School's Out Forever at SV High Tech High

theodp writes "Touted as a model of successful education by the likes of Bill Gates, Silicon Valley's High Tech High just held its first — and last — commencement ceremony, graduating only 21 students in its brief history. Despite the financial support of the world's richest man, the charter school cited money woes as it voted to shut its doors. Adding insult to the poor HTH kids' injury, the local public H.S. district plunked down $8.6M to snatch up their abandoned school and will turn it over to a brand new crop of kids in the fall."

Comments

Re:Not surprising

[Wellington Grey]

Education is not about modern equipment. In fact modern equipment may seriously hinder education at times,

Agreed. I work as a teacher and for 99% of tasks, technology just gets in the way. I'm also horrified at the number of my fellow teachers who think the Internet is some magical panacea where they can just plop a class down in front of a computer, tell them 'research topic X' and the kids will actually learn something.

-Grey

Re:Not surprising

[Compholio]

There were 2 types of classes in college. Those that handed us out notes and went through a slide show and had us fill in some blanks and those that handed out nothing and wrote on the blackboard.

My university has recently implemented a third type, which the GP appears to be familiar with, where instructors use a tablet pc and a projector instead of a blackboard. I am actually on the committee for helping to introduce this technology and I can tell you that it is significantly different from using a slide show. There are several major advantages to using a tablet (writing on it, not as a slideshow) over using a blackboard:

• Ability to easily erase
• Ability to reposition text at will
• Ability to move on without erasing the board
• Ability to save the entire lecture as a PDF

In addition to that we have been experimenting with giving entire classes of students tablets. This then allows the instructor to ask students questions about the lecture (like "clickers"). However, by using open-ended questions where students respond in paragraph form, or by drawing out their answer, the professor can much more effectively gauge how students are learning.

Re:Not surprising

[Wellington Grey]

There were and still are teachers who do the same thing, only they handed the students a library instead of the internet. It isn't about technology, it is about teaching.

Except that teachers are rewarded by brainless administrators for 'using ICT in their lessons' and they get no such reward for going to the library.

-Grey