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What Tech Should Be In a Fifth-Grade Classroom?
theodp writes "While going about my day,' writes Slate's Linda Perlstein, 'I sometimes engage in a mental exercise I call the Laura Ingalls Test. What would Laura Ingalls, prairie girl, make of this freeway interchange? This Target? This cell phone? Some modern institutions would probably be unrecognizable at first glance to a visitor from the 19th century: a hospital, an Apple store, a yoga studio. But take Laura Ingalls to the nearest fifth-grade classroom, and she wouldn't hesitate to say, "Oh! A school!"' Very little about the American classroom has changed since Laura Ingalls sat in one more than a century ago, laments Perlstein, echoing a similar rant against old-school schooling by SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. Slate has launched a crowdsourcing project on the 21st-century classroom, asking readers to design a fifth-grade classroom that takes advantage of all that we have learned since Laura Ingalls' day about teaching, learning, and technology."
Supercomputers.
Or at least something useful.
It'll probably only be a distraction.
Computers, iPads, iPhones, cell phones, iPods, you name it. Anything that gets in the way of learning stuff.
We want to make this the most distracted, empty-headed generation ever, don't we?
First thing, ban calculators. They aren't necessary before needing to deal with sines and cosines.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
webcams
Schools are currently employed primarily to create football teams and consumers. Policy is the problem and technology will mostly likely be used to further that policy.
There is pavement everywhere. This was not so back then. You stayed pretty much local and long distance travel was dangerous.
Agriculture on a massive scale. How many people grew their food back then? How many today? Yet we still need to eat. Fossil fertilized foods, artificially irrigated and engineered crops, mechanically (fossil fuel powered) harvested, transported by diesel trucking to factories to be processed and frozen and shipped around the world in colorful packages. *This* is the single biggest change. with car-infrastructure in second place.
Computers and entertainment at a fingertip is peanuts compared to the stuff that allows you to *have* that spare time in the first place, and the materials to build them.
Extended youth is pretty important, but seeing how conservative kids are these days it's almost irrelevant. Out of university at 22, married by 23.
Oh, and the whole "bachelor's is the new high school" is also a new thing.
Nothing is more important with kids than discipline. I say every 5th classroom needs a good paddle, though basically any tech that you can hit students with is high on my list.
Nothing has managed to replace the blackboard (and its more modern equivalent the whiteboard). I have some first hand observations from junior changing 3 schools in 3 years. The lower the tech in the classroom - the better the teaching.
To put it in other terms - if the kids need an interactive soundtrack for slideware that can be bought from amazon for a fraction of the cost of a teacher.
Further on this from the perspective of teaching older students and explaining to adults.
I have met only a handful of people who can have a laptop open on their desk in front of them and at the same time pay full attention to something complex happening on the whiteboard. I have met hundreds of people who have no problem dividing their attention between handwritten notes and explanation on the board. I would not be surprised if it is something related to motor control and short term memory similar to the well known phenomenon of "death by powerpoint".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The reason schools haven't changed is because reading texts and listening to teachers is still the best methods of teaching (see college). You don't need supercomputers to read - a book will do. And a teacher is still human. Both exercise the brain to train it to form connections.
I think we've wasted a lot of money buying computers that, frankly, did little good. In my school the computers were mostly just an electronic version of a book (sit in front of the machine and read text). They could have saved several million and just used books.
Of course computers are useful tools for writing papers & accessing google but that's all they are - just supplementary tools, not the center of the classroom.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Classrooms today that are equipped with computers, smartboards, and whatnot don't seem to be doing much better in terms of basic literacy and reasoning than schools equipped with little more than slates and chalk a hundred years ago.
I'm not saying that there isn't something positive that we could do with more tech in the classroom, but the current tech doesn't seem to be helping all that much. Tech for the sake of tech is just another expense.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Wire up some inputs and outputs, and let the kids program (with adult help) an arduino robot. Think "so what should it do when it sees motion? Sound an alrm? Blink a light?"
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Teach like in the olden days
Or at least, nothing fancier than a microscope or an electronic keyboard. Definitively no computing equipment.
What's the goal? To improve the education process or to make sure that Laura Ingalls cannot recognize it as a school?
What would she recognize? The blackboard? The alphabet and numbers in a row at the top of the front wall? A lot of child-sized desks and one or two adult-sized desks?
Until we develop direct neural input technology and start pumping information straight into the brains of the students, the classroom will always look like a classroom.
So stop worrying about how it LOOKS. Form follows function.
If you want to improve it, look at the various experimental schools that have higher graduation rates and where the students score higher than the average.
What's wrong with tech in education isn't so much the problem with distractions is with teaching.
Tech based distractions are nothing with a good, engaging teacher at the front of the class, even when the subject matter is boring.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Teach them how to think for themselves first.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Gotta agree. We didn't have word processors when I went to school. The best I had was a manual typewriter.
Having a word processor would have resulted in me getting my papers done sooner ... but not better.
Now, finishing them faster would have been a better thing for me personally. But it would not have improved my education at all. What helped my education was my desire to read everything I could find.
Which is why I still prefer books today. A book can survive a lot more than a laptop or Kindle can.
I don't find this argument very convincing.
That's good if you view school as a vocational training site.
Homeschooling is good. But mostly in the sense of getting parents involved in their children's school work. Most of the parents turn the job over to the teachers.
In my view, school teaches you the basics. Your parents help with that teaching (and include their own moral / religious views on it) and THEN you work on vocational training.
And the basics include the ability to do basic math. Even if you need a pencil and paper to do it. Calculators give answers. They don't tell you if you've phrased the problem correctly.
Cattle prods!
n/t
So how is that different from vocational training?
You might want to reconsider that in light of how badly the average person does on basic science knowledge. For example, evolution.
Schools are currently employed primarily to create football teams and consumers. Policy is the problem and technology will mostly likely be used to further that policy.
+1 Well said
Laura Ingalls would also recognize a wheel. That doesn't mean that wheels should be "more modern" to make them harder to recognize.
Well, there are a few things that really should be on the list. As demonstrated by Bletchley Park's teaching centre, tech that lets you get into the low-level details is best. On this basis, I suggest the following:
As you can see, some of these COULD have been done in Laura Ingles' time. They weren't, not because the stuff wasn't there but because the schools at the time (and the parents at the time) were rather bone-headed. Passing tests and not being punished were then (as now) the important things. Knowing stuff was an optional extra. Getting a person to the point where they COULD know more was not merely optional but actually discouraged. Farms needed hands and getting kids too smart might make them move out.
In addition to tech, I'd advise teaching 2-3 languages, or anything else that is high volume, low density (ie: builds up lots of neurons but doesn't require a hell of a lot of connections between them), as the ages 11-18 especially is when the brain's growth is at a maximum. Forcing the brain to expand at that time allows the person to learn more later on. (Certain knowledge requires lots of cells, other types of knowledge - usually the important stuff - requires lots of connections. Having lots of extra brain cells means you can build more of these connections so can learn more of the important stuff. It also seems to impact how quickly the brain ages later in life, with more cells equaling a longer time at peak mental capacity.) Languages seem to be the best for creating extra space. Doesn't matter if they're never used later on, since they're not being learned to be directly useful but rather to malloc out a large heap for the brain to work with. Endangered languages are therefore the best, since they will require the most additional room - a language only becomes endangered if so few relate to it that it's not useful in and of itself. But that's exactly the property you want for this brain padding. You want something that forces the brain to make as much extra space as possible, so the fewest possible shortcuts the brain can take the better.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What we need is less technology in Elementary School. Not more.
No, we need better, more sensible use of technology. This does not necessarily mean less but it does require teachers who both understand technology AND how to use it properly to enhance teaching. For example, several years ago, I was in doing a demo of an orrery to show my kid's primary school class about the solar system, phases of the moon and seasons and finished off with showing them Google Earth. The teacher and kids were amazed and I quickly had them doing trips to anywhere in the world, seeing the Pyramids, flying down the Grand Canyon etc. It's an excellent way to teach geography and get the kids interested in learning.
Sadly though I more typically see teachers using calculators so early it hampers development of basic arithmetic skills, or playing games which are little more than interactive ads for toys (WebKinz!) "because it teaches them how to use the web"! This is not entirely their fault either when you look at the quality of the technology training they get - although some of it is. I being, temporarily, on the technology subgroup of my daughter's school council the overwhelming feeling I got was that the school knew technology was "good" and so they wanted some but had no clue (or plan) for how they would use it.
Until we can correct this ignorance and get teachers better educated in the use of technology (there are some out there, although these are usually not the ones involved in training others!) it is hard to argue that there should be any technology in a grade 5 classroom because if it is used in ignorance it is far more likely to get in the way of learning rather than enhancing it.
Computers are tools. They're not magic learning devices. If there's a use for them in a school, by all means they should be used. If you have a belief that computers on their own will aid learning then you end up with a solution looking for a problem.
The teacher's two greatest tools are charisma and attention. Charisma compels attention from the students. Attention TO the students reinforced and rewards it.
Get students fired up and they will teach themselves and each other.
Neither charisma nor attention are visible as features of the classroom. They're features of the teacher.
I piss off bigots.
Seriously, what need is there? Just to look fancy? Gather dust on the desks and in storage rooms? I can't think of anything that would require or even benefit from the use of a computer or anything technologically past about 1980 (hell, past 1950) that came up in elementary or middle school, except possibly for special-ed students (and mind you I was one, though partially mainstreamed).
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
How often are you going to see the problem already reduced to 3*27 without the solution being included?
Only in textbooks.
In the real world, you need to have a decent understanding of math in order to understand how to phrase the problem in the correct way.
If you have 4 apples and 3 oranges and you give someone 1 apple, how many apples do you have?
You'd be amazed at how many people would read that and say 6.
Without the ability to handle the "easy" stuff in your head, you cannot move to the more abstract issues found in the real world. You will not be able to recognize extraneous information and remove it from the equation.
That is why you learn to do 3*27 in your head.
The actual list, as voted on by a group of 5th grade boys:
Volcano (Geology)
Explosives test range (Chemistry)
Jet Packs (Physics)
A Shark tank with walkway and trap door(Marine Biology, Political Science)
Space Shuttle (Astronomy)
Remote control full size cars and ramps (Physics)
5-gigawatt lasers mounted on robot tanks (Recess)
This sentence no verb.
Well. The author's careful use of the word prairie indicates that it might be talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie (which I've barely heard of and never read), who died in 1957. Or it might instead be talking about Laura Houghtaling Ingalls, pilot, who died in 1967 (who I hadn't heard of). Either way it's a really sodding useless metaphor. Rule #1 of pop culture: make sure your audience knows what the hell you're talking about...
DISCLAIMER: I am writing this from a student's point of view. So this might be completely unhelpful. Or even more helpful than the viewpoint of a teacher. Either way, just take this with a grain of salt.
What's important is not necessarily the technology, but methods of teaching. Regardless of available tech, if you can get students interested in a subject, they will succeed. However, if you just give students a laptop, or a graphing calculator, they're going to be interested in the piece of equipment as opposed to the lesson. In fact, it will easily make your lesson less interesting. Therefore, the point is to use your resources to add to the lesson, not detract from it. Technology, and even computing equipment, can be used, but the way it is used is more important.
For example, if you're teaching about graphs of trig functions for the first time, it doesn't hurt to have students do something as simple as graphing the six functions on Wolfram|Alpha usin a smartboard and figuring out, "hey, the graphs of the cofunctions are just translations and/or reflections of the original trig function." In that case, their attention would be drawn towards the front, and they would actually be paying attention. Also, it would help them figure out things like that on their own.
However, if you tell them to graph it on their personal little TI-84's, it's almost as if you have given them an excuse to go off in their own world and start playing BlockDude on their calculators; their attention is immediately yanked away from you, the teacher, and toward some tiny little device in their hands, that will be a crutch, a distraction, and therefore a complete detriment to learning. Also, TI-84's just suck, because the time it takes to learn all the different functions, as well the time taken to input functions and such, is ridiculous for the small gains. Tech shouldn't be that (relatively) difficult to use and that easily distracting at the same time. And the very fact that you can put games on there makes is unsuitable for the classroom setting.
Hehe. I guess in certain cases, the tech used does make a difference. If you use tech that is easily used for distracting purposes (that iPhone that she's texting with? or that Mac that he's checking his FaceBook wall on?) it renders all you efforts to hold your students' attention useless. (Even if the class is so intricate that not paying attention for a second will cost them significant knowledge of the subject) It seems like common sense, doesn't it? Apparently most of my teachers didn't seem to get that.
Of course, in any discussion regarding technology and learning, the issue of PowerPoints comes up. As far as I'm concerned, teachers need a lesson on using powerpoint properly. Or maybe 30 lessons. Teachers more often than not make the fatal error of putting up every bullet that they're talking about in the powerpoint. This, again, detracts attention from you. Seriously, you could just put the powerpoint online and let us students take notes on it on our own time. There's a great powerpoint (haha) about this very issue at http://www.slideshare.net/GlobalGossip/steal-this-presentation-5038209
Quite simply, I agree with "pedantic bore". Tech for its own sake is useless for real learning. It's the method of getting students' attention toward a subject that really makes a positive difference.
There's seems to be several good ideas suggested.
1) Participation is important.
A classroom can't be structured to encourage students to complete work and for parents to get involved with their childrens' education, but that's the most important part. Similarly, a teacher must also be involved into education. This latter thing we can do something about with a classroom.
2) Smaller class size is better.
There was an interesting proposal to put two people into a classroom, a teacher and a helper, while capping class size at 20 people. I think the author is unrealistic about the cost per student, but it's a good idea.
3) Technology and training acquired since the 19th century can make learning more comfortable and address to some degree learning and physical disabilities.
There was a good idea about adjustable desks in there. Also, we have pretty good how to make classrooms more conducive to learning through good lighting, sound proofing, etc. Also, allowing for changes in classroom geometry and similar flexibility allows a classroom to accommodate a teacher or class's wishes (even if those things aren't terribly useful, it gives a bit more control over the environment to the teacher). Awareness of learning and physical disabilities (even something as simple as being left-handed can cause problems in the classroom) and technological fixes for some of those problems means that a number of students can participate more fully in the classroom who'd otherwise have more trouble or even be left behind or isolated.
4) For many important forms of education, technology has yet to provide a better solution either by cost or by effectiveness.
A number of ideas avoid trying fancy technology in the classroom. For example, lecturing with a blackboard is still comparable to any similar means of transferring knowledge from single person to many (unless the teacher is handicapped, in which case technological assistance can help) and has a lot lower overhead (cost and equipment). Physical education is barely touched by technology (though there's a great deal of knowledge and ideas now on how to exercise).
5) Vocational part of education (the "hands on" part) is heavily dependent on technology.
OTOH, if you want your class to get down with an Arduino (or other such things), you can't do that with a blackboard.
What should be in a fifth grade classroom. In most places, a computer for the teacher and a decent printer.
Beyond that, whatever the teacher wants and the school can afford. (Which may be nothing). Teachers run their classrooms pretty much whatever way they please. There are lots of reasons for that -- most of them good.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I don't understand that reply.
And who then pass that limitation onto their children. Which is why we need public schools. So that the children at least have access to the information that their parents did not learn or rejected.
PARTICULARLY if those subjects are considered "useless" by the parents.
Which is where school differs from vocational training.
except I explain modern technology to Benjamin Franklin. It's a fun way to look at the modern world (and you learn to question your assumptions. Even tried to explain TV to an 18th century scientist?)
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I'm a programmer and database admin by trade. I also think our children should learn about computers in school. But what schools have been doing lately is insane. The only computers in the school should be in the computer lab. Cellphones and PDAs should be banned outright. Kids should be learning with pencils, paper and rulers. All essays should be required to be hand written. Computer Science classes should be mandatory but kept completely separate from other activities. In school we are teaching kids logic, how to solve problems, etc... Computers make that easier. Exactly what we don't want. It should be very difficult to solve a problem in school. Once you've got it down the hard way, then you can use the shortcut. Until then computers are just hampering the learning process.
But they have to be different language groups. Learning English and German is good ... but not as good as learning English and Japanese. Because English and Japanese are less alike than English and German and, therefore, do not re-use the same connections.
don't use a test to rank teachers / tech the test as that will just lead to cheating.
A switch. Preferable one from a sapling.
safety and bigger routes + the lack of late papers kill kids doing it.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
From one shadow citizen to another, I find that an excellent observation.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
1) Cell phone jamming hardware like they use in some theaters.
2) Lightbulbs
3) Whiteboards
4) Ergonomically appropriate chairs and desks
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
"Another reason is that no one has yet proved that better spaces mean better education. No matter how enthusiastically Cheryl Hines touts the test scores after her upcoming NBC show, School Pride, made over a Compton, Calif., elementary school, no solid research proves that student achievement is affected by physical surroundings. Many of our nation’s top-performing schools are getting the job done in rectangles filled with desks."
I've been a school teacher now for seven years, going on my eighth. Not only am I a math teacher, but I'm also the technology coordinator at our small rural school. And as I'm reading through the posts, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one here who believes that technology is no savior to the classroom.
I was about to respond with my own post, but I'd rather reply to the idea started with the parent comment:
What's the goal? To improve the education process or to make sure that Laura Ingalls cannot recognize it as a school?
This should be the ultimate goal of teachers everywhere, to improve the education process. And if computers do exactly that, then let's put them in the hands of every student. But do computers really do that? If so, where's the proof? I've seen computers in the classroom now for fifteen years, and I was there with them in the classroom for four of them. If they were so fantastic, wouldn't we be seeing positive gains by now?
Sadly, there is little proof. Technology has changed so rapidly, there has been little opportunity to draw a positive or negative conclusion about a particular technology before society labels it old-school. (In fact, few thorough studies have actually been done on educational technology. There is a really good article here that discusses this further.)
So, to anyone who says that classrooms haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human brain changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way the brain learns now as opposed to 100 years ago? As a third grade teacher at my school once said, "It's amazing how much a child can learn when you hand them a popsicle stick dipped in molasses." I say stick to the field trips, the classroom projects, the crayons, and the Elmer's glue. Let a child experience our world, rather than just view it through a monitor.
This idiotic "Laura Ingalls Test" is utterly pointless. Some things--- including teaching elementary basics of reading, writing, math, etc.--- remain the same over the years because the efficient use of these things requires no additional technological complication. Laura Ingalls would also still recognize a kitchen table, a fancy restaurant, and a pair of fucking work boots in the modern age because the basics of such things simply do not change. Really, this article reeks of the same tripe we had to hear back when it was television that was going to revolutionize education. A TV in every classroom! It will change everything!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Can we also reintroduce rote memorization of things like multiplication tables and addition tables, please?
I went to a store where a young woman accidentally pressed the wrong button on the cash register, the proceeded to hand me back the wrong change. (In my favor by about 4 dollars.) I tried to point out that the change she was handing me was incorrect; I shouldn't get about 8 dollars back on a 6 dollar purchase when I hand her a 10--but she pointed to the cash register, insisting that the cash register was correct. What really bothered me was when I said "but 10 minus 8 is not 6", I may as well switched to ancient greek given the blank expression on her face.
I believe we should not introduce calculators until we get to trigonometry--and then only to calculate sines and cosines. I wish we could reintroduce slide rules instead; to understand how to use a slide rule for sines and cosines requires basic knowledge of certain trigonometric relationships--and using a slide rule would reinforce those relationships every time the student sees the C, D, S and T scales.
Newer technology makes it extremely easy to automate doing of certain operations. But the problem is if you don't have the multiplication tables (up to 12x12) in your head, and you don't have an intuitive sense of numbers and trigonometric operations that you get from having used a slide rule or doing certain operations by hand, then how can you possibly know if the answer is correct, or if you didn't just punch in the wrong thing?
The same thing with history: I'd happily exchange the "feel good" movements in history and social studies for rote memorization of dates and facts (to help pin major events in a fixed historic framework), then augment understanding of these periods through historic tellings of relevant periods of history. And emphasize the core historic events, don't just pull selected (but historically minor) incidents out of the timeline just so you can make different racial groups feel good about themselves. Teaching history is about giving a sense of what came before, not about some sort of nihilist "self esteem building" exercise.
Bottom line: The cold hard reality is that the fifth graders during Laura Ingalls's period got a much better education than fifth graders are getting today. And with the presence of computer technology in the home, it seems to me there is no reason why fifth graders should have any exposure in the school system until perhaps high school.
The mechanism is independent, but yes whatever mechanism you choose will have some sort of "gaming" ability from the teacher.
Of course if it's a test you don't test with that teacher, you test when they enter the next "phase". And compare their performance with the test they took when entering that teachers phase. So the incentive for the teacher would be to harm their performance if they want to cheat the system.
Switching to electronic materials only works if all the materials the classroom needs are available in that format. Otherwise,,, you're just making kids carry around a laptop computer in addition to a backpack full of books, that was already heavy to begin with.
As long as (USA) textbook companies refuse to provide electronic versions of their books, you're not going to see any technological changes in the classroom, particularly of younger students. Many textbook companies provide additional supplemental material, but refuse to offer full e-book versions at all {even though the book EDITING is done electronically anyway...}. Internet connections are common but have turned out to be of rather little use; you can't study anything online but porn and viagra.
I used to say that the Federal government should force textbook companies doing business with public schools to provide e-versions if requested.
Now the Libertarian in me no longer agrees.
In the long run, it would just be much simpler to make a Federal law that declares converting hard copies to e-formats as fair use.
~
The Stepford Teachers!!!!!!!
kids arriving on a big yellow school bus.
Central heating + air conditioning, standard office scale lighting.
Ball point pens, Crayons, coloring books, + art & crafts activities.
A grade school band/music/choir program...
A professionally staffed school cafeteria.
A TV and video tape player in every class.
A phone in every class.
School library with couple of thousand kids books.
Baseball diamonds + soccer fields + basketball courts, etc
Professionally staffed school office including nurse.
Xerox machines,
All teachers having University degrees + state certified teaching credentials,
State wide testing to monitor every kid's progress.
As a long time technology coordinator I certainly have doubts about some tech in the classroom, but I can and have pressed for presentation hardware. It really seems to make the classroom less boring for the students. I was a bored student, so I tend to focus on that ;)
Epson Brightlinks (projector and electronic whiteboard) are full of win for example. I'm not a fan of Accelerated Reader, but like Accelerated Math quite a bit. We have suffered with some oversold solutions (I won't name Earobics or A+). Over the last 15 years our school has become recognized by the state for excellence and I like to think the proper application of technology is part of that. Parents that support student education is still the most important key to success but great teachers and reliable technology ARE important in the 21st century.
First, we got better nutrition. This helps brains. Yay!
Then, we changed the evolutionary selection pressure in a HUGE way. 100 years might not be all that long, but we're facing selection pressure like we've never had before: the sudden emergence of effective birth control. If your brain leads you to have "success" with birth control, you are STRONGLY selected against. If your brain leads you to "fail" at birth control, then your descendents will populate the world. There are a few other selection factors at work here too: kids don't have a tendency to starve without a father because of child support and welfare, so there is no evolutionary downside to getting pregnant by a man who won't stick around.
The article mentions that a classroom has not changed for the last century, and Laura Ingalls would instantly recognize one. The article writer seems to consider this some sort of disadvantage, without considering that form should follow function. In other words, a classroom is virtually identical as a 19th century classroom because teaching methods have not changed that much since that time (meaning a teacher telling and showing things to a bunch of students).
Classrooms are clearly adequate for their current purpose, and they will be unless some other way of teaching is found. Instead of changing the classroom, making it inadequate for the current teaching methods, the article writers should concentrate on more efficient teaching methods, and the changes in classroom design will come as soon as the need arises.
GPG 0x1B479C78
Yeah, the morning papers are delivered at 4 AM or thereabouts; I've noticed them arrive to drop it off when I've been staying up way too late (which is way too often, but that's another issue entirely)
BTW, I actually remember one of the neighbor kids (teenager really) losing the gig once the local late paper went away.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
My daughter is attending an online public school, a kind of charter school, for third grade. Part of the curriculum is online, but most of the actual work is still done with pencil and paper. So far we're loving it, but there are challenges. I found out after a couple of weeks that she regarded her online tests as seriously as she did playing a game on the computer. She hadn't realized it counted the same as any other test. I think we've fixed that misconception now.
I love that all of the math is still done with paper and pencil. Concepts are taught on the computer, but there's no calculator for them to figure out problems on the computer, and the instructions tell us to work out problems on paper.
The big advantage is that it allows her to learn more subjects than most regular public schools can handle anymore. She gets math, language arts, science, history, art, and then gets to choose between music, Latin, Spanish or French, and older kids may also choose to learn Chinese. This is much better than what my local public school offers at the third grade level, where they ignore science and history almost completely, never mind art, music or anything like that.
I think the program we're in does a good job of using the computer as a tool, rather than something to teach shortcuts sooner than students need them. The work is very challenging.
I don't know that this program would work well in a traditional classroom. It's great as an option for homeschooling, as far as I'm concerned.
I wouldn't want a program that didn't have a lot of hands on work and work on paper. You don't learn things well enough that way, so far as I can tell.
Those are the most important skills I've ever learned. My parents taught me them, not the school system. The problems I see in our school system are three-fold: writing, research, science, and sports. First, writing. And by writing, I don't mean handwriting, cursive, etc., that's a dying business. I mean writing documents, such essays, technical documents, articles, etc. This has to be done on a computer, like it or not. Pen and paper is just too slow and too inefficient for the purpose of writing massive papers. It will be expensive too. It will take forever to grade the student papers - ask a professor. Second, research. Students have to learn how to use google, libraries, wikipedia(!) and other tools that can teach them things. If students don't know how to learn on their own, they cannot function in today's society. Third, science. We don't teach science. We teach chemistry, biology and physics, but we never really teach science. Students have to learn the real principles of science. How do you design an experiment? What criteria invalidate a study? What methods can evaluate something? They have to be able to answer these questions. I want second graders asking people what the control condition is. Fourth, sports. Get rid of them. All of them. Sports don't serve any purpose in school. They waste time, money, and create a culture in which people who can throw a ball around are the most valuable. They also are causing obesity, not preventing it, because, students only spend 16 minutes active in gym class. If you believe that the causes of obesity are inactivity, you should push to get rid of PE classes. You could get better results if you ripped out all the sports, shortened the school day, and let kids just play in the newly freed time.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
they should be building their own crystal radio sets - they still need to get the 101 of what they are using with wifi and cell-phones.
The first piece of high tech equipment students should be introduced to is a digital calculator for the calculation of trignometric functions and the rest of the elementary functions. These should most certainly NOT be allowed in the primary school cycle
It's ridiculous that kinds in primary school aren't dealing with trignometric functions. We are just being lazy underachievers when we allow students to be relearning the 4 basic operations in high school. I have an in-law who took a beginning algebra class in college. WTF!!!, but most people are worse!!!
Calculus is something you should master by age 12 at the latest.
I wasted so many years of my life being taught math that I already knew. It feels like a crime that I was made to wait until 8th grade algebra before things got to be tolerably fast enough. The brain changes with time; adults tend to have more difficulty learning. It hurts to think how much better I would be at math had I had the opportunity to learn more of it while still young.
I can still see the analogy though; a lot of the general structure looks similar even if a lot of specific objects are new (and a lot of what you mentioned is back-end, albeit important back-end)
Funny you should mention baseball diamonds...although 1850 is a bit early, the game of baseball today is fundamentally similar to that of a century ago or so. It's changed, but not as much as American football has, for instance. (A baseball version of your list would include the designated hitter, a livelier ball, et cetera.)
Professional school cafeteria staff is kind of like saying that Justin Bieber is a professional musician - technically accurate, but not saying a whole lot. :P
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
First, I think you're giving Mrs. Wilder less credit than she deserves, given that she lived well into the 1950s, I don't think a highway interchange would have phased her much. That being said, I recently applied the reverse of the proposed "Laura Ingalls test" and brought my 5 years old to a replica 1880s town featuring a 1 room prairie school house. We had a very difficult time convincing him that it was a school. In his opinion, a school needs to have books, tables and not desks, whiteboards and not chalkboards, electric lights, and of course, a sand table, lego, toy cars, easals and painting supplies, and computers. He couldn't wrap his head around why you'd need inkwells or slates.
Why does education produce more and more people that are less and less capable, if we understand so much better how the brain works. Note the number of remedial classes four year colleges have to offer. They never used to have this need.
For example, one has to wonder why the tests/exams which kids took 20+ years ago are generally harder and had a higher pass rate than what is currently the situation. The contend covered is essentially the same, yet the current crop of kids who take the "old school" tests mostly fail and badly so, while they appear to be good students when taking the current tests. In fact, if they know in advance they are being given an "old test" they whine like the politicians caught in a lie.
All in all, I reckon despite saying we know more we're actually doing a poorer job in education than we ever have.
We should not be quick to jump to the conclusion that lack of change equals lack of advancement.
First thing, ban calculators. They aren't necessary before needing to deal with sines and cosines.
This attitude is a prime example of the reason education is failing. People think they know how everyone else should learn. You don't.
Calculators should not be used lazily to do basic math that can be learnt in your head, a student should still know how to use one, and an advanced student should still be allowed to learn about what that fancy sin or cosine button does before he gets to the point where it's in the official curriculum.
I wouldn't ban calculators, but if I were it would be in favour of spreadsheets. Learning to enter data into them gives you repeatable and easily correctable calculation.
You teach kids by opening up the world to them, not banning things. You should only ban something truely dangerous.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
and you are the one guy who took the red pill and can see what is really going on.
But how do you know that you're not in yet another matrix? Maybe you should take a hundred more red pills to be sure--just whatever ones you can find will do.
The only piece of technology that adds value is an internet access device with a broadband connectivity to the internet. A school is meant to open your eyes to the all the wonderful things that are waiting to be learnt and this happens when you move from a single teacher ( with his limited knowledge ) to the library ( that stores the knowledge of many more people ) then on to the internet that dissolves physical boundaries. Everything else that a student needs will drop down automatically as and when it is needed.
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Why is this in the headlines?
We were not allowed simple calculators in the classrooms until the more advanced math classes of high schools. Primary school is not about mastering tools or preparing for a job, it is about learning to read and write WELL, and do math IN YOUR HEAD. It is about learning to enjoy improving yourself. About learning to live in a civilized manner. It has been proved that when reading from a computer screen, you retain 30% less information. Children already spend way too much time in front of computers/tv/videogames and not enough time enjoying the fresh air.
Tomorrow is another day...
There were hospitals in the 19th century in larger cities. They weren't as advanced as what we have today, but they certainly existed. Many smaller towns still don't have them, and although doctors these days rarely make house calls (it takes much less fortitude to put someone in a car than in a buggy, and there's always the ambulance service if necessary) it is common for there to be only one clinic with one or two doctors in a small town. Many of the smallest are miles away from a doctor, and farms outside towns are as well.
Unless you've seen many first through eighth grade single-classroom schools lately, then schools have changed since Laura Ingalls went to school. In fact, my father went to a one-room school for much of his time in school, and he's under 70. In some places the one-room or two-room school still exists, but it is very rare in the US because buses transport kids farther to fewer more centralized buildings.
I'm sure anyone who has seen a general store would be astonished at the size of a Target or Walmart, but the idea that you can buy things in a building meant for that purpose would hardly be news. Perhaps the breadth of product selection or the financial tools available to make payments would be more of a wonder than the stores themselves. Cash or a bill of store credit because you know the owner would be the options in her day. Imagine seeing cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, EBT cards, travellers' checks, chain loyalty reward cards, gift cards, and gift certificates being tendered. Now that'd be a learning curve.
I think the freeway interchange would make perfect sense as paved roads aren't exactly a 21st century invention. I'm sure there'd be some astonishment at the construction technology behind it and the cars speeding through it.
The best learning aide is a pretty young teacher in a mini-skirt.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Just stay away from the dreaded PowerPoint Presentations...
Tomorrow is another day...
just stay away from PowerPoint Presentations...
Tomorrow is another day...
Turing Award Speech of Alan Kay 2007 has some good points regarding this topic: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007007a_revolution.pdf
also known as...A SURVEY :eyerolls:
I'd speculate that most 21st learning won't happen in a classroom at all. What's sacred about a grouping of 30-40 youth with a teacher in a place-bound location?
back in my school times (mid 90s), we had one boy, Dennis, who had a worse writing than anything i've seen.
after some sessions at doctors they found out that he was dyslexic and had problems with eye-hand coordination.
he just couldn't learn to write the letters legible, and also to differentiate between different letters of his own writing.
but he was very bright nonetheless, always good grades in geography, history, math etc.
what our teacher did: he bought a computer out of his own pocket (with windows 3.11 and later windows 95) for everyone to try out and play around with it.
but during exams/essays/dictations the computer belonged to Dennis and he wrote his exams on the computer. His grades normalized after that just because he could read his own answers.
PS: cue the "back in my time we used chisel and stone, etc..." ;)
Before jumping into technology, maybe we should teach them the basics first. How to read, write, speak, perform arithmetic, interact with each other in a constructive way, and maybe present this novel new concept of scientific reason and rational thought. Or we could just continue on the path of educational dogma seasoned with bits of poorly planned faux liberalism.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Books.
Hello, I teach 24 boys and girls in rural public school in the Foothills of Canada's Rocky Mountains. We learn together using MANY different kinds of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that support and enhance our learning such as wireless laptops, SmartBoards, Wikis, Blogs, video conferencing, Moodle, podcasting and we even have created a studio where students their own television programs. Our focus is not on the ICTs, but rather on how they can support teaching and learning. Our main focus is on critical thinking, asking good questions and collaboration as we work on meaningful, deeply engaging project-based learning. After over thirty years teaching in the classroom, perhaps I should let my students work speak for itself. Please visit us online at http://www.coolclass.ca/ or you can Google "Canada's Coolest Class!" Yours in teaching and learning, Bill Belsey Grade 5 Teacher http://is.gd/fuvFm
I'm surprised at the knee jerk reaction to technology in education. Technology is just a tool that is only as good as the teacher who uses it. Laptops, whiteboards, etc have been great tools in the project based learning area, and study after study shows that project based learning is better than rote learning. http://edutopia.org/project-based-learning-research
In my opinion, we need much better training for educators in how to properly use these tools. Putting devices into a classroom that uses the same teaching techniques as the 19th century will get the results we are currently getting in most schools, nothing.
IMHO there should be more technology than competing countries have. FAR less emphasis on athletics and FAR more emphasis on teaching kids the skills they will need. I'll never forget 4th grade. Science days were once in a blue moon and the other kids would always make fun of me for getting excited about it. Technology propels economies. But it must be current stuff too. The stuff I learned in college wasn't marketable when I graduated. It would have been 5-10 years earlier. I would also opine that project-based learning is far more useful than regurgitating names, dates, and places. Project-based learning teaches kids to work together and solve problems with a clear goal in mind.
These comments are all over the place, so I'd like to add another random 5 cents... Having worked in education, I have an unexpected observation for you: Teachers are one of the single most unteachable groups of people around. So, that complicates things. :)
+5 Insightful, really!
Use a platform like The School Collective (http://www.theschoolcollective.com/) to dedupe the replicated efforts of educators across the United States.
There are several of these projects in incubation and testing, the School Collective is the only one on the tip of my tongue. But the point is to automate the repetitive stuff (lesson plans, etc.) whilst leaving the part that really makes a difference (teacher-student interaction) intact.
"... all that we have learned since Laura Ingalls' day about teaching, learning, and technology."
By and large, what we've "learned" about teaching and learning in the past 125 or so years is how to do a poorer job. (My apologies to those developing tech-driven educational methods.) Socrates and his students did a far better job. They knew how to use their brains to think critically (dialectic, then rhetoric). Part of the development of a finely honed mind is rote memorization (grammar), which modern educational theory regards as more or less barbaric.
The classical scholars, the great minds of any era, didn't have technology. They didn't *need* technology. Much of modern technology simply ends up replacing the functioning of the human mind. It seems to invariably become a crutch for so poorly trained a mind. *This* is why Dick and Jane can't read.
sigfault (core dumped)
Take a look at this guy: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Summary: you put a computer somewhere in rural India. Kids, who don't know much of english, flock to it and learn on their own how to use it; when you come back later, they say "We need a faster CPU and a better mouse."
In my experience, kids want to learn. At age three, you have to try hard to make them stop asking "why?" about almost everything. If they have a sliver of interest, they will pick up reading with a wee bit of parent assistance (as I did, FWIW) before school. As they grow up and become adolescents and eventually adults, they will acquire a passion and develop their skills in it, as I'm convinced most people here have done. When they do, you encourage them and lend them a helping hand if (and only if!) they ask for it.
Or, you send them to school (or rather, you don't resist the people who pressure them to go there), and the school system will drain the curiousity out of them and make certain they won't later acquire a passion for much of what's taught in there.
Ask yourself: did you become fascinated by mathematics, programming, astronomy, biotechnology, music or law (just to name some of the stated passions of slashdotters) because you were forced to study it in school? Did you become good at it because you were forced to study it?
A Cylon that beats you for forgetting your multiplication tables. Easy.
'I sometimes engage in a mental exercise I call the Laura Ingalls Test. What would Laura Ingalls, prairie girl, make of this freeway interchange? This Target? This cell phone?
Oh good, I am not the only crazy one here, although I always thought that Carrie was the cute one.
http://kayeskorner.com/jpegimages/lauraingalls.jpg
http://kayeskorner.com/jpegimages/ingallsfamily.jpg
http://media.canada.com/1785a528-bef3-4f04-af39-9312146bfd98/melissasueanderson.jpg
I know several other teachers, I have three school-aged kids. And from what I can see, I don't see the technology that's employed helping, nor do I see any chance that it's going to get better. The bigger thing? They need to stop buying these expensive curriculum products - which essentially have no research backing them. Then they change how they teach math, reading, etc. every few years when they don't see big improvements. Lack of consistency is probably as big a problem as everything else.
Oh, and have society try to deal with poverty, nutrition, crime and environmental lead exposure instead of it making the schools deal with it on their own. That would actually help.
Laura Ingall's education technology was sufficient to teach people enough to put men on the moon and create atomic power plants. I'd say it's good enough not to mess up. We need to go back to the techniques of the 40's and 50's.
Show 'em how to use the slide rule.
It's not going to be used all day, every day --- but, I'm a big fan of open-source, graphically vivid astronomy software.
Programs like Winstar and Celestia -- they are free, and you can use it to not only show stars and planets, but to show
"travels" from one to the other, relative distance, follow orbits of planets and objects, see surface details on planets and asteroids...
Combine this with a decent projector, and you've got a great (additional) tool for many aspects of astronomy - how planets formed, what they look like, man-made satellite objects, etc.
Actually, I'd encourage anyone to play with these just for fun on their own systems.
-- Sam
PS - No, I didn't RTFA, so some of this may be off-topic. I don't know.