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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."
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
I'd prefer super-balls. Then they could learn some real physics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is one of the things where people get really worked up and overdo it, but there's a certain amount of truth to it. There are some really run-down schools out there, and while I don't think a school benefits from gold-plated toilet seats or wall hangings, there's certainly a baseline we should be shooting for. Making sure that it is properly ventilated, the exterior walls have appropriate insulation, the heat/AC system is adequate to keep the building at a reasonable temperature (not below 55ish, not above 75ish), enough room for every student to have a seat with some workspace, a cafeteria that can pass health inspections, clean floors and walls without large patches of missing or inappropriate surfacing, enough lights for students to see their work without straining their eyes... none of this is extravagant, and certainly there's some room for interpretation and subjectivity, but there certainly is a point at which a school needs to have decent facilities in order not to hamper education.
Frankly, I think part of the problem is that public construction projects are a major source of corruption and kick-backs, so politicians have tremendous incentive to constantly renovate and build schools regardless of any actual need. Plus, it always looks good when you photo op at the groundbreaking, it shows you really care about kids and families, kissing hands and shaking babies is always a plus.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
"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."
Idiot. Sure, better spaces havn't been proven to improve learning... conclusively. Then again, neither have bad spaces proven to be detrimental... conclusively.
... but many of us had to suffer with the special needs kids now working at mcdonalds. At least your special needs friends ended up running banks (although look how well that turned out).
But put a smart child into a room with 14 screaming, poop-throwing monkeys (or poorly socialized kids - same difference) and tell me that isn't hurting the learning process. You may have come from a rich, right-wing family that sent you to private school
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
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.
You missed the point and actually argued for the parent poster. It isn't a 'space' problem, it is a 'people' problem.
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.
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 best learning aide is a pretty young teacher in a mini-skirt.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Indeed.
The most important part of education is having good teachers. There is no substitute for a good teacher, and they can't really be found by looking at who uses the shiniest tech or whose students perform the best on standardized tests, which are often little more than rote memorization. New is not always better, and it is not a failing of the school system that a student from the 19th century would recognize a contemporary classroom.
That's not to say that contemporary technology is useless, or that there is no benefit in having teachers who know how to use it. Education has been around for a long time, and many things that we call "problems" are in actuality difficulties that must be continually overcome.
In other words, there is no "silver bullet" for education. The effect that a good teacher has on good students (for not all students are created equal) may not become apparent for years or even decades. It often takes a good teacher to recognize a good teacher, and while a building conducive to concentration is important, it is the staff (and the pedagogy) that separates a good school from a bad one.
Your brain is not a computer.
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