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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."
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.
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
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.