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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
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
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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?
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.
You missed the point and actually argued for the parent poster. It isn't a 'space' problem, it is a 'people' problem.