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How Technology Changes Classrooms
Corrupt writes "Just ask 11-year-old Jemella Chambers. She is one of 650 students who receive an Apple Inc laptop each day at a state-funded school in Boston. From the second row of her classroom, she taps out math assignments on animated education software that she likens to a video game."
Forget flying cars; this is how the mysteeeeeerious future is supposed to be. I still remember sitting in E&M class back in the day, thinking that if, instead of static images drawn on chalkboard, the charges and fields were animated and interactive, it'd all sink in much quicker. Ditto pretty much everything that has to do with classical mechanics.
Maybe this already exists, but I'd always hoped for a good intersection of games and education that actually encourages students to learn in a lecture setting. "Edutainment" has generally been pretty awful, but I bet there's a way we could integrate learning into an MMORPG such that you can (say) use a knowledge of kinetics to advance your character.
jenious1: I now understand Newton's Laws, so I built a catapult that demolished your castle. Kekekeke!
!pnk101: o yeah??? well im still beating u up at lunch u nerd!!!!1
jenious1: Snap!
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
While I think computer usage in this particular school may be a little overboard, I don't see it as a major problem overall. Kids use computers all the time, and are starting at a younger and younger age. Computers can be a very good tool for these sorts of things, and I'm not sure how they can really retard basic skills other than possibly handwriting. In that regard, kids could hardly end up with worse handwriting than most of their parents, even if they never write anything by hand outside of their handwriting classes in Kindergarten through 3rd grade.
Most kids in my experience will use computer learning games because they're more interesting than long sheets of math problems. However, if given the choice between that same computer game and, say, a particularly interesting worksheet (maybe one of those where you color a picture different colors based on the answers to the math problems), the choice is not always so clear cut.
The basic upshot is that kids will learn best if they're engaged in the material. A computer game can engage them, but a particularly good teacher or a particularly good set of handouts can engage them just as well. A good education will come from a mix of various techniques to keep the kids from becoming bored with any one thing and disengaging from the process.
As for kids not learning Latin anymore, I think that's just because Latin is not particularly useful to anyone not in a specialized field (like medicine or law), and is thus not worth spending a ton of time on in the earlier grades. If you're interested in joining a profession that uses Latin, or planning on competing in a spelling bee, you'll learn Latin eventually. Otherwise, you're going to be bored out of your mind in a class you have no use for, and will eventually forget most of it anyway.
"Thanks to technology, people are graduating without even knowing how to construct complete sentences. And also thanks to technology, those same people can now go on to be "editors" for major websites."
Or it could be that most schools do not teach grammar or language structure at all, I know when I was in school we never got any of that crap. We got a few mentions of 'noun' vs 'verb', etc. But nothing like a lecture or classes on proper sentence structure.
At the secondary level, it seems to me that the impact in the technology itself. For instance, learning to use a teletype machine did not provide a long time marketable skill, but it did provide an opportunity to learn a novel device, which was cool. It made me learn how to learn. Likewise when one might learn to use a EEPROM programmer, vi, a drill, a saw, or even drive a car. All of these are learning the technology, and motivated students will learn how the technology works, and how it does not work, which is what we want anyway.
This continues to college until technology is mostly used to help us learn more efficiently. An computer index can be more efficient than a printed index. Typing paper in LaTeX can be more efficient that on a typewriter or in lower tech word processing program. The list goes on.
What I think is really important, though, is that kids are allowed to become familiar with technology, and it's use. I see classrooms where there is no play time with machines. I see primary school kids being taught by rote the parts of a computer, which little context of what a computer does. I see teachers telling students to open the internet by clicking IE. In this way technology changes the classroom very little, as we are still teaching facts with little context in reality.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Latin is a great resource if you want to learn other romance languages
Actually they could just spend their time more wisely and directly learn the language they want in the first place.
and it is the language of western science.
Funny, since most of the scientists I've ever met or worked with don't know speak Latin. Apparently it's not as big of a deal as your conflation attempts to make it.
I recently saw a demo of a classroom tool. It played upon the peer aspect of a classroom, rather than teacher-to-student. It allowed the professor, with a tablet PC, to actively write on powerpoint slides, save the edits, etc. Nothing new there. But from the student perspective, anyone with a tablet could take their own notes the same way, watching along with the slides on their own computer (those without a tablet could type as it was web-based).
In addition, there was a blogging feature -- a few students with tablet PCs could become "bloggers" for the class, and students could tune their browsers to the blogging students' pages, and watch what they were writing.
Peer respect kept it mostly to good notes but the professor said that even if she heard the class laughing at something the blogger wrote (she never actually looked at the blogs), at least the kids were awake and possibly engaged in some part of the content. More than that, it let others consider parts of the lecture they might not have before -- sort of a group collaboration, but without the professor. A blogger might note something on a slide you hadn't thought of yet, or do a quick visible search on a word you hadn't really focused on, but upon reading the definition, more made sense.
It was really interesting and I felt a very different way of performing in the classroom. Kids staying engaged is professor's number one concern -- not every teacher is dynamic and exciting. Using a tool like this kept the kids interested because it was what they were used to: reading other kids' notes and perspectives on topics.
The tool was put out by UC San Diego:
Ubiquitous Presenter
I was 'gifted' on the computer (as I am sure most of the people on here who are around my age were). I used the computer for things I was not supposed to. I circumvented the "deep freeze" lock they had on their systems in grade 5.
I as banned from school computer use until High School (which is grade 9-12 here).
I would have performed the exact same with or without a computer. In high school it pained me to use their computers so I did most of it the old fashioned way. When it came to looking up obscure things I couldn't find in the Library I'd have a look see at home on my own computer in my "comfort zone" of Linux.
I graduated two years ago. I've been self-employed since and making pretty good money. I incorporate Linux and open source software into everything I can... as long as it's the right tool for the right job, that is.
Yeah, yeah... Linux shill. Be on the lookout.
Memorizing the multiplication table is not outdated yet. It might never be. Me being able to quickly, accurately estimate totals in the grocery store is quite a benefit. Being able to factor polynomials without having to use my calculator was also handy.
My state (Utah) dropped the times tables from the 3rd and 4th grade math core for a couple of years. Disaster ensued immediately.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Bi-nary, Dec-imal, Hex-a-dec-imal... Right. Latin has nothing to do with computers.
Abacus is spelled phonetically.
No it isn't.
If I'm correct (I'm not a native English speaker) the first a is an 'a' while the second a is 'ei'. There are several more than 5 vowel sounds in English. It's just that you use only 5 characters for them. Even simple words like "race" are mind-boggling - the a is actually an 'ei', the c is actually 's' and the final e is mute!
For nearly-phonetic writing look at Slavic languages (there are some exceptions, like word-final w, but those are at least consistent), or at relatively modern scripts like Vietnamese.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I had the opposite experience, to my benefit. I went to a Catholic HS which was very traditional, and the highest level math class was "Elementary Mathematical Analysis", which was heavy trig with some differentials near the end. No calculators allowed except for particular items. Mightily we bitched, not being able to take "Pre-Calc", but the nun said "Trust me - this will better prepare you for what you will face in college calculus". So we learned what all the trig functions meant from the most basic level: First day "This is a circle".
Fast forward 1 year, and I get to Lehigh for engineering and am in Calc 21. First third of the course is...analytical trig, and the test started with "Put away your calculators; if you know what you are doing you should not need them." Followed by wails of protest, and a few smiles from me and some fellow classmates.
Similar was 7th and 8th grade math - we memorized decimal equivalents of ever fraction from 1/2 to 1/12, and selected ones up to 1/32. We hated it at the time, but I probably use those more than any other bit of grade school math.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The problem is that your response displays reason, which has little place in the bureaucracy and money sink that is the modern public school system. After all, why use a crummy old textbook when you can get a new one for only $35-50 (times the number of kids, times how many books each needs).
I remember reading a truly mind-boggling article about the textbook development and selection process, but I can't find it now. If somebody else knows about this, please post a link.
As to the "bureaucracy and money sink" stuff, I highly recommend that any parent read the free online book: The Underground History of American Education. It gives a very interesting perspective on the whole public school system, and raises some compelling and disturbing issues about it.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.