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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."
Technology in schools is in desperate need of a re-think. The recent evolution in open-source, as well as many newly founded partnerships should help see a more powerful move in this sector, but is it powerful enough?
Of course, literacy is also a part of the world - hence it's nessecary to teach that too.
I said technology should only be part of schools for a reason - not that it should be the ONLY thing taught in schools.
And yes, there is nothing you can do on a computer on a schooldesk that you cannot do with books, pencils and paper. But what good is it being able to write really good stories, for example, without having been exposed to a word processor in your life?
It's a skill you're pretty much gonna have to learn sometime.
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But the basics my parents learned are more relevant today than ever - reading and writing and arithmatic should be the core studies required for all students. Add in history, language (especially for those of us in the US who think English is the only language), PE and an artistic course and that's a sound core curriculum. All of this can be taught without tech. Teach the buggers how to talk, write, and think.
I love tech and think it can have a place in schools if a few simple rules are followed. Use tech where it makes sense. Make sure the teachers know how to use the tech FIRST. Make sure there is sufficient and appropriate tech for the audience (skip PowerPoint and Word, geez, use a good text editor, who needs all the formatting whizbang crap anyway?). Try and find an IT support person/group that understands education and can communicate with the staff (nothing worse than a locked down desktop just because the IT dept can't be bothered to understand the teacher's needs).
I think it's more important to have teachers who understand their subject, are enthusiastic about it, and love to share that enthusiasm than to have computers for computer's sake.
I also think it's important that we stop adding course load on kids and trim the subject list back to something that is more human AND make the classes a bit longer (I had 1 hour classes when in high school, my kids were down to 45 minutes - how soon before we get to 1/2 hour of McEd?).
Tech is fine when used sanely with a purpose within a larger designed teaching environment. If something has to go, let it be tech in favor or better teachers.
I do not think the future of education is a computer on every child's desk, but I think that computers can be used to create tremendous resources to help further education.
For example, with something like this : http://www.moodle.org/
there is the potential to create independent 'schools' of various types... imagine a community of parents who home school their children organizing with such a tool to diversify the experience.
With such education portal systems becoming more available, they can find more uses in high schools... where being at home sick may not mean a day missed, where community colleges can better support classes not bound to an in-person schedule.
Schools can better facilitate summer and evening classes, distance learning. To give an example more relevant to this particular venue, a *nix user's group could set up a 'school' to teach people how to use and understands the various *nix and Posix based operating systems. Teach hobbyists how to program in new languages, and generally leverage these tools to increase the practical education of the open source movement itself.
I think the problem with the question is that people apply it automatically to Junior having a computer in front of him in the classroom, when there are so many other ways computers can be used to enhance education... and that education doesn't stop when you graduate and doesn't have to come from a school charging tuition.
With all this focus on Open Source programming, writing, music, videos, and other sorts of content... why not be equally passionate about 'open source education'?
Planning, shooting, and editing a video is, in my experience, the most time-wasting irritation of any project, and is especially awful in foreign language courses. Time that could be spent on listening and speaking -- real IMMERSION, like what you'd get if you lived in another country -- is instead spent trying to work the darn equipment and set up scenes. Still the same horribly broken language skills (spoken without anyone to model proper pronunciation from), and now hours upon hours of work have been spent on a half dozen sentences.
And there are only two situations in which a student makes a video: solo or in a group. If the fates are kind, it will be a solo video, and the student will just have a very irritated parent or two. If it's a group project, one can only pray that they get along with the other group members, or else it's hours of bickering on a project nobody really cared for to begin with.
By the time you're done, the sense of achievement most often comes in the form of "Wow, that sucked, I'm glad it's over."
Which is not to say that the worksheets don't suck as well, because I agree that they are often crap. There are other ways of teaching these things, besides rote drilling "A is B and C is D" into people's heads. I just find it extremely unfortunate that, rather than exploring possibilities, courses always fall back on the big 3: skits, posters, and videos.
I contend that the culprit is BAD TEACHING, whether the fault of the teachers, the methods, the system, the long hours, whatever. Vomiting information at people and expecting them to absorb it I find absurd, but that's what many teachers do. For 6+ hours a day. Throwing a few computers into the mix will keep people amused with the "shiny" and "huzzah! she stopped talking!" aspect for a while, but as someone who made a good amount of videos over the years, the novelty wears off REAL fast.
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That doesn't address the question at all, namely why students don't use the available computers.
I think the reason is very simple: people like to work in private (thus not at school), with things arranged in their own way (thus at home), and with their own software and settings (which school computers often don't allow).
Whether the computers at school run Linux or Windows, and if they cost three hundred or three thousand dollars is completely irrelevant, except, of course, in cas the computers at school have some software that students need but is expensive for them to have at home. And guess what? Those are the cases where you do see students using the computers at school.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
well please take into account that excessive technologisation distracts students! with a simple textbook - everything is nice and clear, with a computer - not so sure.
I still can not imagine e.g. math classes with computers - although numerical methods are somehow important - the true understanding comes from paper and pencil.
I have attended one of the best schools in my city at the time. We had only old craps - not realy computers - x286. There were no computers used in classes apart from "computer sciences". When I see young people massively distracted by "technologization" I think this is NOT the right way.
Of course - students MUST know how to use a computer. And do it well. But please - does every lecture now has to be computer-aided now?
best regards - michal (totaly distracted)
I'm sorry, but I'm fairly certain that these school districts have football teams along with swimming pools, etc. I know of a local school (Manheim Central) who prides itself on having a killer football team. God knows what would happen if one day they didn't have one. My guess is that the funding of the team always manages to get through.
I wonder if these same schools are struggling for a tech budget while sports are funded this way. That would be the first question I'd have for the Racine district (in the article).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against sports in school per se, BUT... I AM against funding non-academic activities over academic ones. What are the priorities for funding here?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
There's a difference. Learning to use a word processor (and to type in general) just isn't that hard. A person can and often does learn that on their own. Being able to write really good stories? That is in a class by itself.
As to the use of word processors, I consider that it is quite important that pupils are introduced to them relatively early on. I received consistently bad grades in English while I was forced to use a pen. It is a horrible device with the worst UI conceivable - it may be okay as a last resort for taking notes, but expecting people to use it to write essays is ludicrous. When I was allowed to word-process essays, I immediately shot up to being near the top of the class (top in my class, top 5% in the year). I am now paid to write.
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"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?"
Of course not. It's the parents' fault. Even today, I know plenty of kids who were raised without video games or (gasp!) television in the home. It is possible.
That said, yes, it's still a virtue to be able to read a "boring" math text. And not just in the abstract, back-in-my-day, walked-uphill-both-ways sense of the word "virtue," either. Some things are hard to learn, and take dedication and study. No amount of pointy-clicky technology magic will change that fact.
I say this as someone who spent two-thirds of last year grading some of the most attrociously-written papers you can imagine from junior and senior undergraduates. By my estimation, only 10 percent of my students were more than functionally literate. As my students will prove to you when you encounter them in the workplace, an extensive knowledge of Microsoft Word doesn't teach you how to write....
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
"Using the internet as a research tool? Why not just teach them how to use research tools in general? That way, whether they find themselves in front of a Google prompt *or* a library card catalog, they'll know how to go about finding the information they seek."
Indeed, why not? I'm with you on that one, and I didn't suggest for a second that that was the only way we could (or should) be doing it.
However, in the absence of a handy desk-sized library for every student, and the hassle of organising orderly class trips to the school or town library, a PC and web browser pointed at Google might be the easiest way to do most of the teaching, with card catalogues and other organisational schemes providing backup and contrast.
In fact, what we should really be doing is teaching (very abstract, high-level) database design concepts, since those are directly applicable to any information-organisation scheme.
"I've seen people try and fail to find what they're looking for on Google, because they don't know how information is logically categorized and classified and evaluated. If you can't teach them *that*, you can't teach them to use the internet as a research tool."
Bingo. Notice how I don't suggest teaching programming so that everyone can become a programmer, but because I believe it teaches you to think right.
You start from a few basic primitive statements (axioms), and combine them to form algorithms or functions (conclusions). You rigidly test these constructions to make sure they're stable and correct, and successfully handle edge-cases, fixing them (or starting again) if you find any faults. These "proven" conclusions can then be relied upon, allowing you to reach higher-level conclusions, and defend these structures from attack by others (secure code).
Ok, I'm stretching the metaphor to breaking point, but I think you'd find it hard to argue with the idea that programming encourages and develops meticulous and impartial thought-habits. Certainly the quickest and clearest thinkers I know (generally) tend to have some significant experience of programming (or logic, or mathematical proofs) at some point in their lives.
"Programming, testing, debugging? That's fine for people who are going into CS, but for most people that's going to be like teaching everyone how to rebuild an upper engine block."
I'd argue only in the same way basic arithmetic is only of use to people who are becoming mathematicians.
To take your (perennial-slashdot-) car analogy - a customer brings the car into the shop, and complains it rattles above a certain speed. Do you bang weights on the wheels, change the axel and check the tyres all at once, or do you isolate each part as much as possible, check each one for correctness, and change as little as possible to fix the problem?
It's the same process - start with axioms ("something's wrong"), and proceed carefully, logically and methodically. Change only what you need to avoid wasting time or creating new bugs (I dunno in this case - maybe denting a wheel while changing it).
Another example would be designing or building something - say a house. Do you build, paint and furnish the lounge, then do the upper story, then do the walls downstairs, or do you plan out the overall structure and plot out (even subsconsciously) regular, methodical sub-tasks and milestones until the job's finished? In fact, I think this is an even better example, because of all the skills we've mentioned so far good task decomposition, which I'd argue is the hardest and most important "thinking" skill it's possible to learn, is also the one best taught by programming.
There's nothing like getting half-way through a project and realising you have to go back and recode half of it because of a bad initial decision you made to teach you to make good, flexible decisions right from the off.
"Yes, there's *nothing wrong* with knowing that stuff, and yes, it's an area where disciplined
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