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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.