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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."
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Its not that teaching math is outdated. Its that memorizing multiplication tables might be outdated.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.