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Continued Opposition To Laptops in Schools
theskeptic writes "The WSJ has an article about opposition to programs that provide laptops to 6-8th grade kids. Detractors say that the kids are wasting too much time online browsing dangerous sites, instant messaging friends, and posting to Myspace. Parents are worried that serious learning is being neglected in the quest to 'dazzle up presentations with fancy fonts instead of digging through library books.' Some parents however are 'enthusiastic laptop proponents,' one saying the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son 'master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'" Gaaah.
'the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'
I need to talk to that young man. I keep getting this error when trying to compile a PowerPoint presentation:
make: *** No rule to make target `mindblowingpresentation.powerpoint', needed by `pointyhairedboss.info'
* * * * *
All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
--Jane Wagner
Children need neither laptops nor cell phones. They need to learn the basics. Not PowerPoint!
'the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'
So now he's prepared to show his friends a 15 minute slideshow about why girls have cooties?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
I went to a college that required lap tops, and even in the classes where they made sense, they were either kept off by rule almost all the time, or it was a game/chat fest. I remember one military science class that had 16 of the 30 kids all playing the same Red Alert game.
Too many kids can't do basic arithmatic without a calculator (literally they can't do it anymore unless they punch it in) why are we giving 10-12 year olds more technology? I think systems for home use (with computer assignments would be a far more effective use of the money).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
A twelve-year-old making PowerPoint slides???
Wow. When I was 12 we were learning the basics of how to write an essay, look up stuff in the library, and how to organize a paper.
PowerPoint just seems totally wrong for kids in middle school. Teach 'em the foundations, they're gonna need them. They have the whole rest of their lives to get RSI.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you cannot read, write, or speak, what good will PowerPoint do for you?
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
Apart from purposes of research or computer science courses, I hesitate to say that there's even a place for ubiquitous computing in the classroom. Typing noises *are* distracting, and a good teacher can teach more than 100 computers! And, as far as electronic demonstrations replacing *real* dissections and chemistry experiments for reasons of "ethics" and "safety" - some school administrators need a good punch upside the head since the virtual world is only a poor approximation of the real one.
-b.
I'm a halfway competent network administrator...where do I send my resume?
Sorry, you're overqualified.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Are you close to Boston ? Know bash or Tcl ? Do you have your resume somewhere online ? Thx !
the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation
The terms "critical professional skill" and "PowerPoint presentation" should never appear in the same sentence. PowerPoint presentations are one of the most overused and misused pieces of technology. At my current job, I have sat through 400+ slide PowerPoint presentations on more than one occasion.
What they should be teaching kids is how to quickly and effectively get their point across.
I am also a laptop owner, college graduate and full-time nerd. Hell, I even think we should use less paper. Despite all of that, I am an outspoken opponent of laptops in the classroom.
As a teacher/professor, you are charged with getting through to the students. Helping them understand the material involves interacting with them. I can't fathom how a teacher could be expected to do that in front of 30 kids who are staring intently at the computer screen on their desk and not at the teacher. This lack of eye contact and interaction cannot be good for the educational process. I've seen it in action: it's tough to get through to kids sometimes and giving each one a laptop is not going to help.
Also, slightly less important, but still worth noting is how crappy my hand-writing has become since I started using a computer on a daily basis (this happened for me in 1994 or 1995). I've mostly forgotten how to write in cursive, my signature is a joke and when I do have to write something it is almost entirely non legible.
Computers are really great. With access to the internet in particular, you've got a wealth of knowledge (and lies and opinionations) at your fingertips. There are valuable computer skills that can be learned (programming, graphic design, even powerpoint, etc.), however, I don't feel that incorporating computer usage into every class is practical or useful. A notebook makes a hell of a lot more sense in a chemistry lab than a laptop... unless you set it on fire. Actually, the computer is not great set on fire either, so I'll strike that last comment.
When I was in school, note-passing was all the rage. It was the way that the students had come up with to communicate with each other (about things that should be dealt with outside of school) without the teachers knowing. With a classroom full of kids that aren't looking at you and all staring at their laptops, you can bet that many of them will be doing the modern equivalent of note-passing: myspace, IM, etc.
Let the little brats take notes in a notebook.
calling all destroyers
Actually that's more than part of the problem. Many schools don't have halfway competent network administrators, and they certainly don't have the resources to maintain that many laptops, and they would have to maintain them. After all, if little Johnny's laptop stops working, and that laptop is important to his participation in school then someone is going to have to fix it, and in many cases the parents aren't going to be able to afford to.
What's more, this would give each of these children a tool that would allow them to get online at any hotspot on the planet, and lots of parents are going to have a problem with that. Sure, there are probably ways to make it so that the wireless card only works at school, but then why not simply use much less expensive desktop machines?
This doesn't even take into account problems of sabotage, theft, or accidental damage. Do we really need kids in urban areas carrying around hundreds of dollars of computer equipment? Plus, every year hundreds of thousands of school books get destroyed. Computers are far more fragile than books, and more expensive to boot.
Basically, giving kids a general purpose laptop is a horrible idea with very few redeeming virtues.
Since I can buy a very capable laptop for about $500 these days (in fact, I have bought a few for my daughters in college), why are the schools paying so much?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Those in charge of school curricula have recognised that IT will be important in the future (at least we should credit them with that) but they have no idea in what sense or how to impart the knowledge needed to deal with this to the next generation. This is the generation that elects a senator who thinks the internet is a series of tubes! How can it be expected to come up with a meaningful strategy for teaching this stuff.
If all middle school can teach is how to make a PowerPoint presentation, then maybe it's best to leave learning about IT to the traditional method -- by kids hacking into the Pentagon's most secure system in their spare time.
Conquest's 3rd Law: Every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents.
The dog ate my hard drive!!
Parents who think learning PowerPoint is important? It's too late. Nevermind this kid's education. Just make sure we have an extra cell in the prison system for him.
I program computers for a living. I didn't get a computer until I was in 8th grade. What does that tell you?
This reminds me of the study that was done regarding chess. A lot of people got the idea that chess taught students "critical thinking". The conclusion of the study was that students who were taught chess learned... chess. That's it.
I'm also reminded of the first incarnation of "computers to help disadvantaged students" that I witnessed first-hand in the 80s. There, at the computer, was one of the "slow kids" interacting with a computer. What was it doing? A computerized version of... flash cards. Yes. The Atari 800 was being used as a virtual stack of 3 by 5 cards with simple multiplication problems on them.
Now, for those of us who were learning algebra, the computer was a fantastic tool. In fact, when I was just being introduced to the idea that variables could be involved in math problems, the computer illustrated the point most vividly. So, I don't think that computers are useless in schools. I think it probably makes sense to introduce them right around the time students are learning algebra, but it's hard to tell if I'm being prejudiced because of my own personal experience. At any rate, having a computer certainly made me better at... computing! Whether or not it would have made me good at anything else I can't say.
As a general rule though, I don't see why we should be spending several hundred dollars for a stack of 3 by 5 cards with multiplication tables on them. I certainly don't thinnk we should be giving kids eyestrain by having them read books of computers. Get paper books, OK? I definitely don't think we should be giving vocational training to kids in gradeschool. A kid with an average eduction should be able to learn PowerPoint quickly after graduating highschool, via a brief seminar. A kid with a superior education should be able to attend the same seminar, and recognize PowerPoint for the mind numbing crap that it is.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Computers are far more fragile than books, and more expensive to boot.
I don't know how much it costs to boot a schoolbook, by my laptop boots for free..
(couldn't help myself, sorry)
>> critical professional skills
:)
these parents have no idea what "critical professional skills" are... sure, maybe if your career goal is to be some kind of personal assistant for powerpoint, then yeah, ok... but powerpoint? critical? really?
but damn, you can learn powerpoint on your own, it's not that difficult... and certainly not worth spending the amount on a laptop...
now... if you said learning c++ was a critical professional skill, sure, that makes sense... but why can't the kid do this at home?
don't get me wrong, I like the idea of laptops in class, but only as a fast way to take notes in class, or convenience of keeping all your data and projects in once place (productivity tool)... considering the big distraction they can be, maybe for learning software or programming languages kids should use computer labs or the laptop at home only? But that doesn't even seem to fix everything...
school is about rigid regementation, partly to get the unfocused kids to focus (common theory of the school catering to the slowest)... having a laptop in the classroom presents a huge hole if websites, IM, or even a more interesting personal project is distracting the user...
this may sound lame, but maybe there needs to be some technology added here to force the laptops into a state where only relevent work is happening. something as simple as the teacher being able to see all screens to police the students to be on topic... or better yet, have in classroom computers with a good centralized user account system (i.e. linux with NFS mounted user accounts)...
Maybe the goal should be, a computer in every classroom... and a computer at home for every child...
More expensive I know... but it would help to regement things... Clearly, having a laptop for each child IS important for those children who have limited access to a computer at home. At least this way, the student can learn computer skills on their own...
Another thought. Has anyone done research into whether having distracting things like laptops help kids multitask better and actually focus better? It may actually help students learn to tune out distractions... Again, I bet there's a percentage of students that mentally just can't handle this temptation... I wonder if laptops for kids actually polarize kids, making the ubergeeks brilliant and well prepared, and the distractable kids uber stupid...
This issue is apparently complex.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
A few years ago, my late father and myself conducted a 2 year study of every single school system in the State of Alabama and looked deeply into the issues of what made them tick and not tick. This resulted in a series of proposals based on what actually happens towards fixing the schools. Every single proposed solution at that time was passed except 1. That one was to actually vary the pay of the teachers and their tenure based upon the results of the standardized test progress of their students. Yes I did propose and it has gone nation wide the testing of schools by testing the progression of the students! I am the one everyone likes to hate over this.
The critics are absolutely right about the ineffective use of testing and such. My answer is shut up about the defects as an excuse not to test. Lets test the students and get better tests and better testing methods if you don't like the results. I whole heartedly support more efficient evaluation methods and any efforts that can direct teachers towards better results. The methods here are standard industrial and technological evaluation methods.
Schools are not under funded. They are grossly over funded. Teachers are not under paid except in their early career years. This may vary some from state to state but bureaucracy pays more by tenure. Lets cut this crap out that funding of the schools is the problem it isn't even the problem at all. The issue is that the system does not reward people for trying. It rewards them for expiring the clock. You get what you pay for.
The issue of Laptops in class has mostly to do with the issue of teachers being quite unwilling to adapt to the present time. Here are a set of solid proposals for the schools around the world.
Beginning about the 4th grade students should no longer carry books. They should be issued laptops. Their books should be documents on the net freely available to them. The school systems should hire the authors directly and fire the school text book companies. It would save a bloody fortune.
The issue of the style of interactive texts in the schools that is developed should be based upon an axiom my father said about teaching me the slide rule. (Yes I date to that time) He said, you may use a slide rule when the answer you get is more important than learning the method of getting the answer. This should be the objective of the design. All lessons should require the method be examined while that is what is being learned. If this is done, the tricking with cute fonts and cut and paste reports will do no good in grading.
The real matter here is design. I discussed this with the authors of www.starfall.com and their effort to teach phonics on line. (Excellent site by the way) I told them that the cute interactive graphics and funny cartoons should only work as a reward for full development of a lesson. They are doing more and more this way in time. This should set a map for people to see. One can clearly see that this is a job never done. It is a work in progress forever. That is why we will always need teachers and not just computers for training.
A note to the mods. This is the most on topic least troll and most informative listing you have ever read on this topic. If you can't see that write a criticism as a response or get a life. Otherwise this deserves every mod point you can give it. Slashdot shouldn't be a shout-down and heckle society.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
OMFG! What are we teaching our kids? Has the curriculum really dumbed down to the point that using PowerPoint is "cricical"? I hate it! The entire universe cannot be distilled down to some bullet points!
... They're citing Joe Schmo's paper in their paper, but who is Joe Schmo? And is he objective?"
What happened to the "Three R's"? In an age where we're turning out an increasing number of high school graduates who are functionally illiterate, what are we doing? It's time to put an end to the "New Education" and get back to basics. Just recently, Dallas ISD published the stastic that only 26% of their high school graduates were functionally illiterate and they were actually *HAPPY* about it because it was down from 33% the previous year.
DISD credits this increase in basic literacy to "removing distractions from the classroom". They've been working on quite a few things, including mandatory school uniforms, banning cell phones, etc. Now you want to introduce the biggest distration of all - portable computers. One of the biggest problems is that most people are so uneducated that they aren't able to determine a "good source" from a bad one. Quoting from a recent newspaper article here "Students may know how to use an Internet search engine, but professors have complained that the online information students use is not reliable, said Mary Jo Lyons, information literacy coordinator at UT-Arlington....."There's nothing wrong with Google," Lyons said. "They know how to type in words and search, but it's how they evaluate whether it's a quality site. That's the problem.
In a world where knowlege, if not education is power all we're doing is setting ourselves up for becoming the next Third World country.
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
Learning to communicate effectively is important, but a twelve year old needs to learn how to think critically and solve problems before they learn to be a sales-weasel. Aside from that, powerpoint is a terrible communication medium, with no more educational value than the clear plastic cover I used to put on my papers to get a better grade.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Being able to determine what is and is not valid on the internet requires a background set of information against which to compare. Setting kids loose on the internet and telling them, in essence, "you go figure out what's correct and what isn't", is sending them out completely unprepared.
That's not saying that everything taught in the schools is correct, but the percentage is much higher than what one finds using google.
You are part of the problem.
Blame the teachers? They don't expect enough of the students, sure.
Who REALLY should be blamed?
The parents.
For not taking responsability for their children's actions and learning.
Require calculus from all students to get out of high school. Require REAL reading. A book in 2 months? Laughable. A book in 3 weeks.
Don't PUNISH teachers for FAILING the FAILURES. If a student fails, it should be the parents who are ashamed, not the schools.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Last year I taught at a private high school that required all of its students to purchase laptops. At first I thought it sounded like a great idea; how cutting-edge. But before the year was over, I came to see the whole program as a waste of the parents' and the school's money.
The issue isn't really anything from the technical end. IT had WebSense up and running, which blocked anything they deemed inappropriate for anyone connecting to the school's wireless (nevermind the few students who found ways around this). And IT could monitor what each computer logged into the system was up to at any point in time. They kept a record, so if a teacher suspected a student of doing anything unacceptable, but didn't want to make a big deal about it during class, all it took was an email: "What was Johnny doing between 1:15 and 1:30? Oh, playing a game? Thanks." And the next day the kid would get detention. As TripMaster Monkey said, a competent IT staff solved all of the problems from that end.
The issue is why is the program worthwhile? In what way does the education of the students become more successful by requiring their parents to spend xxxx dollars on a laptop for each of their children? And is it worth the hassle to the school's IT people?
Some might argue that it helps develop the students' computer skills. I'm not sure about national statistics, but I can assure you that every one of my students had at least one computer in their home. And trust me; they knew how to use it. Toting a laptop around campus all day didn't make them better users.
I have also heard arguments that each student having a computer affords for excellent instructional opportunities beyond the standard lecture and note-taking approach. Of course this is true, but I would have much rather had a projector in my room (which I did not) so that I could show visual aids from my computer. They are many ways to reach out to students with different learning styles and to make class more exciting that don't require every single child to have a laptop. And many ways that are less expensive.
In addition to the burden on IT of keeping up with the above-mentioned 'security measures', they had to employ one guy who did nothing but repair laptops (or send them off to be replaced) five days a week. That was his entire job. I've seen more laptops in multiple pieces, with broken/missing keys, and with cracked screens than I can count. Children in grade school do not need to be held responsible for keeping a laptop in running order. The average fifteen-year-old can barely be help responsible for walking across the room without tripping over his own feet. High school students rough house, drop things, are clumsy, are forgetful (I would never dream of leaving my computer on a bench for two hours), and just generally are not prepared to take care of these expensive pieces of equipment.
Most importantly, I know of very few teachers who in any way used the laptop capability regularly in their class. Some teachers forbid the students from using their computers during class, probably to reduce unacceptable use. I never had any problems with in-class laptop use because I taught physics and I don't know many people that can keep pace note-taking with that much mathematical notation (and 98% of the students couldn't type fast enough to keep pace in history class, either...so much for the 'saves paper from note-taking' argument), so if a laptop was out while I was teaching, knew someone was up to no good. The only time the computers ever saw the light of day in my room is when I didn't want to start on a new subject for the last five minutes of class, so I would let the kids work on WebAssign homework. As for lab data analysis, the upper-end TI's that all of the students had could do everything I needed, and if they couldn't, it's nothing that couldn't be done at home.
My point is: mandatory laptop programs in grade school have a short list of benefits which is overwhelmed by the subsequent detriments. The (questionable) honing of computer skills and introduction of new (seldom-used) teaching tools does not outweigh the cost to everyone involved and hassle to the IT group.
The first year was an unmitigated disaster. I spent my study hall and my lunch hour every day working as a helpdesk tech, and we averaged thirty kids an hour with dying and dead machines, all suffering from malfunctions, viruses and just plain abuse. When people weren't loading their machines full of music/movies/warez/porn, they were playing games and IMing each other in class. This contributed to all sorts of network problems, which exacerbated the problems the machines already had. (Did I mention that the Microsoft "Knowledge Technologies" package had more bugs than the AP Biology fruit-fly lab?) Moreover, you couldn't use the laptops for any of the programming, advanced graphic design or publishing software we used, for which having a laptop might actually have been useful - that stuff was all Apple-based, and restricted by hardware dongles to boot. Finally, since 90% of the teachers were technologically incompetent themselves, they had no idea how to use the machines in class. I can count on one hand the number of kids who actually used the machines for anything useful during class time, and that counts myself. (Five classes out of six, my laptop sat in its bag and I took notes on paper.)
The program is still in operation, and it's still useless as ever. Nowadays, they added two new functionalities to the machines, digital whiteboards and computerized attendance. The latter program takes class attendance using a map of IPs and locations, which any enterprising geek can rig by using a static IP.
I can't fault the program completely, though. I had a great laptop when I went to college. I just found it completely, utterly useless in high school.
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
Good network admin ins only a small part on the problem. From what I have seen (mind you this is the LA area) the whole system is broken.
1. When you have damn near everything blocked by the firewall/router like Wikipedia the usefulness goes way down. I swear I think they are running a whitelist not a blacklist.
2. I donated a few old machines to a school here and installed them. Dropped a note to the admin to add their MAC's to the list and after a few weeks my friend (teacher there) started calling and memoing as well. After the school year ended and the next semester started and ended and still nothing. Not so much as a phone call from to admin at the district, much less Network access.
3. The teachers have no clue how to use them effectively. They seem to use them as a reward for doing something. "Get a passing grade on your next test and you can play with the computer" type of thinking
4. My old Jr. High spent money on removing all the lockers in the place to replace them with trophy cases. One might ask where do students put their books?.... Surprise? They got rid of books years ago. Yet they blew tons of money on a fancy new computer lab that sits mostly empty and unused and/or underused, blew money on removing lockers, blew money on installing a trophy case, and have not spent a dime on books in 5 years.
5. The students are aware of this B*llsh1t, are forced to go and have no respect (plenty of contempt) for the school (understandable) and treat the equipment like everything else
What can we expect from the people running our schools? Certainly not reason. And what is it we expect laptops to do at the schools under these conditions?
Curse them all
Except the real solution is to get rid of compulsory schooling entirely and get people doing "unschooling",
0 031028151034651
http://www.unschooling.com/
and upgrade libraries and turn school buildings into learning centers (or democratically run "free schools"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
for those children whose parents cannot afford to supervise their children during the day directly).
See for example John Holt's writings:
http://www.holtgws.com/index.html
or John Taylor Gatto's:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
or any of many other radical school reformers.
All your suggestions sound good on paper but miss the point that people have tried for decades to reform schools incrementally and they are still broken -- or rather, they actually are still performing the mission they were designed for, which is dumbing kids down into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and gullible consumers so they will fit well into a well ordered industrial economy, a mission now obsolete in a post-industrial and post-scarcity information age.
The future is not to still idealize Prussia and even earlier empire building aspirations back to Plato
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=2
which developed these techniques of "education" but instead to look into the future, where people start asking questions like "why work?"
http://www.whywork.org/
and how to structure an economy when "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain":
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
(Sorry to read about your loss, and it sounds like you were doing a lot of great things together, just needed more time to go even further.)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Actually, I slightly agree with you. There are a lot of incompetent teachers (and administrators) and this is a huge problem. The difficulty is not that you can't fire teachers (you can). Teachers should be accountable for their performance, and they way this is done is not more testing. Its management. Adminstrators don't spend time in the class room observing and managing the teachers.
The fact is there isn't much incentive for good people and good performance in teaching. Positions are hard to fill and teachers can't expect to make more than a blue coller salary. The standard political approach to this is always to act like accountability is the answer. All carrot and no stick for teachers. In your job do you do good work just to keep from getting fired? Teachers need to be paid for performance and they need to have a lot more opportunity to make a real salary.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
In any effective education system (there aren't many of them) the teachers don't see the exams until after the students. The teachers and the QA staff have access to the same curriculum - one group creates lesson plans based on the curriculum and the other group creates exams. This division of labour prevents "teaching to the test" because the teachers don't know what's going to be on any given test (everything in the curriculum is fair game), but more importantly it takes away the ability of teachers to "test only what they taught" if they fail to complete the curriculum. That hopefully eliminates the stereotyped "worst case" where a student is promoted all the way through high school without learning to read or do math.