today's technology-driven society. It raises some interesting points, such as the contrasting the wide availability of computers in schools to the generally limited use among students. Part two goes in-depth about the technology's cost, citing the dependence of grants that are disappearing and the effects of reducing technology staff. For part three you will have to tune in the the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tomorrow."
The job of schools is to teach, or to provide a starting point in this world.
As I don't see technology becoming any less a part of this world, I'd argue that it's entirely relevent to use it in schools. People need to be brought up around technology to be able to readily accept it and take it for grante, otherwise the lurning curve is that much steeper. Just as long as it only remains a part of schools, rather than becoming the schools themselves.
Just another harmless drunk
Technology in classrooms is necessary. Not only is our world increasingly dependent on technology to do menial tasks, but the workforce of the future will be expected to be fluent with these technologies and it's better to get children accustomed to them as soon as possible. And let's not forget the obvious advantage of having advanced interactive content in the classroom.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Hopefully, the fad is computers being used poorly in the classroom. Heck, Powerpoint alone tends to reduce my engagement in a class by 90%. Computers used in courses where they're relevant is great, and I've had some excellent ones to that effect. It's when people decide that a class on English Literature or Music History could benefit from the wonders of computers, without even having a "wow this is better!" reason to begin with, that things go sour.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
My wife is an elementary education major who is getting an endorsement in technology, and so is, naturally, very much a believer in education in the classroom. I agree, but that is kind of beside the point I wanted to make.
I honestly believe that if the Open Source community wants to go mainstream it must gain acceptance in schools. Because I learned first on Windows/MS software, I still do, and probably will alway feel more comfortable there. I love the ideals of Linux and the Open Source community in general, and I am learning more and more to feel the same way about Linux itself. It really has come a long way since the first time I tried it 5 odd years ago.
My point is, that people will continue to feel most comfortable with that to which they are first exposed. If I had grown up with Linux (I am too old - I kind of grew up with the TRS-80 and IBM Clones running DOS, but never really spent much time with computers until Windows 3.11), I wouldn't have the reservations (at least most of them) that I do about it.
Again, If you really want to raise the awareness of users, people like me are not the best way to go. Schools are the best hope for the future of Open Source.
For most students much of learning is a rote exercise. Exams are a regurgatation process, from some the product is as appealing as barf, from others it's a well served up platter where memory is complemented by order, and they can ask, fries with that? There are limitations to the amount of data students who learn by rote can process and having to learn Information Technology as a secondary form of literacy increases the burden.
There is no magic cure for education and the ever increasing demands burgeoning amounts of information makes on students. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic just doesn't cut it anymore.
The stone cold fact is fewer people have the faculties able to assimilate huge amounts of information, recognize patterns in that information and acquire the tools to operate positively on that information.
The best and the brightest are no longer culled from America only, or the west, the best and the brightest are cheery picked from the wide world, because the demands have pushed the requirements to a world set.
Along with ability there must also be the drive to endlessly read and update one's knowledge base.
Strong arguments now suggest our relatively larger brains came about from our more complex social structures, and, for many, maintaining social structures take first place over being a geek. Some people would rather get laid and revel in their place in the tribe. Go figure.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Not to say there is any replacement for a classroom (or good ol' old fashioned repetition) but, as an example, many concepts and theories in math and science can be more effectively demonstrated visually and interactively than they ever could from a static textbook. These topics lend themselves very well to simulation and demonstration. And once a student understands the basics that build into principles, then we can get them to use it in the class. And so on.
A math teacher friend of mine routinely observes that his kids are learning in different ways than how we did. The textbook is falling prey to a massive culture of distraction. IM, web, games, television, cellphones... the ubiquitous pull becomes even worse when the last thing a student wants to do is read a boring math text. I'm less inclined to simply blame the student - is it really their fault? Why not have those technologies reach out to them in the same way? Should we risk denying the reality of the world we actually live in (versus how we think it should be)? In other words, adapt to new learning styles. Make learning the game that they play for 4 hours a night (instead of reading math).
So thats exactly what my math teacher friend has started doing.
Its in its infancy, but longer term he will be using it for learning augmentation across the board. Its pretty interesting stuff, and possibly helpful for any other Math and science teachers here on /.
Right now i see the whole discourse on schools and technology centre on how much it costs to put computers into classrooms. And how to "teach technology" to our kids. Why? I think we should bury the technology and stop oohing and ahhing over it - and just start actually using it for what its meant for.
To replace textbooks in a cost effective manner would require:
1) Rugged, reliable, long-life hardware that is too boring to steal
2) eTextBooks to be a lot cheaper than the printed version
Say a textbook lasts 10 years in a school (by school, I'm talking about the UK definition of schools, not university where you buy your own or use the library) - 100 copies of $textbook will cost say £2000. 100 advanced eBook readers would currently cost £20000 and be a lot less convenient in many ways than the text book. Of course, multiply that by 10 courses (assuming the average GCSE student does 10 GCSEs these days) and you get a textbook cost of £20000, or £200/student, or £20/student-year. Aforementioned eBook hardware, assuming 10 year lifespan, would also be £20/student-year. Of course, these eTextBooks would probably be licensed on a per-year basis, say £5 a year. £50 for 10 years, but you will get updates for errata integrated easily. 100 licenses would be £50000 for the 10 years, maybe less with a bulk discount. That's £50/student-year in addition to the £20 for the hardware.
I'm just cynical, but there is a reason these things are being pushed, and it isn't concern about the weight of textbooks in a schoolbag. It is to raise revenue for textbook firms.
However, I don't think much beats using pen and paper for making notes in class. Quieter than a room full of people typing, and I think it gets the point into your head a lot quicker.
It's apparent that computers in education are now used for keyboarding and application training. When computers were new in 1980's, Programming in logo and basic was commom. With the level of complexity and overhead with the new applications languages, programming has been relegated to HS and UNI courses. I appears the asshats that advocate crap like c++, java and c# are using the same wizard obfusication to block out any new developers and create job protection.
We need to get education back to ideas like Squeak and logo and C. The new "languages" are nothing but glue to connect libraries and teach NOTHING.
...they're great. But when I was in high school, we rarely used them for something good. Mostly we used them to search for information on the Web. Yes, it was useful, but we could as easily have used the school library.
I think schools should focus more of the computer education on the actual *use* of a computer. Teach the students *general principles* of GUI:s, try and teach them how the Internet works, what the difference between an image file and a text file is, etc. - even if it's very brief and in dumbed-down terms.
The computer education I recieved was more akin to "Click in these places in this order to do X", not "You want to write a report? Which program do you think is best suited for that - a word processor or a spreadsheet app?", which I think would have been a lot better, creating an understanding and a creative framework to build on when faced with challenges without clear-cut solutions.
A simple change like Firefox's yellow adress bar when visiting a secure (https) site rendered a friend of mine completely unable to keep browsing, because she had no idea what to do - she had only been "trained" to use white adress bars. She stared at the screen for a good ten minutes, completely unable to figure out what to do. Terrific. Over a frickin' yellow adress bar.
Once I got into uni, computers started to be actually useful in ways you can't replace with something else. Mathematical simulations, programming, you name it - but that's really not suited for younger children.
I think computers are touted as magical "solves everything"-tools, when in reality, they're not. They solve specific problems very well, but you can't use them everywhere.
From http://www.answers.com/technology&r=67
1a. The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives.
1b. The scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective.
2. Electronic or digital products and systems considered as a group: a store specializing in office technology.
3. Anthropology. The body of knowledge available to a society that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting or collecting materials.
To me, technology, like any other -ology, is the knowledge of something, especially using the scientific method. Everybody knows themselves and somebody else and animals, but they are not psychologists. Everybody knows a group of people, but they are not a sociologist. Most everybody has seen a calculator or a computer, but that does not make them a technologist either. Give a computer or a calculator to someone that does not know how to add, and they will not know how to add with the calculator either.
My point being is that there are a number of prerequisites besides hardware for technology to be applied in education. I get annoyed at the concept that technology is something that spontaneously does stuff for people. It doesn't.
Americans are already behind the most of the world in basic education like math, science, and history. I believe that all aspects of education should be reexamined. The feel good, "I'm confident in my ignorance", attitude simply cannot last much longer, unless we start outsourcing that too.
One computer for every three students? How did they ever think that many computers would help with the children's education?
Ridiculous quote:
Jena Haggith, one of Hansen's students last school year, said she preferred his use of technology for lessons over textbooks. "When I read from a textbook, I get so bored, so I don't know what they're saying,"
But how much time in lessons is spent reading the textbook? 5%, perhaps 10%. Hardly a justification for spending so much money. Also, the ability to read and comprehend dense factual text is a useful skill - how are these kids going to cope in the real world where everything isn't broken down into bite-size multimedia presentations?
But it gets even funnier:
But, he said, students perk up when technology is involved. "They're into computers, and they're into what computers can do," he said.
No, they're perking up because they know they won't have to do any work for the rest of the lesson because the teacher will be too busy troubleshooting to keep an eye on the kids
This is from the teacher side of me - I teach after-school classes, and I'm working on a degree in education.
The teachers treat lab periods as if they were days off. They sit the kids down, turn on the software, and let the kids zone out. There' no interaction from the teacher; the "Compass" software just does the work.
And what's worse is that the software doesn't teach concepts or methods. It teaches for the TAKS (Texas Assesment of Knowledge and Skills standardized test). The kids go from grade to grade, knowing nothing, learning nothing except how to click the X.
What happened to true educational software, like Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, and Carmen Sandiego? These actually made the kids think, do quick maths in their head (I've not met a kid outside of middle school who can pull this now), and they sure didn't teach for any standardized tests.
Now to the IT side - I manage the school LAN, which is about 250 Windows machines (ranging from Pentiums at 200MHz running Windows 98SE to quad-Xeon boxes running XP for my gaming - gotta be a BOfH) and 100 or so Macs (PPC 603e and up).
School districts, as you know, are massive organizations, easily on par with major corporations, and the different divisions require different outfits - for example, while every machine in the district I work at is loaded with Windows and Office as a base, the different levels get different software. Elementary gets Compass and a bunch of programs funded by grants (Orchard, Type to Learn, Lexia - basically total crap that's a pain both client and server side); middle and high get Plato (a version of Compass for the older kids) and development tools and editors in the labs (Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Photoshop, Codewarrior, a bunch of compilers and apps), and the admins get specialized database software to do attendance, check grades, create "student profile databases," and whatnot.
At my campus, we've got 60 laptops for the kids, in addition to four computer labs (60 Macs, 60 Dells), plus the requisite two student machines per classroom (which are never used). On top of that, we have campuswide wireless-G coverage (and that's impressive, since we're a brick-and-mortar school built in the mid-50s), quad-Xeon machines for me and the resident DBA/lunchroom and bus monitor, and bloody flat panel monitors left and right on dual-head cards. Finally, we're getting 30 more laptops on the Beaumont Grant soon, and we don't know how we're going to fit those in, since the laptops are rarely used as is.
The teachers don't know jack about their software, they surf the Web and get infected left and right since we're not allowed to install Firefox, and we're bogged down with crap software that we have to install. On top of that, the admins took the dedicated LANtech away from the building (I'm a contractor, brought in to work on a grant's machines, and the building principal - my old childhood principal, to boot - extended my contract to cover the rest of the campus, with no extra pay) and they're trying to centralize things at a helpdesk _with no remote management software_, all in the name of saving money.
You can't pull stuff like that when you have over 50 schools to deal with, a shrinking tech services department (they laid off five techs at the end of the last school year - my boss was one of them), and a staff that knows next to nothing about the systems there except how to check their mail.
Schools are losing their direction with technology, and they need to seriously reexamine what they're doing with it - both for the IT staff's sake and the kids.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Computers in school cannot be fully usefull until they are universal. 1 to 4 ratio ONLY at school is no good. Teachers have to be able to assume this tool is available at a certain level to all of their students just as they demand pencil, paper and 3 ring binders etc.... Untill that is the case they will ALWAYS be a secondary, extra or just plain extraneus paperweights in the classroom.
To those who say computers can't be usefull in classes such as lit, history or music etc.... Hell Make a wiki for a lit class dealing with a work and have assignments for differnt students to write various portions and make them all responsible for comming up with a final wiki on the subject and continue to build these through the year. History could work much the same way with students exploring their discussions and building timelines of events and posting and responding to each others thoughts. Music... hell don't just study music theory, break out something like Garage band and some instruments and start putting it to USE as your learning it and record, edit it, produce something and distribute the end result to the rest of the school if it sounds good. Not just trying to make music but to put each theory to work and build a piece of music unique to each classes talents while exploring all of the various elements of theory covered by the class.
To date the focus has been on having computers and that is all wrong. They need to function the same as pen and paper. As a fundamental tool for exploring and learning the subject at hand. All of you who are slashdotoholics who say give it the ole tried and true pen and paper deal tell me that the web isn't the first place you turn when you want to find out some new piece of information. If the info isn't there it will certainly point you in the right direction. Why would this not work for a classroom?
People who say computers can't be better than the way its been done before are the same folks that once said printed words were no substitute for oral tradition and for all I know the ones that said oral tradition was for wussies who couldn't figure it out all on their own.
Computers are better at the collection and sharing of information than older methods. THATS WHY WE USE THEM. This will make them powerful and ESSENTIAL tools for education if people would get their thumbs out of their asses about it. They are not substitutes for teachers and never will be. But as that science teacher so ably demonstrates. They are valuable tools in the right hands.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Just being able to cram more material in a bunch of bulletted lists, and flip pages quickly, doesn't mean people will understand more.
1. Humans aren't like a hard drive, that you can just dump megabytes per second into. The human mind has actually very limited bandwidth, as such, but is actually a sort of a pipeline, with buffers behind buffers. Any one overflowing will mean information being discarded.
Wisecracks like "but then I suppose most students aren't going to complain about courses having less content" are good and fine, but miss the point by a mile. It's lazy students complaining about too much content, it's students leaving the class with actually _less_ content they actually assimilated if you just overflow them. And I think it's a _very_ valid complaint if I wasted an hour and ended up none the wiser.
When giving someone new information, they also have to assimilate it in some (preliminary) form. The speed limit for writing on a blackboard and the mere exercise of their transcribing it by hand into a notebook serves just that purpose: gives them a chance to at least move that stuff into the medium term buffer before more stuff is dumped upon them.
Just flipping through lists after lists is just a way to overflow their short term buffer, at which point almost everything after that is just wasted. You could just as well call it a day after that point and let them go home, because they'll be just as wise at the end of it.
That doesn't just apply to classrooms, btw. Even when studying at home, the best thing you can learn about _how_ to learn, is to recognize when you're having a full buffer and take a 10 second break. My grandma taught me that, and frankly, it's been the best advice I've ever got by far.
2. Teaching/learning is also a question of motivation and attention. How much you're left with after class isn't just a function of how fast the teacher could plough through bulleted lists, but how well he/she could hold your attention.
If just giving you the maximum content in the minimum of the teacher's time, all classes would consist of a 10 second, "Read chapters 3, 4 and 5 until next week." Heck, you could even dispense with that. Just give 'em a big list of books at the beginning of the year, don't see them again until the exam. There is a reason why schools and universities don't work like that.
The teacher's role is in a sense also a social one. He/she is there not just as someone to regurgitate information which you could have gotten just as well from a book, but also (or even more importantly) as someone to keep your attention through that.
3. Look at the effect Powerpoint presentations serve at work. Much as management _loves_ colourful powerpoint slides, I've yet to be even in a single meeting where they actually helped. You either end up with far more questions and basically get slowed down to the actual bandwidth that people can digest, and even lower (losing all that speed advantage), or you end up with everyone forgetting everything that was in those slides before even the meeting is over.
I don't know exactly _what_ it is about Powerpoint slides, presumably the 1 and 2 effects, but maybe something else too. But they seem to act more like attention dissipators than something to help focus and memorize and understand. Things that would have been (and occasionally _have_ been) by having someone doing it interactively at the blackboard, seem to go in one ear and out the other when a Powerpoint slideshow is involved.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's actually a good rationale, but you still have to consider that there are a number of homes still without computers, most of whom are low income households. Case in point, I was a collegiate athlete at a university with a computer requirement if you stayed on campus. Out of the 20-30 freshman that came in on our team each year, around 5 had to have a surplus computer donated to them since they didn't own one (and most were on financial aid). Also in rural areas (see GP's reference to Indiana), people, I'm guessing based on previous experience, are much less likely to own a computer. I came from a rural background as well and had several classmates who had to type their senior papers in the school library. Albeit, this was in 1999, but at the time computer prices were dropping drastically.
So to keep this on topic, I would suggest that if you put cheap computers in schools, they will be used. The kids with the same technology at home will forgo it or most likely use it to goof off. But others will use them out of necessity.
I am a techie.
My wife has a Phd in Childhood Ed.
My wife is a school adminstrator.
All comments below are valid (in my mind) to Kindergarden through 6 grade.
1) Teachers are liberal arts majors and they do not inherently know how to use tech.
2) Recent studies have shown kids pick up computers use methodologies very quickly when they need to, without adult help.
3) Computer labs need constant care, oddly enough viruses run virtually unchecked through schools, computer ones that is. I often call my wife and tell her that her computer has a virus, after an email from her.
4) It has not be shown yet that kids learn their ABC's, writing, reading or basic math better using computers. It just has not been shown.
Like the saying goes, "If you can't do something, you can't do it with a computer."
If we had schools capable of turning out well-educated young adults with a firm grounding in the fundamentals of rational thought and at least a working knowledge of math, language, history, and science, well, the absence of computers in the classroom and whatnot wouldn't be significant.
And if all you have are schools turning out masses of people so ignorant that they actually think "Left Behind" is a good series of books, the presence of computers in the classroom isn't going to matter one good goddamn.
It's about quality education. Schools can throw all the technology they want at kids, but computers alone won't give children an education.
Teachers must be properly trained to use this technology to its fullest. I'm afraid that won't realistically happen until the next generation of teachers emerges that has grown up all their lives around computers.
Computers should never come at the cost of student-teacher time, nor at the cost of fewer teachers. Nor, should schools compete with each other as to "who has the bigger, faster" setup. If it isn't actually improving education, it is worthless.
Saving schools money is good, as long as those savings are going to improve the educational experience, and not back into the budget for someone's pet project.
I remember my high school trying out computers. We only touched them when we all had to do something, and take turns, etc. The computer was a glorified typewriter, and the students were still required to hand write drafts, for instance. (I cheated, and scribbled on my notebook until a PC opened up.) But, I was patient. I knew most of the kids had never even used a computer. I, and the geeks I hung out with, averaged 2-4 at home. Still, I would have loved a school laptop back then. I finally bought my own in college.
College was different, but not much. I was more of the outsider for having it, as most of my peers had regular pen and paper. Then again, most were asking for printouts of my delicately constructed lecture outlines to compare to. While others left for the library to do a short paper, I was already half done before leaving class. Of course, I was left to my own faculties come test time.
But, that is another problem. A student who doesn't know how to work without a computer may be at a disadvantage at the college level, much as a student who doesn't know how to work with a computer is at a severe disadvantage. I remember the same debate over calculators being introduced into the SAT. Some college professors (not all, or even a majority) do not care what you work best with. They'll plop down a blue pad in front of you, and tell you to put all your fancy gadgets away.
Did computers help me in school? Not really. I didn't really care about education until college, and what mattered there was choosing a smaller school where I had lots of one on one time with professors when I needed it. They could have given away iPods and iBooks, and whatever else colleges are giving away now. Take them in exchange for 100+ student classes? No way!
As a side note, while I think moving some text to computers is good, I think I would be wearing some very thick glasses if I had to have read Anne Frank on a laptop.
I8-D
I'll grant you that a calculator (and excel) save me a bunch of time. However, how does one know if they made an error setting up their calculus problem or equation and fed the wrong equations to their calculator, if they do not have at least a basic knowledge of arithmetic?
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Oh yes it is. The most likely failure mode in any machine calculation is user input error. Knowledge of what order of magnitude and first digits to expect let you know if the calculation you just made is even in the right ballpark. It isn't an issue of solving non-homogeneous 2nd order differential equations in your head, this is basics to know when you are just about to make a fool of yourself.
Most certainly, the ability to do mental arithmetic is more or less useful, depending on your future career path, but most emphatically, your describing it as stupid speaks volumes.
You're never far from a calculator of some sort, and even if you were (stuck on a desert island and needed to do a caculation to get home), everyone can do the math manually just not ultra-fast.
The point is not that mental arithmetic is used to replace calculators as some sort of penis waving 'yay, look what I can do', it's to know what you just did with the calculator is sensible, so the calculator doesn't turn into a crutch that collapses at the most inopportune moment (say when your spacecraft is approaching planetary orbit or your phone/gas/electricity/grocery/restaurant bill doesn't add up).
But they don't even get as far as calculus in high school
I assume by 'high school' you mean 15-18 year olds. Here, by 17, the basics of integration and differentiation is complete in maths courses.
First of all, the price is outrageous. My little brother's brand new middle school is asking for $350, my school is asking for $150, and my younger little brother's elementary school is asking $120. $620 in donations just to start a school year is insane. Not only that, but those are just a particular donation the PTA is asking for. There is also individual funds set up for certain classes such as Art. Money is asked for on a case-to-case basis (if you're taking the class).
OK, so just because my parents are spending a lot of money, it must be getting spent on the right stuff, right? Well, unfortunately, that's usually not the case. My little brother's elementary school just recently purchase about 35 new Apple eMacs to replace their 5-year-old iMacs all running OS X. I used them for 3 years, and they were perfectly fine for the purpose that were set before them (word processing, Kid Pix, and typing programs). So why replace them? Because the PTA thinks we need to be "on the cutting edge of technology". Then the middle schools have thing like laptop carts. Basically, in each cart there is 30 iBook G4s all being wheeled around with an HP Printer and an Apple AirPort stuck on top. The teachers hook it up to the nearest ethernet port and everyone boots up...so we can type reports. That's it. Boom, $20,000 down the drain (probably more). That's a lot of money that could have been spent on something useful.
Meanwhile, every other year there is a campaign about passing some new tax reform so that things like the parent's music program and the library don't get booted. Why don't they take all this money they've saved, not spend it on computers, and keep all the programs they're in danger of losing (not to mention that not a single school in our district has recived anything more than pink slips that meant nothing).
The point is, wether it's a fad or a style here to stay, it's too expensive with little benefits. I'm a 13-year old techno-geek and I love new computers as much as anyone, but I also understand the value of a good education--new comptuers aren't it.
Software is like sex. It's better when it's free. -Linus Torvalds