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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."
Kids don't learn Latin anymore
Because it has no practical application for 99.999% of them. There's a reason it's a dead language and it has nothing to do with computers.
Funny how kids used to do a lot better when schools didn't really care about kids' self-esteem and made them work diligently on paper. The focus on using computers to make things better is just a distraction from the fact that the average public school is literally just a tax-supported daycare center that provides some education.
So I went to visit my local high school in Georgia and I spent a little time talking with some teachers. While I was there they were setting up a presentation on a projector from a PC, it wasn't using powerpoint, rather some vastly inferior-looking custom software. Anyhow, I digress...
I was struck by how much it appeared to lock the teacher into the detail of the curriculum. It seemed to me that the main point of the presentation method was to confine what the teacher could say to the class.
My impression was that the technology was being used to micromanage teachers more than to enrich the learning experience for the students.
Nullius in verba
Nail guns allowed less skillful people to work as carpenters, to do an adequate job in situations where they would have not been able to do so before. Nail guns also allowed skilled carpenters to do simple jobs more easily and quickly.
If all you need is a wall frame of 2x4s, a carpenter of limited skill with a nailgun will do. But if you want fine furniture built, you need someone with more skills, who knows the properties of different sorts of wood and different types of joints and fasteners. Before nailguns, every carpenter knew these things.
I notice that TFA - like most in praise of computers in the classroom - makes no mention of test scores or any other metric that demonstrates that students are actually learning better ithis way than in more traditional classrooms.
I recommend Cliff Stoll's books Silicon Snake Oil and High Tech Heretic.
Worse, this system doesn't just use computers, it is totally reliant on them.
Says the principal in TFA, "Why would we ever buy a book when we can buy a computer? Textbooks are often obsolete before they are even printed." But that's not true: fundamental fields change slowly, a ten year old geometry or physics or art textbook will do quite well. And students can take them home, read them on the bus or under a tree, do homework anywhere - apparently this system pretty much requires kids to have computers at home. Grandma, who's uninterested in all these modern gadgets, picks you up after school and you stay at her house until your mom gets off work? Can't do homework while you wait, no computer.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
And following your logic we should not be teaching math at all just how to use a calculator.. See how silly following logic can be!
Its not that teaching math is outdated. Its that memorizing multiplication tables might be outdated.
The main point of modern math class is how to translate real life problems into numerical equations. Once you can do that, solving those equations is rather trivial.
My neighbor's kid was suspended from school for refusing to use his school-issued laptop to take notes. He preferred pen and paper.
He was telling me that several times per class, instruction grinds to a halt because of computer problems, or from the kids having difficulty drawing diagrams on the laptops amidst the text notes. It was also damn-near impossible to write down equations in math class, so he gave up and started using paper. When he refused to use the laptop, other kids followed, and he was ultimately suspended for insubordination and "gang activity" for trying to organize a civil protest to the policy that requires that they use the laptops.
If I ever have kids (and I probably won't because it would be cruel to bring a child into the world in its current state of affairs), they're either going to Montessori school, or be home-schooled.
Sure, now it's...my hard drive melted or the server's down.
Seriously? Kids are starting too young.
You're never too old to learn that you shouldn't depend on a remote system for files you definitely need for a presentation or in this case classwork. USB sticks got popular for a reason. That also removes the hard drive melt problem, it's quite hard to maintain that excuse when you could save to the USB stick which can be verified to malfunction or not.
I was part of my school's IT Department, and we had those computers locked down rather well. Each teacher could see what was happening on each student's monitors, and we had the net access very limited. However, the students kept finding new proxies, new ways of getting around the firewalls, and, most of all, they kept bringing in games on flash drives.
The main point of modern math class is how to translate real life problems into numerical equations. Once you can do that, solving those equations is rather trivial.
While that is the point of the math classes I took in high school, I'm not at all sure that's the best method to be teaching mathematics. My high school used the "Chicago Math" method of teaching, which focuses heavily on "real-life" examples and encourages heavy use of computers and calculators to ease computation.
It seemed like a pretty good method at the time, but when I got into the electrical engineering program in college, I found myself woefully under-prepared mathematically. I found that the de-emphasis on computation had caused my basic knowledge of mathematical formulae to atrophy. And, since math is cumulative, I found that I had a very difficult time catching up (especially in calculus), since my knowledge of basic algebraic principles was never developed properly. Indeed, this lack of basic skills led me to switch to the computer science program, since I found that discrete math and set theory were easier to learn, as I was learning them from first principles, making my lack of algebraic preparation less of a hindrance.
So, while its tempting to say that computation and practice are irrelevant, the fact remains that these things do matter, because its the practice that fixes the knowledge in the student's head. My father learned math in India, which has a much heavier emphasis on practice, and, even now, he's still much better at algebra and calculus than I am, because he's practiced it so much more than I have.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
As an engineer and a teacher,
Some people think doing long division is somehow better than using a calculator. Yet, I question this as you all 95% of people do is memorize the steps. You memorize the steps on what buttons to press on your calculator. You memorize the steps on how to do long division. Neither gains you any insights into division as a concept.
There is a 5% of more gifted students who actually understand how long division works and take some conceptual aspects from it in terms of number theory... but most don't.
One of the sad things is that using a calculator SHOULD permit teachers the time to drive home the concepts. This enables the students to know what they're doing when they're dividing and how they should apply it in real life. It's like teaching kids multiplication. Yet, they don't understand when to use it and they don't *grasp* the connection to say calculate the sales tax on something.
I personally spent much more time with number theory, number lines... than most do precisely because teaching to use a calculator is trivial... which BTW it is not :P I was amazed at the number of kids who have trouble with a calculator.
I'm not on my PC so this will be done as anon, but...
I'm an IT director for a school district... No matter what you do to those PC's, the kids will get around it. Why? The kids have all the time in the world to work against your best laid plans and on top of that, plenty of adults find blocking kids from doing 'X' inherently wrong and will go out of their way to help them (websites listing proxy servers and ways around content and use filtering software for instance).
If I had nothing better to do than keep kids from doing things with PC's they aren't supposed to be doing during class, I'd probably just be able to keep up... But I'd ahve no life and it would be sad...
I already do a fairly good job as in alot of cases the kids go the easier route and instead destroy the PC's when they don't want to work on what the teacher says to with them. I get more dead keyboards (missing keys, destryoed connectors, cut cables), than almost anything else... In the case of some laptops used in a mobile lab, in just 2 weeks I've had one laptop striped of all it's keys for it's built-in keyboard and another where the battery was forcibly removed... The funny part about those is how without suing parents we'll never get the money to replace the destroyed equipment... It's all written off and leads to higher replacement numbers...
Indeed it is... IF you've got the multiplication tables memorized...
I have a PhD in math, and I still don't have the multiplication tables memorized. I can multiply without problems, because these things are very easy to figure out. In fact, I thing that should my school require me to memorize the tables, I probably would not choose to study math. And if I did, I would probably be worse at it.
Learning is about making connections. Memorizing is about having the bits in place to connect. Education requires both.
True. However, after memorizing "the tables", how much space is there to make connections? There are number of fascinating connections related to multiplication that can be discovered after memorizing just a few simple rules. And after kids spend several months memorizing and drilling multiplication tables, how much time and how much desire is there to make connections?
AccountKiller
There is very little value in learning how to do things the old way when the new way is all that will ever be used. Try saying that to a historian or an Archaeologist. There is actually a lot of value in learning how things were done "the old way". Take photography for example. I learned Photoshop. Then I took a darkroom class. I understand concepts in Photoshop better because of my experience with earlier technology. Similar, just because I can program in Java, C++, or any other modern language, it doesn't mean that knowing assembler or hex are useless. I program better because I am familiar with them. Little value in the old ways? That's a very nearsighted view.
Actually they could just spend their time more wisely and directly learn the language they want in the first place.
I would disagree somewhat, partly because you make the assumption that Latin is just a stepping-stone to the language I REALLY want to learn. Don't forget that, although Latin is dead, there's a nearly endless back catalog of Latin literature that's worth reading (from as recently as the 19th century). Of course, if you master basic Latin, you'll have general reading knowledge of many other languages.
Your statement also implies an either/or approach -- either learn Latin or be 'wiser' and learn the language I really want to learn. The language I really wanted to learn was German, and I did. But my 4 years of Latin allow me to travel in Europe relatively painlessly. Would it have been 'wiser' for me to just learn Italian and try to extrapolate that to French, Spanish, or Portuguese? Maybe, but I would've missed out on some great literature.
Really, who's to say which is 'wiser'?
I remember reading of a program that studied the effects of teaching Latin. Not only did they do better in English, they also did better in history. Naturally, the program was cancelled.
My fiance, a highschool science teacher, recently ran an experiment for her specialization course. The project was designed to explore if technology can be used to support classroom learning (as opposed to the more common "idea" of replacing classroom teaching-- or when technology is just used for technology's sake)
The thesis was, basically, since students are already familiar with and enjoy using technology, the implementing a certain piece of technology would allow them to access resources they didn't have before, or would not comfortable using/accessing without a computer
She did this by setting up a forum on her website. The website already has a calender, class notes, helpful links, and a homework blog. The forum was intended to be a method for students to share resources (not solutions that would violate academic policy), and allow easier communication between peers and herself.
She gathered data in two ways: through two surveys (before the forum went online, and at the end of the semester), and through forum usage stats. The results were interesting.
There was a lot of interest in the forum before it went online, and that number stayed pretty much the same by the end of the semester. That means that those who weren't interested in the tech before didn't suddenly become interested simply because it was "eLearning". (Or, the disinterest rate and new interest rate balanced each other out perfectly. Same end result
By far, the most use of the forum was as a study aid. Every week there was a quiz or a test, with the quizzes based off student research on current science topics. The students were able to collaborate as a very loose "study group" online, pointing each other to helpful links to study resources. Forum usage stats absolutely skyrocketed the day before a quiz, specifically on the "study" threads. In fact, the maximum usage per week always fell on the day before a quiz.
The second most useful feature was the Articles section, where she or students could post links to interesting science articles, and discuss them (though the majority of the use was posting new articles, or reading them. Very little discussion)
One of the most interesting results came when the she marked their practical test based on their pig-dissection. Traditionally, this is the "student killer" and has a very low average-- mainly because the students can't really take their work (dead pig) home on this one. The forum contained several resources that were not available in previous years, including a link to a virutal dissection website, tons of dissection and anatomy articles, and even a series of digital photos taken of the dissection by one of the students. The average for the test across three sections of the course were significantly higher than previous years-- and most interesting was that the average mark for the top 8 forum posters was significantly above the class average. Of course it is impossible to say if increased forum usage made them better students, or if they were good students to begin with and as such were more likely to use a classroom resource more heavily.
Surprisingly, the forum was very seldom used as a method to contact her or other students. There was an area for posting questions that could be answered publicly (ie: to ask clarifying questions about projects, etc). It wasn't used. The surveys showed that over 98% of the students preferred to get this information either from a static source (her website), or just asking face-to-face later. (This may be due to her two classes being very organized, and not waiting for the last minute to get information they need to do their work).
The data all showed that students didn't want the technology to replace classroom communication-- they prefer face-to-face. They didn't replace any of their study or communication habits with the forum simply because it was there. If there was something they could do offline or online, they would often do it offline (and not online simply because they could). But when it came to things they couldn't do offline, such as the pig dissection study, or form geographically disperse study-groups, they did so. Things that were new features that added onto or improved their classroom experience were embraced.
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