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Laptops In the Classroom Don't Increase Grades
blitzkrieg3 writes "Classrooms all around the country are being fitted with one to one laptop programs, networking hardware, digital projectors, and other technology in order to stay competitive in the 21st century. Kyrene school district spent $3 million modernizing their classrooms. The problem? The increase in spending doesn't lead to an increase in test scores. Policy makers calling for high tech classrooms, including former execs from HP, Apple, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, want to increase technology investment despite the results. Others are not so sure, or think it is an outright waste of money."
Are the tests testing for technological awareness and other abilities enhanced by using laptops?
That's the only thing that contributes to increase student grades. Technology is just a tool, not a means.
Exterior of a computer skills classes, which are obviously important in their own right, all this tech does is increase student distraction. I'm a bit surprised they aren't tracking a DECLINE in test scores in all other areas of learning, really.
Computers by themselves are not magic teachers. They wont replace quality teachers but they can with proper application assist in education. I think most of the problem with computers in school is that people have the wrong expectations. It's just a tool. Like any tool you have to know how to use it properly and what it can and can not do.
Who would have thought giving kids an even bigger distraction would not increase grades? Kids today can barely sit still and concentrate on one task at a time let alone sit in front of a laptop and be expected to only take notes. What kids really need now is someone to tell them to sit down, shut up, and listen. If a disruptive student doesn't want to be there then they should be able to leave. Forcing them to be there is not helping them or anyone else who is trying to learn.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What sort of valid conclusions can one draw from tracking test scores over time? And why is the immediate reaction "blame the tool"?
Our broken education system views technology as an expensive lucky rabbit's foot intended to bring better grades through its mere presence.
Grades would improve if rote instruction were automated, leaving teachers free to offer individual attention where students need it most.
The unionized education establishment has become the foremost enemy of technology, viewing it as a threat to what they see as a public sector jobs program.
The purpose of education is to educate children, not to keep educators employed. If we don't embrace pragmatic instruction through technology then other nations will, leaving our students at a competitive disadvantage in a globalized world.
I remember the same arguments about calculators, and how they were going to dramatically cause a significant increase in every student's test scores by simply giving them the right answers, and thereby prevent them from gaining the true understanding that they would need to succeed in the world.
The end result was that rather than having people solve very simplistic problems that they could actually pull off in a 4x4-inch section of paper, students were to solve far more complex problems that actually test their understanding of what they are attempting to do instead of their grasp over carrying a 1.
Bottom line is that as long as we have people who say "I'm computer illiterate" and then laugh, then there is still work to be done to enable people to be successful in the world.
Thirty four characters live here.
They aren't the holy grail people think they are. Even assuming they aren't subject to cheating, they aren't necessarily a true and accurate measure of anything really valuable on its own.
Too many people get so hung up on the mantra of "Test score, test scores, test scores" that they forget that tests are only so close to reality.
And yet they decide to question the technology investments which are a paltry expenditure compared to how much is spent on the testing.
Schools should not be wasting time and money on tech until they can get reading writing and basic math right. Without those none of the rest matter.
And I have yet to be convinced that handing out Macs (and it is ALWAYS Apple who wins these school contracts) does one damned thing to improve education, other than twitter and facebook skills of course.... future employers are going to be hungering for that.... NOT.
I think it is possible to use tech to make a better education process, but that the American education system is wholly unsuited to making the fundamental change in mindset required. So quit wasting money until we are ready to blow it up and start over. In case nobody has noticed the country is broke.
Democrat delenda est
Simply using computers in class would change the lesson plan, which in turn would change the grading standard.
Is it surprising that kids would still stick to the same approximate bell curve after the lesson plan changes to include computers?
Computers take time to adapt to - and the grading system in grade school is all about adaptation to new knowledge. Kids who don't have the time in their lives to adapt, or the skill to adapt will not have an easier time with computers than without. Kids who adapt quickly and have time to learn independently will continue to excel with or without computers.
Computers just allow people to do things on a scale they wouldn't have been able to do before - sort of like interchangeable parts in manufacturing, or other mass-production tools. School isn't about scaling projects to previously unseen sizes - it's about learning a lot of individual things in series, then slowly seeing how they interrelate.
Computers can't scale mass learning yet, nor have we truly had the time to adapt them to more than token "learning scenarios".
And grades aren't a good measuring scale to judge something that changes the grading system.
Ryan Fenton
This is very important research because test scores are the only measure of a child's success! Experience with real life tools are irrelevant. Keeping students engaged isn't important.
Putting my tongue-in-cheek assessment aside, not every investment immediately yields an increase in test scores: nor should we only invest in things that do. Test scores are important, but they are not the only measure of a student's success. In 10 years no one will look back and say that adding laptops to schools was a bad idea any more than they will tell us that adding light bulbs or bathrooms was a bad idea. Technology moves forward, and schools should keep up or risk their test scores going down. It won't be too long before every 4-year-old has a portable computer of some kind.
...when you keep teaching the same boring crap in the most boring way. Yes, even with laptops, iPads, projectors and all the bells and whistles.
Actually, I do know what I am talking about: I teach/research functional programming and game development, and guess what? I use the latter when teaching the former, to make it more entertaining. More than one student, after one such lesson, approached me to tell me that he was quite surprised to find that functional programming could actually be "fun" (pun intended).
The problem is that students are surprised when something is shown in a fun and entertaining fashion, and they accept it when stale notions are pushed down their throats. I'd start by fixing this...
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
I am currently taking senior level physics classes at one of the big universities, and I can say that at the undergraduate and graduate level, laptops are not a boon to learning. Walking into any of the higher level science lectures and the last thing you will see is a laptop. Its usually just pencil and paper and perhaps a sparse open book. Working quickly through the professor's QCD problems on the board is not easier with a computer, unless perhaps you are a master of putting in equations and such in digital format. Same applies for partial differential equations, set theory, number theory, analysis, and all those other symbolic math classes. As my professors say, computers are just useful idiots. They aren't going to teach you anything new, only the programmer can 'teach' the computer new methods of approximating problems.
Now in my labs, yes, computers come into play quite a bit, MatLab, Fortran, C++, etc. for modelling large systems, of course they make massive calculation sets easier, but for a fundamental understanding of Minkowski space-time, Hilbert Spaces, etc, just having a web-connected machine in front of you during the lecture is not going to make the class that much easier. Having an innate desire to understand the fundamentals is key. Naturally having many open doors available for obtaining the information is helpful, but for the classic situation in which you have a quality professor spewing content, its usually easier (for me at least, YMMV) to leave the laptop at the house.
Sounds like another 'lets throw enough money into the technology and hope the problem goes away'. As far as K12 education goes in the states, well, I have to speculate that 90% of the students would love a laptop in the classroom, just not for the learning part. One man's opinion.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
In college I used to play quite a bit of WoW and would regularly skip classes to continue playing. As a result my grades dropped quite a bit and my college prospects were looking pretty bleak.
What worked very well for me was buying a cheapo laptop and throwing Ubuntu on it and using that as my laptop for class. In this case its inability to run most games actually worked out very well. While I could still get distracted from facebook and browser based games, I was still attending the lectures, getting my homework in on time, and actually setting aside time to study for exams.
I am actually kind of surprised that Linux laptops aren't being used in the classroom more often with the increasingly wide variety of OS educational software being developed these days.
The student needs to work to find out how he/she learns best for each subject and apply that/those technique(s).
Technology can help. When virtual reality is possible, the student can learn history by "being there". Or he/she could watch a movie about it today. But that requires that the content (movie) be available along with the technology to view it (the laptop). Handing out laptops without content only leads to games of minesweeper.
And this isn't even addressing whether the students have Internet access away from school.
Or whether the school has the support structure in place to handle the hardware breakage and software problems that will happen.
A major problem in our schools is teachers who don't know the technology that they are trying to teach to the students. I am reminded of an episode of Southpark where all of the students are sitting in the computer lab while the instructor is reading an instruction set that he obviously doesn't understand himself. Of course all of the students are not listening and instead are playing video games. I don't think this is too far off from reality. I recall when I was in highschool computer classes and many of the students already knew more about the subject than the teacher did. I think the issue boils down to teacher incompetency. Perhaps if some of the money that is spent on technology was instead used to hire more talented teachers then the problem would go away.
If all they do is decrease the insane cost of books then its a win.
Yeah but your calculator is not trying to organize a flash mob of teenagers.
Todays learning "tools" come with built in, unrestricted, communication functionality, which (IMHO) causes most of the distraction problems.
Only when you can remove or seriously restrict the communication functionality can they become useful learning devices again.
my anon 2c
And of what possible use is anything that does not lead to an increase in test scores?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'll bet they are not tested on how to use the computers or the software they are supposed to be using. If they do that the test scores will go up, especially if they include IM, chat, YouTube, and Facebook. :-)
Nate
Everyone's hoping the lack of good teachers is made up by substitutes.
Why else would we have iPads, Microsoft Powerpoint and educational CDs in the classroom?
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
Given that a lot of people testify to having learned a lot by themselves with a computer and no teachers at all, I'd say something with this article and data seems to be missing. The article itself says data is not very clear. Some studies do show increase, but most do not. No data shows learning decreases, it seems. Method of testing mixes results from improved teacher training with higher technology. What is compared before-and-after-investment is English and math - which may or may not be the most relevant skills to test. Technology skills of course increased dramatically. Seems normal that changes, investments, and techniques would take time to fine-tune and produce measurable results. Also, the article shows a table of expenses in the Kyrene District - technology = $10 million, textbooks = $10 million, salaries+benefits = $120 million. Compared to salaries, I'd say the investment is rather inexpensive. If the technology allows teaching more kids at this same learning level in the future, it would seem a good investment.
Put a library of open source books on every one of those laptops and teach children how to learn from those books themselves.
Just have topics in one location and refer to it from everywhere it is needed. So don't have significant figures, or gas laws, or scientific method repeated again and again in every book. Just have them covered in one location. You may need to have several versions of each topic for different grade ranges.
Make the library complete in every subject from kinder garden to doctorate degree level.
Write programs to test people from the coursework in the library. Have thousands of teachers work on these books every year.
Given the choice of where to put funds I would install one pc in the classroom and invest the rest in quality teachers.
At some point this scale will lend itself to sliding, for example with students who have reached a proficiency with a subject which allows a computer to be used as a useful tool, saving time etc.
I work in IT for a large school district. We are deluged by vendors hustling their product as the One True Magic Bullet that will lift our standardized test scores above the next No Child Left Behind target. These products with exception involve a big investment of time, money and hardware, plus roll out and training at our school sites.
Our principals, running scared ahead of the advancing and ultimately unreachable targets of NCLB, will eagerly embrace any Shiny Thing that promises them even a little edge. (Not unlike golf enthusiasts or audiophiles, but more desperate.)
One thing I've noticed about these vendors: they all make it very, very difficult to pull data out of their products so that it can be analyzed in tandem with actual test results. You might almost imagine that they didn't want us to look at actual outcomes to verify that their product is actually effective.
Here is my perspective: parental involvement, economic prosperity and English as the student's primary language are the best predictors of a child's academic success. And there is little to nothing that a school district can do to affect these factors. Job growth, a strong middle class, and a culture that values scholarship will do more to promote learning that any number of shiny widgets, no matter how much money Bill and Melinda want to throw at the problem.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
Crappy teaching + computers = Crappy teaching with computers. Someone thought they were a magic cure-all. I don't know why they never think to look at how subjects are being taught and the people who teach them.
The quote at the bottom of Slashdot as I post this is:
"You attempt things that you do not even plan because of your extreme stupidity."
Yeah, that about sums it up.
But to use a calculator, you need the foundational skills and understanding that underlie the problems they help solve. Computers are essentially media devices now: just like you don't need to know how TVs work to watch TV, you need understand nothing about computers to use them. And they are very distracting.
I think they have a role in the classroom. But I think that role is overemphasized and a lot of "I'm a hammer-expert, and that's a nail" thinking from people in the tech sector is wasting a lot of resources in education that could be spent much better.
I learned how to use DOS at the same time I learned how to read. In fact, some of my earliest memories include a luggage-sized computer with a three-inch monochrome monitor. Today, I spend the vast majority of my free time at my computer desk. I can program in several computer languages. My desktop dual-boots 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.4, and I am even typing this essay on an ergonomic keyboard that I brought from home. I am, to use a term coined a decade ago, a digital native. So, when I look at the state instructional technology today, I am both impressed at the technological progress over the course of my lifetime and utterly disgusted by the shortcomings of its implementation in our society.
Foremost among my concerns is the mind-boggling disparity in access to technology, particularly across socio-economic status. I can point to you on a map two schools within mere miles of each other where one has SMART boards in every classroom and the other did not even have a classroom set of calculators available to me as a math teacher. That is only just digital technology. On a far more fundamental level, I can point to a different set of two nearby schools where one has automatic-flush toilets and the other had such frequent plumbing problems to a point that drinking from the water fountain was risky business. I simply do not feel that I can ethically spend time researching Facebook or the iPad as instructional technologies when not every student in the public education system has access to comfortable and healthy analog technologies like air conditioning.
Another issue that gives me significant pause is Mooreâ(TM)s Law. Technology is advancing at a prodigiously exponential rate, to the point that futurists predict an upcoming event dubbed the Singularity at which technology will progress faster than society can cope with its evolution. I am particularly fond of a TED talk given by Ray Kurzweil on the topic of the integration of technology with the body, particularly the part on an already-possible synthetic red blood cell which would, to paraphrase Kurzweil, allow the average teenager to regularly outperform todayâ(TM)s Olympic athletes. Even the advent of internet-enabled phones has caused notable distress among teachers. I can not even imagine the discord when the technology is implantable and can not be turned off or confiscated. On the other hand, the standardized management paradigm behind the OGT and the SAT would finally collapse, so it would not be all bad. I digress.
Looking only at today, I question why the research on technology on Second Life as an educational venue is only in its infancy when that particular medium has begun to be replaced by other, newer alternatives like Free Realms. Similarly, Facebook is being replaced by Twitter and Diaspora just as Facebook replaced MySpace replaced Livejournal replaced Xanga replaced Geocities. Honestly, Facebook is so passé that even governmental agencies have investigated its use. I forget which one, but just a few months ago around ten red balloons were placed at random locations across the continental United States. All of them were found within about eight hours. My point is that research that focuses on a specific technology in response to a cultural fad is doomed to failure from the start. By the time anything practical made its way to teachers, students would already be offended by the outdatedness of it.
The third problem that I have with instructional technology is that there is far to much emphasis on innovation and far too little on revision. Take the TI-nspire. Look, it now includes a computer algebra system but has a terrible user interface, and just as math teachers were starting to get comfortable with the idea of allowing graphing calculators in the classroom, we have made the technology even more powerful â" re-emphasizing the original concerns about the calculators doing all the work. Similarly, take all these new educational iPad apps on top of the virtual man
And now ... we have large swaths of people who can't do column arithmetic in their heads. Have you been in a retail store lately and paid cash for anything? Dig that quarter out of your pocket so you don't get back $4.97 from your $20 after they've hit the magic "total" button on the terminal and watch the train wreck that ensues.
So while yes, the people *who already could do simple problems on paper* benefited from the calculator, I'm going to go out on a limb that many didn't.
And that's ignoring the part where video games didn't run on the calculator. Or Facebook.
I work for the local public school district as a tech responsible for setting up and maintaining computer labs and classroom and staff equipment, and every year we keep piling on more and more equipment -- for example, our classrooms now have two Macbooks for every teacher, one for their digital projector/whiteboard and one for their desk, document cameras, clickers, ipads/ipods and the like. The majority of the teachers, save some of the younger 30 crowd, tend to only use equipment that has some analogue to previous technology they grew up with (think using document cameras and digital projectors as replacements for the old projector overheads), and the vast majority goes unused or only infrequently used for the most rudimentary purposes. The amount of money being spent on technology for teachers that won't make use of it is staggering. Even the younger teachers only scratch the surface of what can be done to engage their students with the technology they've been provided. In my opinion, some (most?) districts have a fire and forget attitude towards technology: they provide the equipment, but very little in the way of instructional support and software to use, such as device specific applications and online courseware. And when you look at the ridiculously high prices for district wide purchases of licenses for these things, it's no wonder. Aside from Smartboard/Interwrite whiteboard lessons, there's little in the way of cheap or free and widely available instruction material developed for interactive classrooms, and until that changes, and the trailing generations of teachers retire, a lot of taxpayer money is being wasted.
Laptops are a medium like papers and a tool like pencils. It has no use without the right software.
It is the teaching methods, written text, and so on that makes paper and pencils effective. Paper and a pencils by it self do not make any educated.
this study completely misses the point, this was a school with a 31 student classroom size, in a area with a decent mean income. Our schools don't have too many troubles teaching our children, and they actually do pretty well compared to other nations if you factor schools with a high rate of poverty. The laptops didn't make a big change because these kids most likely had access to computers already, now they where just in school. Where laptops in schools would be invaluable is for the poorer kids who don't have access to one otherwise.
The increase in spending doesn't lead to an increase in test scores.
WTF thought that it would? The tests (assuming they are properly designed) presumably measure certain aspects of acquired knowledge. Unless the curriculum teaches the kids how to increase their knowledge, the tests will show zilch. Teaching the kids how to use Word and Excel (for example) won't add anything to their store of knowledge in areas other than Word or Excel.
Kyrene school district spent $3 million modernizing their classrooms.
Whoopee for them. And how much did they spend on books (e or otherwise)? How much on lab equipment? Art supplies? Foreign-language teachers?
There would seem to be some seriously stupid school boards and teachers out there with way too much money to spend. Parents, too.
The problem is, schools are looking for a "silver bullet" for their scores. Buy this thing, scores improve. Nothing like that actually exists in reality, though. Schools are full of expensive technology that doesn't get used because the teachers can't be bothered to use it, or because the IT department is behind and hasn't got it functioning yet, or because it is difficult/inconvenient to use because of limited access or overly restrictive security measures.
If you DO want to implement some fancy new program, here's what you need:
First and foremost, you have to have teachers on board. If the teachers are resisting the new technology, it isn't going to be worth your time to try to force it on them. Get rid of the teachers, abandon the technology, but don't foist a bunch of tech on teachers that don't want it. It will be a waste of everyone's time.
Also, you have to think through your actions. Get the students on your side, and get them to buy in to the program. The tech department that I was working at tried to lock down the computers to a pretty extreme level. Time restrictions, draconian internet filtering (even at home), and random screen watching during the day. The end result was that the students felt like the laptops were worthless, and simultaneously had a big incentive to work around the blocks in place. People act like you expect them to act, and we essentially told the students that we viewed them as semi-criminal, irresponsible delinquents. Plus, anybody who has used a Live CD knows that it takes about 30 seconds to bypass even the most bulletproof software restrictions, as long as you have physical access. You can imagine how that turned out.
Finally, you have to have something to DO with the laptops. You can't just drop them in classrooms and wait. You need to essentially build your entire curriculum around the laptops to make them appreciably better than the normal, boring computer lab. Have a research based, directed, cohesive plan for how and why the laptops are being used, and they might actually be worth your while.
It's kind of sad, because a well-funded technology plan could be an amazing tool. In properly implemented programs, they've shown that laptops CAN have a big, positive impact, especially for gifted and talented kids who can all of a sudden direct their own learning to a greater extent. However, throwing money at a problem almost never fixes it. You need good people, good strategy, and the resources to support them.
This is an easy problem to solve. Let them use their laptops during the test. That's an accurate simulation of the tools they will have available to solve problems in the real world. To do otherwise is like testing kids in P/E by having them tie one hand behind their back.
The modern world isn't about what you know. It's about your ability to find good information quickly, and discern it from poor quality information. No one in school ever taught me the history of the word "crass" but thanks to the help of wikipedia, I learned an important history lesson while doing spellcheck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus
More importantly, the teachers can spend less time forcing kid's to memorize trivia because trivia is a reference material problem. What this means is more time to prepare students at an earlier age for higher level learning.
Many teachers already give open book/open note tests. This is the next logical step. If you're grading on a curve, you can identify the students who are struggling just as well, can group students by their ability, and therefore resources can be dedicated to the students who are struggling. The students who are not struggling can be allowed time for independent study and recreational reading.
Considering the number 1 complaint of teachers is unmotivated students, this would be a great incentive to do well because your work load is directly tied to your performance(just like the real world).
If you're looking for a logical reason for any change to schooling methods, standards or practices ask whether it makes the teachers' day any easier. If it does, that's almost certainly the reason it was introduced - irrespective of the effect on the childrens' education. If it doesn't make the work easier or the teaching skills level more basic or the schooling system cheaper (leaving out salary costs) then it was probably a mistake or someone wanting to make a political point.
Any effect on the childrens' education is either random variation, unmeasurable or just a side-effect of the real drivers for change.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It would be much cheaper and more effective to find better ways of evaluating teachers, weeding out the dead wood and attracting better talent. Value-added analysis achieves this in a way that corrects for factors outside the teacher's control (broken household, poor section of town, etc.).
Consider two teachers. The first teacher's class tests at the 30th percentile at the beginning of the year and at the 40th percentile at the end of the year. The second teacher's class tests at the 70th percentile at the beginning of the year and at the 60th percentile at the end of the year. Although the second teacher's students tested better, they fell behind. Shouldn't the first teacher be commended and the second teacher be put on probation?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The end result was that rather than having people solve very simplistic problems that they could actually pull off in a 4x4-inch section of paper, students were to solve far more complex problems that actually test their understanding of what they are attempting to do instead of their grasp over carrying a 1.
Not in my experience.
Calculators were strictly forbidden at every math exam I've had at university. They tested my knowledge and understanding far better than any other exam I had. All I needed was to know the multiplication table (up to 12 helps), how to multiply larger numbers and how to divide numbers.
With calculators you may learn how to solve certain problems by rote, and thus score slightly higher on tests. That doesn't mean you have any understanding of the math involved. Tests where calculators are involved seem to be prone to this, at least in my experience (which is admittedly not that extensive). My girlfriend had "learned" math like this. She attempted to take further math classes, but quickly struggled as there was no longer a magic button that would rescue her.
I guess my point is that calculators doesn't do anything for understanding.
Doing trivial multiplication and addition on paper is a skill I believe most people should possess, and if you have that as a basis you can test their skills in everything from easy to complicated math problems.
They can of course help with productivity if you know what you're doing.
On the difference between learning "just in case" in schools and "learning just in time" using laptops and the internet:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You don't become a great artist by looking at great paintings. You get there by painting all the time. You don't become a mathematician by watching the instructor. You get there by doing the homework. You don't become a famous author by reading Jane Austin and Mark Twain. You get there by writing.
In every case, the thing you must do is create content. However, that's almost impossible on tablets (no keyboard), hard on laptops (small keyboard, no real mouse), and even slightly challenging on desktops (ever try typing out a complex mathematical equation in Latex?).
Today's latest and greatest systems (I'm looking at you, iPad) are really geared toward content consumption, not creation. We should focus more on making it easy for kids to express themselves and then give them the tools that do that.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, while the quality of teachers is a plus, the entire system dictating what they teach and in a lot of cases how they teach certain material is beyond dated. Computers could be beneficial but with out a complete overall of how students are taught and even how we determine how well they're doing (standardized testing), computers are not going to aid a damn thing.
Computers in the classroom prepare the students for real-world experiences and environments, not necessarily improve test scores. If they do, that’s a bonus.
While you're outfitting these classrooms with new technology, can you drop the mandatory year of cursive writing, please?
The classroom doesn't work for most kids.
1. All kids are not the same.
2. All kids do not have equal potential or ability in all areas.
3. Generally, when you force someone to do something that does not interest them, they rebel. Even more so when there is something interesting that they are being prevent from doing because they are locked up in a classroom all day.
School sucks. Education theory is a bunch of crap designed to perpetuate the priestesshood and keep the worshipers confused.
If you want kids to learn, you present it as a way to solve problems that they are interested in solving. How do kids become interested in solving problems and learning how things work? They are afforded the opportunity to confront them...not locked up for their own(or public) safety. Instead of classrooms we need places where kids can go and see people making interesting things and then have access to space, tools, materials, and assistance in making thins that interest them. When I was a kid, we made our own zip lines. Sure, there was some danger but death was highly unlikely. Ditto with woodworking, pyrotechnics, gardening, swimming, earthworks, model planes, hotrods, electricity(radio, tesla coil, etc). We didn't learn this stuff in school either. No, some old geezer down the street shared his interests. These days, they'd put him in jail because he would occasionally share a cold beer after a day working on the hotrods.
Teaching and learning are almost purely dependent on the people doing it. Technology can play a small role, in particular when teaching technology, but otherwise it is quite irrelevant.
This is again an instance of those in charge not wanting do deal with people (gah!) or individuals and looking for generic recipes instead. Here is something every good teacher knows: There are no generic approaches to teaching. Get the best people for the job, make sure the kids are reasonably free of other troubles like not having enough to eat, inadequate medical care or violence at home (people again...). That is the way to get the best results. It happens to be the only way.
On additional severe problem is that testing does not reflect reality. It never will, until true AI becomes available to do it. (My guess: never.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Look on the bright side: at least they did not cause lowered grades. There must have been some tolerably effective filtering software in place, to prevent them becoming just another media-consumption (youtube) or puerile gossip (facebook) or other facile (twitter) waste of time.
As others have noted, technology per se does nothing to advance learning or impart skills. The learning process is driven by the teachers, and if they don't know how to use computers to enhance the learning process, then there is unlikely to be an improvement in learning. This is not to say that the teachers are inept or unskilled with computers; just that they just don't know how to use them as a teaching aid. This would require promulgation of a whole new body of techniques to the existing teaching staff, and good luck with that...
[Posting as AC to avoid undoing mods]
Both of my parents are teachers with nearly 60 years of experience together.
What doesn't work? Laser disc players, plasma screen TVs, banks of computers, projectors, and laptops. Computers are always just a distraction, and putting media entertainment center in a classroom makes it worse. Blogs, videocasting, podcasting are worthless.
What does work? Dedicated computer labs students can use after hours for word processing and research outside of the class.
What's best in the classroom? Books, paper, pens. Maybe wheel in a TV cart now and then to show the odd film. Traditional education never needed technology, but the administrators are always trying to push it in the classrooms.
because they are the tool we need to move away from paper text books. THAT needs to be the big push.
And there are more to schools and learning then grades. So, get rind of textbooks can save a lot of money, was well as end kids lugging around 40 pounds of books every day.
It's not a waste of money. If it increases kids' computer literacy with neutral effects on everything else, it's still a win.
go through the fucking roof. the higher your budget as an administrator, the more power you have in the bureaucracy. if there was some bunch of think-tank eggheads writing papers about how faberge eggs were important historical educational tools, and the government granted the money, then administratosr would buy faberge eggs so that their budgets would continue to go up.
professors to show people how to use open office, and oracle doesnt pay kickbacks to administrators to choose mysql based solutions for the bureaucracy.
of course, we wonder why this educational system produces corrupt government officials and corrupt corporate executives.
We won't invest in teachers' training and pay, because educational material and educational technology companies lobby hard to get contracts. We won't invest in training TSA agents training and pay, because contractors would rather sell the government security technology that doesn't work. Investing in the people - which DOES work, isn't on the table. And privatization? The pre-9/11 privatized security worked SO well. And, hey, doesn't Edison Schools have a great terrific record?
Their cronies and paid politicians will prevent these companies from being held to account. After all, we wouldn't want to interfere with taxpayer-funded free enterprise.
Was that really the intention? To improve grades? Now, how should computers accomplish that?
Well, they COULD do that. First, just test facts and second, allow computers and internet. Wikipedia replaces crib sheet and presto, instant grade improvement. But aside of that... how should computers improve grades?
You can't even say "better tools don't make better users". For what subject is a computer a better tool? English? If you can't write an essay on paper, do you expect the student to somehow magically turn into Shakespeare by handing him a computer? Math? If anything, grades in math will get WORSE when people stop thinking for themselves and being able to do quick calculations in their heads because it takes them longer to get to results. If they have to punch in 5 * 7 instead of just knowing it's 35, they will be slower. Not faster. And anything more "advanced" requires people to actually UNDERSTAND math, calculating becomes secondary.
What else is there? Can anyone explain to me the logic behind "kids with computers => kids with better grades"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
i agree with you.
however, software engineering requires computers. you cannot understand how a team works together with a source-code control system without being on a team, working on a project, with a source code control system.
A computer can give students the ability to obtain much more experience than they could get otherwise.
An example is online poker. Relatively young players can get the kind of experience that it would have taken years to amass before the advent of computers.
My example involves teaching design. Using the computer it was possible to give the students many exercises in things like balance and color. Students could instantly change design elements and see the improvement (or lack thereof). The overall results for the class were much better than they had been previously using pencil and paper.
DO you know why abacus, cash registers, calculators and computers have in common? the users can do math without actually understanding math. That is specifically what made the abacus such a successful device.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"And now ... we have large swaths of people who can't do column arithmetic in their heads"
when was there a tine that wasn't true? Never, that's when.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In K-12, if you consider something like an interactive smart-board, you're not really teaching differently. Yes, it's fancy and expensive, but from a teaching perspective, it's still really a 1 way communication from teacher to student. Is it really much different than a blackboard? There certainly is an advantage in that curriculum can be standardized and shared amongst teachers, but that mostly helps teachers, not so much for the students.
Now, what does work? Anything that allows for individual assessment and instruction. Something like the smart response system. Allows a teacher to present a question and record individual responses from every student. The teacher knows immediately if the students know the answers and can adjust instruction on the fly. Responses can be anonymized, which removes the stigma for students raising their hand with a wrong answer.
Or putting a piece of software in students hands which tracks their progress. I've seen software which teaches a skill, lets say 3rd grade math. Students answer questions. The software tracks their progress, presenting additional instruction for areas which the students answer questions incorrectly and less instruction for the parts they know. The same software can produce reports on students' progress. You end up not with a class of third grade students, but a finer distinction. Students are in grade 3.2 or 3.5, and the teacher/principal/department head/parent knows about the progress on a weekly basis, not just every marking period.
Computers are essentially media devices now: just like you don't need to know how TVs work to watch TV, you need understand nothing about computers to use them. And they are very distracting.
Computers are not distracting. Computers are tools. If distracting software or content is allowed on the computers, then yes they are a distraction... school computers, during class, should probably not be connected to the internet (or at least not allow browsing).
Computers are a fantastic tool and there's no reason to think they cannot improve education if the right approach is taken. But just dumping a computer in a classroom without figuring out just what the approach should be makes no sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And yet those kids who use calculator know just as little about how to solve the problem as the ones that don't.
And the end result was that instead of having people who understand the theory you have people who know how to program formulas into calculators.
I'm not saying that isn't a useful thing to know, but I think the point of school is to teach the underlying principles.
You can learn to use a calculator by working as a cashier. I know for a fact that the kid who worked in his parents store after school was the fastest with a calculator, but that didn't mean his grades were the highest.
Since grades are supposed to be approximately normally distributed, no technology should raise grades. They should remain the same: approximately normally distributed. The real metric would be "can Johnny read better" or "can Jenny do math better" not "are their grades higher?"
Oh, wait, forgot about that stupid grade inflation thing where we're making the tests easier and not changing the grading curve to match...
A track at the school does not make fat kids skinny. It does, however, support runners at the school. A swimming pool at the city park does not teach children to swim, either. But access to a public pool levels the playing field between kids who get private lessons and those who cannot. Anyone who thinks expenditures on track and field make kids thin doesn't understand that the access is directed to the top of the class - the runners, swimmers, and computer illiterates. It's no different than paying the salary of a teacher when only 50% of the kids are listening or doing their homework. Laptops, and teachers, are provided so that the students who CAN and WILL pay attention and benefit from them have access to them, the other 50% of students can go to hell and take the schools GPA average with them.
Gently reply
that merely throwing money at something doesn't automatically "fix" it.
A little real effort and care goes a lot further. Simply having a token laptop in front of a kid doesn't mean they're going to learn any better, unless the teachers also know what they're doing with those tools. I'm sure some do, but I'm also sure quite a few don't.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Well, the only way to REALLY increase grades is to increase the number of graded assignments/quizzes/etc. Or maybe to have more students, since that would also result in an increase in grades. In order to increase test scores, all you have to do is give more tests!
Oh, you meant improve grades and raise test scores?
To reign is to serve.
I work for an educational software publisher. We make research validated software that does produce results.
We've found the best model is a 1:3 or 1:2 model where the kids go through rotations of using the computer, being taught traditionally, and optionally being in small group learning environments. All that needs a cohesive lesson plan and software that ties it all together.
You can do some things better with a teacher (reasoning, explaining) and some things better with a computer (lots of practice, adapting to specific mistakes a kid makes, delivering content the kid needs).
One of the big problems with many of these 1:1 computer installations is they buy a bunch of hardware, do minimal teacher training, and just expect results. Many times in the 1:1 model, the teacher is teaching one thing, and then using software that either teaches it differently, or is only tangentially related.
"Policy makers calling for high tech classrooms, including former execs from HP, Apple, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ..." Once again, companies have found a way to increase their bottom line by "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" tactics. Computers have become a crutch for good teaching capabiliies, and a poor one at that.
But go ahead, blame something else.
My handwriting is atrocious and it's easier and quicker for note taking, not because I though it would help with my grades, well, not directly.
I agree. Computers add little to classrooms not dedicated to teaching a subject that requires computers. Programming, design, physics/engineering, film/music production, etc. Even if they do add something, one has to ask whether that money might be more beneficially spent in other ways. Such as, for example, offering higher teacher salaries and thereby attracting a higher caliber of teacher.
You certainly don't need to understand how your calculator's microprocessor works to use it, or how its solar panel transforms electromagnetic waves in electric energy, or how its LCD panel works. You need to comprehend the user interface and that's it.
Computers (and for that matter, TVs) are the same. The sole difference is that unlike calculators, computers are not single-purpose devices. I can use it as a typewriter, a calculator, etc. If each individual item is a tool, why would something combining all of them not be?
Behind this all is the capitalistic mind set government has that throwing enough money at a problem fixes it.
If we look at technologically getting implemented in third world countries, supported by charity and non-profits, there is no question that technology has improved education in places where it was used.
Even funnier, is that where this was done, it often didn't take much money if any. 1 or 2 computers in the classroom replayed to increases of 400%-500% of children's learning.
I totally agree in that ideal wasn't the issue, implementation was. Can't throw money at a problem until it goes away, you have to work smarter.
Laptops should not be in the classroom to teach people computer science - laptops should be there because they provide cheaper and convenient access to more literature and reference material than you could otherwise provide any student.
There is an unhealthy obsession in the tech community with getting every kid to learn programming in one's favorite language, and that distract from the potential of these tools for general education. It's not about teaching them Python, or "how to use Powerpoint" for that matter, it's about replacing a backpack full of 5-year-old books with instant access to the most recent research.
Which of course still needs the same types of experts as before, those who know how to organize information to translate data into learning experiences and understanding - i.e.: good teachers, that almost-mythical creature we expect to work for peanuts even when we find them.
Even so - I'll happily take the distractions of computers in the classroom for this generation, than the soporiphic ennui we had on my own. At least they're reading *something* when they're utterly bored by the lecture, instead of learning to sleep-with-my-eyes-open as kids often do when given no other options.
I've aced tests where I have no idea what I'm doing I just regurgitated memorized junk on cue and I've done poorly on tests where I thought I had a really good grip on the subject material.
Who tests the testers and the tests they make up to test with, anyway?
And testing creates anxiety and paranoia in many personality types which goes toward skewed results.
I could go on and on but suffice it to say laptops in the classroom - even playing tetris all day - are miles better than the junky retarded testing systems I've been exposed to anyway. More laptops and banish testing. Oh and you might as well just fire to teachers too - do them a favor so they can try to get a job that pays a decent wage.
The problem with many students today is that their attention span is far too short in the classroom. They are more likely to be distracted by their Facebook updates with a laptop in the classroom than to actually use the laptop for taking notes. And as already mentioned, technology is just a tool. Unless the instructors can incorporate it into their classrooms without having it misused by the students, these tools will more often than not do more harm than good.
Investment is spending a lot now to get a little back over time.
It may not improve grades, but it may improve costs, as the shuffling of paper is an expense for everyone.
It will definitely improve kids' grasp of computing, which will be a far more necessary skill than dealing with paper.
In fact, if all it does is teach kids they don't have to print things out to read them, the benefit will follow them into their jobs, and save money for the entire business world.
Next: install email and messaging programs and teach them they don't have to fly everywhere to communicate.
This study doesn't follow even the basic principles of any scientific experiment. For ex. they had no control group. No, all the other classes in other schools without laptops don't count as control group as those had far more variables different than just the laptop.
Also test scores aren't suitable to measure most aspects of the learning process in the first place. For ex. if a laptop makes it easier for students to learn things (ie. it takes less time for them to learn it, or what they learn will stick better), that won't neccessarily show up in test results. Students may still be disinterested in learning things or uncapable of comprehend or memorize stuff, despite the laptop actually helping them to learn things easier.
The third thing to notice is, that laptops obviously can be only then more effective than pen and paper, if the teaching methodology is changed to accomodate to it's features, and if those methods take advantage of those extra features that a laptop provides over the former. That includes multimedia presentations, interactive learning and test programs, dynamically explorable resources, etc. I rather doubt that the classes with laptops actually used a very different methodology than those they were compared to, who were still using pen and paper.
All in all this study is completely flawed and can't be a base of any actual conclusion on whether laptops are useful in classrooms.
Multicultural-racial classes of 30-50 students, many of whom lack basic English skills.
Thank you for saying this! As an occasional TA for undergrads taking physics courses, I'm appalled by some of the things that my students think they need a calculator for. If I have any math to do on a quiz, I explicitly use numbers that divide such as to give simple integer results. That's still not enough, they actually enter in things like 30 divided by 2 into their little magic boxes.
Of course they dont increase grades. What are they, magic? And increase compared to who? They all use them?
The others who have said that basic math and english skills are important are correct. Teach the kids basic skills first, then give them computers in the classroom, and teach them how to use the computers. One thing I see a LOT with people of all ages is that they can't find what they are looking for online...because of the search terms they choose. Some choose terms that are too broad or too narrow. They can't seem to understand how I can easily find what they can't. Its all in the search terms.
If you want to give a kid a computer and have them learn something have them build the computer and write the software to run it. Thats what we had to do when I was a kid.
Now get off my lawn!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Let's see how this is all working out, then: how our the generations who grew up in a media-soaked environment in the US competing globally against those with a more disciplined, rigorous and at times, yes, boring approach to learning, such as India, China, Korea, Japan, and even Finland?
Given the fact that I've interviewed a lot of college engineering grads that can't do division on paper I'd say the concern that calculators prevent true understanding is well founded.
students were to solve far more complex problems
Really? As the test scores show in the US, education has been dumbed down for decades to stop the public education system from grinding to a halt. While there may be a small sect of really advanced students, the overall trend is a less educated student body. The problems with education today aren't necessarily a technology problem but so far technology doesn't appear to be providing a solution to get us out of this hole. We're spending more per student today than we ever have in the past and we're seeing less results. Money is not the solution either. There is a social problem here that people are fearful to address.
for the corporations that plug them.
Simply placing any technology in a classroom will do nothing more than increase the amount of stuff in the room. We all know this. It doesn't matter what the technology is, paper, pencils, projectors, laptops, unless the technology can be meaningfully integrated into the curriculum it will not have a positive effect on overall learning.
What this study does, beyond saying the obvious, is to identify the two main problems with education.
Problem one is that politicians, the public and school board administrators think they can increase student learning by stuffing technology in the classroom. Well I've seen many a classroom over the last 40 years that have wonderful technological marvels collecting dust as they sit unused on the shelf. I've also seen classrooms with next to no cutting edge technology that have produced students who excel in learning. So the presence of technology does not make for increased test scores. So why is money being spent on laptops and networks and other gadgets when this is shown to fail? Well, because we as a society think the quick fix is the way to make it happen. Society is looking for the quick fix for everything, buy on credit vs saving, liposuction instead of lifestyle change, etc. So why not education too.
The second problem is that we all assume we know what education needs, in this case computers. We all know all there is to know about education, after all most of us sat in a classroom for a dozen or more years we should be experts. In fact today we are allowing our politicians and media to use education as their whipping boy. We denigrate teachers. We fail to support schools. We have allowed the educational system to be perverted to the point where we value the politicos who run our education systems more than the teachers who actually do the real work. Well folks collectively we know next to nothing about education. Our politicians and education politicos know F**k all. To resolve this problem in education let's put the resources (money, people) back in the classroom where they belong. Let's invest more in teachers and less in the administrators whose job it is to support the actual education of our kids. Let's invest the money in actual classroom resources like books, manipulatives, lunch programs, and ongoing professional teacher training. Let's put the resources back where the education rubber meets the education road.
Sorry to ramble here folks, but let's all realize that large schools, huge school boards, and standardized testing are not in place for the benefit of students. These things benefit the politicians and education politico. Bring education back to the neighborhoods and the kids it is meant to searve. Take it away from politicians. hey folks consider getting involved.
The last time I looked at a standardized test typing, word processing, Internet browsing and email weren't on there. You'd be hard pressed to find a job these days that requires absolutely no computer skills what so ever. You can probably get a student to pass a standardized test with out ever having had touched a computer but school is more about getting them prepared to join the work force and not just about passing a test.
Grades are stupid.
Are the commenters forgetting that in low-income areas, many students don't have computers or internet at home, and their parents don't care enough to take them to the library. Therefore, they don't do homework. These tools are for use outside of class.
I am currently a senior in college. The only time I have ever seen technology implemented in my classes, the only benefit of it is to make grading easier for the teacher. If you didn't get the correct final answer, you don't get any form of partial credit. Sometimes, if you enter in the right answer, but not in a way that the program understands it, you don't get any credit. I once had online homework tell me that I had the wrong answer for rounding to the correct number of significant figures (I verified by re-entering my answer with more decimal places). It's actually quite a headache from the students' point of view.
where the student's dont dance, or an acting program where the students don't act, or a technical theatre department where the students don't set up lights and rigging, or a sports program where students don't ever play games.
imho
Just throwing technology into a school will not yield better outcomes. Teaching and learning need to be the driver, not a bunch of tablets. Standardised testing is also an outdated paradigm, and as such I would not hold any stock in their results. Sir Ken Robinson has already hit the nail on the head with this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
With respect to using technology in teaching, Sugata Mitra has this one covered. It digital classrooms are the future then we need to design then to support group learning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU&feature=relmfu
You could give the driver's ed class 1000 new cars, but that by itself wouldn't make the students better drivers.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I was using the family computer (windows XP) for a while. I knew some things about how to use it, but not much. When I found an old (1990s-ish) laptop, and set it up with windows 98, I learned many more things about how the hardware and software of a computer work. When I got my own laptop, then a year later switched to Linux, I learned quite a bit more. Since then, I have become much better with computers, as I tried new things and had to fix everything I broke. Working with the terminal and C made me a much better typer than any software program. Having to set up each thing with very little outside support really taught me a lot. If the kids just get the computers with everything set up, and someone to fix it when it breaks, it will not help them a lot.
Archie Bunker was right!
... And pens dont improve handwriting. Dumbasses.
Only a bad car analogy will do =P
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
I was in the advanced maths stream all the way through school.
There was a brief moment when we were maybe 13 or 14 where calculators were useful (any maybe a little longer in physics lessons). Other than that, every problem we studied we solved using algebra and surds.
That was then. The last time I was really struck by the effect of calculators in the classroom was when I was interviewing school leavers applying to study computer science the UK's premier scientific university. They all had maths A-levels at grade A. Quite a lot of them could not do simple things like sketch y = x^2 or do simple things like add or subtract fractions.
and do interviews in college. they dont just 'study books about writing'.
the experience of interacting with other people cannot be replaced by studying a book about it.
thats where software engineering education would completely fall down without access to real computers, with real compilers and real build systems.
Doing research for my master's in secondary ed people do seem to actually believe that academic "success" is defined by lack of discipline problems. Nevermind the kids can't actually do math or read or write. Kids are capable of being "engaged" by walls for entire class periods. That's obviously not a measure of learning.
Work Safe Porn
As someone who has been on both sides of that scenario, it isn't about not knowing how to do the work, but task switching. I don't have to think about making change, because the machine is doing it for me. When I have to make change, it takes some time to shift gears and call up those skills. Double especially if some smug asshole who looks down on me to begin with starts throwing nickels at me when I'm already in the middle of counting out change.
I predicted this result.
So did everyone else and their grandmother, but still...
That their test scores for computer literacy are higher in classrooms where they're actually using computers, rather than cardboard boxes with keyboards drawn on them.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I'm working IT at a 1-to-1 laptop school. When implemented right great stuff happens. Google Docs makes working on group projects actually feasible (though kids still have to be taught how to collaborate effectively.) Google search necessitates focusing on deeper issues when the answers to most typical school questions are 5 seconds away. With Wolframalpha, why spend a couple months in math class on the mechanics of factoring quadratics when it's now trivial and there's far more interesting math subjects to explore? Tech isn't the magic bullet for test scores. That's probably a good thing.
As another geek in the trenches, the above poster is correct, and we're doing it. Additionally, most of the "problems" pointed to in this thread don't really exist at any level worth measuring. My district has issued laptops to every student 4-12th grade. Our test scores are now 3rd in the state, while our per-pupil spending is 99th (of 115). It does work, it does bring drop-out rates down, it doesn't have to cost that much, and it can make a difference in education. However, as the poster states, it's not about putting technology in the classroom, but transforming education to teach with technology. In many cases, teaching has become a two-way street, as the students have taught the faculty about the technology. Stop thinking about this from your own perspective, and try seeing it through the eyes of your children. And, just for those of you who can't see past potential distractions, come watch what our first 4th graders do for senior projects in a few years. I watched some of their network traffic as 4th graders, and I guarantee the future will be amazing.
DO you know why abacus, cash registers, calculators and computers have in common? the users can do math without actually understanding math.
But surely the goal of math classes is to make students understand the math they're studying?
In many high schools, a pre-calculus math class is a calculator button pushing course with very little mathematics immersion or subject comprehension. A PowerPoint cut and paste project should be a snap. It's possible a student might not need to read the cut being pasted. An image pasted is a 1000 words! An a fade and pan is 5 thumbs-up!
Which would be why you should teach algebra, not math.
Being able to manipulate a base-whatever numbering system mentally, and actually understanding why numbers interact the way they do, are two very different things. Excessive focus on the number side of things obfuscates the actual important stuff.
that if you throw a bunch of laptops at a bunch of kids (not the CS class, but everyone) they spend 95% of their time on facebook and playing games. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT.......
I just completed a Perl / Python module at RMIT in Melbourne via distant learning. The exam was paper based, which was a real surprise to me. Even back in my days in high school some 15 years ago they gave us computers to do our exam on. So now primary and high school kids get computers to tweet to their hearts content, while any university you have to work with pen and paper even on computer subject. Go figure this out.
Sure, technical skills are important for work, but life skills are important for living. Higher education should be career focused, but basic education should be about learning life's basics. Few people have the inclination to learn general knowledge, so if they don't learn it at school, then when are they ever going to learn it?
When I was in school we had subject called "Awareness subjects" (very rough translation, essentially "General Knowledge") in which we learnt geology, astronomy, ecology, botany, anatomy, sex education (round 1, before we hit our teens), local geography and world geography, etc. etc. Only when I moved country (Australia), did it become apparent that I knew more about the world than my new friends.
How can this be important? Let me give you a couple of examples from San Diego:
1. Swedish team is having a "team building day" along the San Diego beach. (Ah, those were the days. :) Our boss is paying for the hire equipent.
...akward silence...
Shop attendant: Your accent... where are you from?
My boss: We're from Sweden.
Shop attendant: Where's that? (Okay, I can accept that. After all, it's a small country of no relevance, right?)
My boss: In Europe.
Shop attendant: Oh, I've heard Europe is no good...
Shop attendant: Do they have pizza in Europe?
2. Financial application being developed for use on both sides of the Atlantic. A San Diego developer is hard coding dollar signs.
European developer: Why are you hard coding in dollar signs everywhere?
Californian developer : They're money fields. (With an "Isn't that obvious?" expression.)
European developer: We don't use dollars where I come from.
Californian developer : What? Don't you have money?
Seriously... how do you reply to that?
I would be afraid to hire people like that, regardless of what degrees and technical expertise they may have.
To be fair, I've met lots of Californians who are extremely knowledgeable about the world. (So why the massive discepancy? Not talking about the Bible Belt here.)
Anyway, with that level of ignorance being pretty common, how do you expect the people of such a nation to be taken seriously? With such general ignorance, how can the people be expected to vote sensibly? Is this deliberate to create a lower working class, where people know enough to work, but not enough to question?
Back to topic:
Laptops in schools will teach computer skills, and hopefully when doing research for general knowledge subjects, kids will learn about the big world outside. They're also useful tools for visualising maths. Very useful tools indeed for a wide range of subjects, along with paper and pens. But it's not all about getting a job. Don't forget lifes basics.
I'm in a pretty similar situation - I know quite a few teachers who, having just been given some new tech, take it and thrive. Optimistically I'd say that the tech does at least as well as the "old methods" in 90% of cases, and most of the time is an improvement. Every now and then, though, it's just done plain wrong. One teacher I recently worked with had just been given the so-called "full setup", consisting of about $3000 of classroom tech. This teacher was laid off at the end of the year, and while working with their replacement, we discovered that absolutely none of it had been so much as touched during the year.
On the other end of the spectrum, some teachers take the time to fully integrate things into their curriculum, and it really does improve the classroom - students are far more engaged and responsive, and their test scores (among other things, obviously) reflected it. But in the middle of the spectrum, the majority of teachers barely use it to displace the 25-year-old overhead projectors.
The issue is that, while some teachers actively want to embrace the tech, the rest lack any sort of direction in doing so, either doing the absolute minimum, or ignoring it completely. I'd say that in many cases, the funding is there, as is the tech and the software. But without solid planning, training, and support, it just doesn't get used to anywhere near its full potential.
I look at some recent algebra and trig books and go why did they use those numbers? There is nothing more complex about having 27.1 rather than 25 as a quantity or getting sqrt (47 rather than 7 or 8 as a root. Unfortunately, the profusion of calculators have allowed these books to no longer take the care in crafting questions that have clean solutions and that concern themselves with the concept rather than being strictly true to "real life" contrived examples. I did the 96 hour Math Contest in modeling and would love to spend a class doing a complex problem, provided it is complex in the right way, which a calculator rarely frees one to do. Don't get me wrong, some classes do benefit from "seeing the function", but far too often it devolves into the "pretty pictures parametric equations can make" i.e. polar roses.
It may be irrelevant, but when I was teaching "Intro to Computers" (COBOL) as a sub... the class got weirded out when I had them move to the boards in the classroom and start writing programs OFF the computer...
The whole class got to discuss four students work at the same time... and it only took a couple of class sessions till they remembered to leave the computers off till the lesson and it's review on the boards was done...
I was just a sub, and unfortunately had no written guidance so I took it slow and easy, making sure that the students "got it" before moving on...
It seemed slow paced to me anyway, but I made sure they knew the current stuff before we added things... Really it's the only way I know to teach...
Before the end of my time there some of the students just kept up and some were using ASCII art, colors, and sounds...(BEL)
Some didn't get it at all (and I wondered WHY they picked a computer class) some needed both the lectures, examples, and cross feed of other students helping them improve their code (which wasn't gonna happen on a PC) and some would have had to be chased from the classroom with a stick to KEEP them from learning so I concentrated on the middle group... When the regular teacher got back to work they kept me on for another week to get her up to speed on where I'd taken her classes (this one and Systems Analysis 4XX)
Her only gripe was that I'd covered the whole semester's in a little over a month...
Which leads me to believe that we might be doing better for the next generation just TEACHING a subject well than throwing all the expensive toys in the world at it...
Hard to hand code OO projects in high level languages when they depend on a GUI to put it all together... but understanding the BASICS first has gotta help!!!
Teachers had far fewer resources, and schools had far fewer administrators 60 years ago, but got results at least equal to the results obtained today. They probably got more results. But between the bullcrap bureaucracy and kids being labeled with hundreds of different "learning disabilities" (truly amazing how many kids in my area are "dyslexic" or have "ADHD"), we have young adults entering the workplace who are profoundly stupid. Luckily, they are completely equipped with a social agenda. They know all the "right ways to think". They know nothing about thinking for themselves.
They are the same people who Penn & Teller displayed on their Enironmental Hysteria episode of Bull****. Likewise the episode on diversity education on the modern campus.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Technology is a crutch which keeps students incapable of controlling its use from learning, not a tool which enhances it.
Throwing millions at fancy electronics will not fix any problems with education, if anything it will exacerbate them; instead, focus should be put on valuing learning and education itself, and forcing students into situations in which they must think for themselves.
Which would be why you should teach algebra, not math.
Where I come from, algebra is considered part of math.
Raising grades in and of itself isn't meritorious. Lowering standards raises grades. So obviously grades are merely relative to the measurement used to generate them.
The enablement is not to change a child's performance against an ambiguous metric, but rather to enable new forms of learning including self pacing and dynamic interfaces.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
Finally that tablet computers are gaining momentum things have a chance to change. The problem is we need cheap tablets, in the range of $200. Then we need to retrofit desks with vertical tablet holders to hold them upright or at a sloped angle depending on the use. Then young people can carry Bluetooth keyboards and mice but don't necessarily need to pull them out all the time. When each child has two tablets it becomes a game changer for education. One tablet functions to present material and the other to do work on although they are interchangeable. We just need the software to do the work on.
Teachers and schools then need to change how they teach. In also changes how they speed money. Text books need to be free. How many doctoral and masters candidates are getting government grants to support their education? Unless your quite wealthy it takes ten plus years to pay off a doctoral education. I think we could create new grants for these students in exchange for them writing books and software for schools; talk about cheap. Just design the grant to increase funding depending on how many schools use the material or on the specific needs of minority education such as accessibility for the physically disabled.
Lectures should be prerecorded videos. Each teacher on the subject in the school should be required to record their own lecture. Everyone is different and everyone approaches and teaches different subjects differently. If a student has difficulty understanding one teacher he should be able to turn to a lecture with a different teacher on the same subject. All the students that year are effectively in the same class. They take the same tests; dynamically created. All the teachers are then available for one on one time with all the students. It also means the teachers don't have to be the same quality or know each subject as proficiently; sometimes a TA is all you need, someone to help walk you though the problem and or identify what you need to work on more or have a better teacher help you with.
The above is where tech will change the game.
We then need to address motivation. We need to put the responsibility of learning on the student themselves instead of thinking a teacher is going to magically pour the subject into their head. Everyone is going to have different motivation. Everyone will not perform the same. We need to figure out what motivates each student. Specifically we need to reward students that learn the material faster. We need to enable students to produce and perform and enable their own discipline. Get done with the subject and either progress to more advanced topics more quickly or get rewarding activities. Perhaps becoming a TA and interacting socially. Perhaps having more time for sports and competitive social activities. Perhaps learning elective subjects. Or perhaps going home early, or maybe setting your own hours and not getting up so early in the morning. The list can go on and on. I bet if you addressed motivation and learning like this students high school and below would learn their mandated subjects that are now taught over 9 months within two months.
Laptop or not, it makes no difference.
Every body had a comment on what teachers should or shouldn't be doing. Not many claim to actually be a teacher. Well, I am one. I suspect that those making the loudest comments are not. It is so fun to watch.
It is like this: Just because you have ridden in an airplane one time and you might know something about how airplanes work doesn't qualify you to tell the pilot how to fly the damn thing. Just because you have experienced education once and in one place and time doesn't qualify you to tell teachers how to do their jobs. Are there bad teachers? Sure there are, just like in every other profession. However if you magically got rid of all the bad teachers (what few there are) and replaced them with the best teachers, education would still be as it has always been. There is no magic bullet to fix education.
So, why do teachers get attacked so much? Simple. Who else are they going to go after? The parents, the kids, or perhaps a person in political power? Politicians go after teachers, because that is the only group they have leverage on that isn't a significant part of them getting reelected. All you have to do is vilify teachers. It takes all the responsibility off the voting parents and themselves for not doing their part to improve the situation.
In spite of all that, I go out there and do the best that I can for my students. If I only had to teach the curriculum, it would be easy. Now, I have to the be the advisor, parent, mentor, and friend. And you know, that is fine. As soon as they can figure out how to make a laptop do all of that, I will be happy to step aside. I can always go back to my former career.
In theory, there is very little past the 3rd grade which people will use throughout their lives. Most people never use more than basic arithmetic, percentages and maybe interest calculation from math (everyone uses statistics and fractions, but more for making up numbers than from the mathematical sense). The majority of people don't use much science at all, if anything, I would say that teaching everyone anatomy, biology and physiology maybe even botany has proven to make jobs harder for doctors since people can now misdiagnose themselves and their children with bigger words they don't understand. English... don't make me laugh. Social studies... let's be frank... the fact that Christine O'Donnell managed to get 30% of the vote is absolute proof that people don't understand shit about social studies. And statistics have shown time and again that there are an insanely high number of people who couldn't find their own home on a globe.
:)
Some people would say that teaching skills to the kids when they're that small would be a really bad idea. Through 6th grade, the education should most likely be entirely academic. Some might argue that it would be beneficial to give kids with low aptitude for academic education an opportunity to end a trade school where they're taught a skill in the 7th grade would make sense. This would solve many problems... unfortunately... there could be quite a few great minds of the future who get lost in that system.
Skills aren't for children. Dad or mom can teach them skills at that age... in a school... ABCs and 123s are much better.
As for children knowing how to use computers... well, I hate the idea of my kid making power point presentations in school... is degrading... it makes them into business school/saleman idiot drones. Basic programming, problem solving, etc... would be much better
Children growing up today have something that we didn't: all of the worlds information at their fingertips in a matter of seconds. The most important thing we can teach them is how to find and utilize this information. Such skills can be taught with excellent English, computer literacy and advanced searching; how to piece together knowledge from multiple sources, how to find a good tutorial and apply it to what you're doing. Then teachers can get on with their real job: inspire students to take up a challenge then watch them excel.
You know, Math in the classroom didn't increase grades either.
Last week in the news it was reported that some parts of the US are cutting back public education to just 4 days a week due to lack of funds. Yet taxes are the lowest they have been on the wealthy since the 1950s.
The corporations listed in the blurb are obviously for computerized classrooms because it puts money in their pocket.
If they cared about their fellow citizens they would be using their money to get that 5th day of school back and maybe even lobby for longer school years........something that has been shown to be very effective in other countries.
When did /. become completely overrun with hypercynical over-opinionated narcissistic douche-nozzles? I don't know what fallacy-spewing turnip truck this can't-be-wrong crowd fell off of, but keep it the Hell out of our schools!
Just to echo many of the above posters: the presence of technology in the classroom itself won't increase students' grades; rather, the presence of technology in the classroom in conjunction with effective use of that technology will.
No yesterday, no tomorrow, and no today.
Don't forget to consider second and third order effects.
Computers in the classroom may not directly lead to an increase in scores, but what impact will it have to introduce children to computers in a controlled and structured environment?
In a previous life I was a school teacher. As of 3 years ago I was unable to find *any* decent Computer aided instruction (CAI) for math.
The best of a poor lot, presented a problem, which you had to either guess the answer or work out on scratch paper, then enter an answer.
A well written Math CAI:
A: At it's core is a Math Processor -- in an analogy to a Word Processor.
Just as a WP can help you create words, allowing you to type faster than you can write, having spelling and grammar correction, allowing you to insert details, or take out redundencies, allowing you to arrange the flow of your thoughts, so then a MP would need the following characteristics:
1. Entry: You have to be able to enter math faster than you can write it out by hand on pencil and paper. And just as it takes a few weeks to learn to touch type, so I'd expect that it would take a bit of time to learn how to touch math-type. Perhaps this is the place for touch screens.
2. Marking mistakes. If working an equation in several steps it should tell you when the current line is not equivalent to the previous line. This alone would go a long way to help kids learn math.
3. Good visualization. It should be easy to graph, to animate graphs e.g. show that the slope between two points on a function approaches a limit, as the points converge.
This program should NOT be mathematica, although I think that Wolfram would be someone to talk to about this. MMa does too much for you, and the last time I looked was missing #2, and clunky abouy #1 and #3.
B: Under the hood, a Math CAI looks at the mistakes the kid makes. Some years ago, an elementary school teacher/researcher discovered that kids had 'buggy software' in their math skills. E.g. a kid would see
184
- 62
and correctly write down
22
But when presented with 162 - 84 would also write down 22. The 'bug' in this case was that the kid subtracted the smaller digit from the larger.
He found that if you analyzed the mistakes looking for patterns, that most kids had a small number of bugs, and that fixing them was fairly quick.
C: Lot of empirical evidence that shows we learn best when just at the edge of our ability. Good CAI needs to be tuned to provide problems that are easy enough for a reasonable success rate, and hard enough to not be boring.
D. Good CAI would be developed by a team of teachers, with different methods of teaching. Instructional snippets would be recorded from various teachers. Ideally every concept is presented 6 different ways. The CAI program would track which approach worked with a given kid. If he practice showed that he didn't get it, try a different teacher's instruction to it. With time, the CAI would know which methods worked with a given kid.
This approach can work well for arithmetic and algebra. Geometry would be tougher. Higher math -- number theory, topology, group theory and their ilk would be a lot tougher.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
In his essay The Dynamo and the Computer (1990), Paul David notes that when electricity was first being introduced to steam-driven factories, the electric dynamos were overlayed with the old steam technology. This resulted in spotty performance, and the dynamos were judged according to the criteria previously used to judge steam-driven workstations and factories. This resulted in a false impression of the usefulness and abilities of the new system.
Similarly, the introduction of computers to classrooms has followed the same pattern. Originally, computers were used to replicate old ways of working (i.e., typing), and in many cases still are. Most teachers are not trained in new ways of using computers to teach (e.g., online learning, Logo to create simulations, etc., etc.) And we continue to judge student performance as if computers were not there. I have never seen test items specifically related to how to use certain computer programs to their best advantage, nor tests of how well students use computers.
Until we stop working in old ways and start judging computer-based learning on its own merits, not those of the past, we won't see the improvements (largely because we're not looking for the right ones.)
Reference:
David, P. A. (1990). The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox [Electronic edition]. The American Economic Review, 80(2), 355-361.
The end result was that rather than having people solve very simplistic problems that they could actually pull off in a 4x4-inch section of paper, students were to solve far more complex problems that actually test their understanding of what they are attempting to do instead of their grasp over carrying a 1.
I think you're just making that up. It sounds good "in theory," but I don't think the data support this
If you look, for example, at the historical trend of SAT scores, one doesn't see any evidence for this. Looking at the 1974 data (the earliest I could find, and about the time that calculators started to be introduced into society) and 1994 (when the Internet began being introduced into society), the math scores were absolutely flat. (Interestingly, there was quite a drop in average verbal scores).
Since 1994 there has been an increase, and I think that's interesting. But I don't think you can argue calculators are behind the trend.
At least, that seems to be a common perception, helped along in no small part by the marketing spawned by tech companies. The fact is you can teach people to be cogs as effectively with technology as without. At the same time, you can teach people to think imaginatively without technology, but, of course, technology is an excellent learning tool for such a project.
Sorry, I don't buy that the "basic math" is somehow an impediment to complex problems.
At the public school level the basic math matters, giving calculators lets kids skip the learning and practice they need for the basic skill.
At the high school level algebra matters, and calculators don' help much.
Heck with integers I found calculators confused students even more.
When you get to trig the calulator does help a bit, but when you get into stats and calc, it doesn't help again.
Calculators are just a tool, and a rather limited one at that, if the teacher marks the logic, as almost every math teacher I ever had did, they offer almost no benefit.
The sad part is watching todays teenagers struggling at their McJobs and how you could possibly question what their cash register says after they make a mistake.
Well put!
If you don't understand what parent and grandparent is talking about, watch this video by Khan of Khan Academy:
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
...is that with saturation comes complacency. What happens when (not if) that technology fails? I know this question has been asked in many guises over the years, but this yet again rears its ugly head, and to reiterate the most common answer:
If a child has been taught to launch the Calculator app on $OS, when that app is unavailable for whatever reason (platform crash, power failure, &c) when he needs to perform a calculation, he's gonna be stuck. Nobody will have taught him to use Typewriter 1.0 (pencil and paper). Nobody will have taught him to use Calculator 1.0 (brain). There is no initiative in computer applications. Even programming languages (from the lowest to the highest levels) have very strict rules over what you can and can't do and how to do them. The next generation of zombies will be sporting wearable tech, and when that tech fails they will starve.
Unless of course, said child has parents such as myself who have the initiative, sensibility and set-aside time to physically interact with their kids and teach them basic survival techniques - such as how to count using fingers, how to start a fire with two rocks and a lock of hair, how to snare a rabbit, scaled agriculture, repairing clothes, self defence, shelter building...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Most people today don't understand why the US is in recession. Why the housing bubble happened, or what may fix it. This is confirmation of your statement, we are in the middle of what may be a historical economic event and people don't have a clue. BTW, I successfully predicted the top of the housing market in 2002 based on very simple logic - housing prices vary inversely to interest rates, which had been declining for 20 years and were near zero - and I didn't need a computer to reach that conclusion.
It has be proven with double-blind studies that a human learns better by manipulating pen and paper and physical book and talking face to face with teacher and students. This is because humans evolved in a 3D world. Not until the computer can create an immersive 3D tactile experience in learning will it be advisable to use the computer as the core teaching tool. When I want to learn something, I print out materials and mark them up and write in a notebook and sleep on it. If it is good thought, then I put it Evernote for storing and later reference.
I am an old guy. Half a century ago, my k-12 teachers might say something like this: the ideal classroom is a tree log for a student to sit on the end of, with Socrates on the other end.
And I have more recent memories: Here is on from '83:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_at_Risk
This is nice and official and reasonable sane on what to do to fix the schools. And notable for really really dire language. Read it and curse for a bit.
Being a bit more high-level, we do like to push tech and a lot of us really really like/liked the space program, when we had one. And the money payback on Apollo is quite nice. And the 20 years of world tech leadership was nice. But I want to note that for a young kid the space program was exciting and MOTIVATING. Tell me something about our kids future and their motivations.
And here is the simple *local* cure for your schools: Hire teachers based on their high verbal IQ. You can pretty much ignore everything else you can away with ignoring. This is the only consistent variable that improves learning in schools. Fads we always have and people always wonder why things do not work out for very long.
Oh, here is an extreme. Remember Socrates. You could not hire him for your school in any normal fashion because of state licensing requirements. And just making a wild guess, given classical Greek pedagogical pedophilia, it is likely he cannot even live near your school. Oh well.
As an Algebra II teacher I see students every year who are harmed and impeded because they do not know their multiplication tables. 20x + 15 -> 5(4x + 3) and you get "where did the 5 and the 4 come from?". This is not good. Long division is good. The who idea of algorithms, limits (we are approaching from below) and when I actually go to divide polynomials they might have a snowballs chance in hell. So yeah, in high school it's too late and students use calculators, but don't tell me that their lack of basic math is not an impediment.
efitton.net
What am I suppose to do with two computers when I have 30 students in the class who are all responsible for the same state standards? Am I suppose to use the two computers so the money isn't "wasted" even though I have no research that indicates that it will be helpful and have not seen a realistic plan for how this will help even two students learn better without missing the content that the rest of the class is doing? There is a reason I'm not using those two sad little computers in the back of the room; they wouldn't help me achieve my goal of student learning.
Computers just by themselves are already great teachers. I'd bet those kids learned a lot more with them.
Now the question is what they learned a lot about. Was it games, porn, their friends, astronomy, programming? The only thing one can be cairtan is that it was in not the (dull) curriculum of school.
Rethinking email
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Add 23365786 and 809870987089 class. Look around hmm no pencils oh look a calculator on the desktop.
This maths is easy.
>Schools should not be wasting time and money on tech until they can get reading writing and basic math right. Without those none of the rest matter. :) my 3rd grader can add, subtract, and learning to multiply and divide. My first grader can read basically any word (of course she doesn't have HD vocab yet), and is reading chapter books. Both in (good) public schools, in GA
They usually do; what schools are you talking about ? What is basic math for you ? calculus ?
>I think it is possible to use tech to make a better education process, but that the American education system is wholly unsuited to making the fundamental change in mindset required. So quit wasting money until we are ready to blow it up and start over.
The Amercian ed system works well, and can adapt to changes; computers CAN help, teachers are usually better; it seems this is talk about replacing teachers with computers, which is usually a bad idea, instead of adding computers to teachers.
> In case nobody has noticed the country is broke.
No, it is not. We do have a large debt, but it is quite manageable; if we just let Bush's tax cuts expire, the deficit will stabilize in less than 10 years.
And tablets are PERFECT for drilling, and getting better; they're cheap, and the UI gets out of your way ! try doing flashcards and quizzes on a tablet; they're great. And a lot of elementary material requires oodles of drilling.
They're asking the wrong questions, focusing on short-term test score results. The right questions are: For teachers, does the technology increase the adoption rates for new materials? And for students, do the laptops increase information and computer literacy rates? Improving either or both of those rates will have significant impacts further down the line.
Assessing the effectiveness of these measures by looking at immediate test scores is akin to judging a new company mission statement by the next quarterlies -- it's foolish and short-sighted.
Not in my experience.
Calculators were strictly forbidden at every math exam I've had at university. They tested my knowledge and understanding far better than any other exam I had. All I needed was to know the multiplication table (up to 12 helps), how to multiply larger numbers and how to divide numbers.
That is reasonable, especially when the problems are crafted to have nice round answers. That is designed to test understanding, and if done right, the teacher really won't care if your answer is wrong due to arithmetic error, as long as the work shows that you understood the problem and how to solve it.
The one downside to this though is because handwritten arithmetic generally takes longer than using a calculator, the professor cannot have as many questions. I personally found that most of my mathematics professors allowed calculators on tests, despite no problems needing them. The problems invariably were things that even the best calculators on the market could not solve. (For example, I've yet to see a calculator that can symbolically perform surface integration, and by that point in calculus, the basic integrals you convert them to are something the students have already proven they can solve on their own, so the fact that some calculators can solve them is irrelevant).
With calculators you may learn how to solve certain problems by rote, and thus score slightly higher on tests. That doesn't mean you have any understanding of the math involved. Tests where calculators are involved seem to be prone to this, at least in my experience (which is admittedly not that extensive). My girlfriend had "learned" math like this. She attempted to take further math classes, but quickly struggled as there was no longer a magic button that would rescue her.
I guess my point is that calculators doesn't do anything for understanding.
Correct, calculators do nothing for understanding. They simply help speed things up and reduce errors. In school ideally you would only ever use a calculator to do things that you have already demonstrated an understanding of. Those are often the sub-problems of your current problem.
Doing trivial multiplication and addition on paper is a skill I believe most people should possess, and if you have that as a basis you can test their skills in everything from easy to complicated math problems.
They can of course help with productivity if you know what you're doing.
Being able to do trivial addition and multiplication on paper is definitely a skill everybody should possess, but that is a required portion of primary education pretty much everywhere.
In the real world using a calculator is far faster and less prone to mistakes (you can make a mistake typing, but with pen and paper, you can make a mistake writing the original numbers, or make a mistake in the basic arithmetic.)
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Idiot. What makes you think that students can solve complex problems with a calculator? If students can't calculate without a calculator, they won't be able to calculate with one either.I can't tell you the number of times I have seen students getting the wrong answers with a calculator simply because they didn't know how to key in the problem. An idiot armed with the latest technology is still an idiot.
Somewhere in a classroom with no electricity some kid just scored better than 90% of US students on his/her math test. His/her education costs $2 a month and this kid will likely be your child's doctor when you child go on SS disability for being a fat worthless slob.
But yes, your child will be able to tweet how much the wait in the doctors office 'sux'.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
Mod parent up - back in high school I had a nice pile of math awards and commendations from various organizations, and yet when working as a cashier it was annoying as anything when somebody decided to start swapping change with me.
Typical process is to count customer's cash, ring up transaction, put customer's cash in drawer, count out change, and hand it to the customer after closing the drawer.
Counting 97 cents in change takes me all of two seconds. Putting all that change back and then stopping to think through what I'm doing since I've been doing mindless checking work all day long takes time. Now, suppose I put that cash back in the drawer. How much was the original total? How much did the customer give me originally? A bunch of memory tasks need to be solved, or I need to add 0.25 to 14.97 in my head quickly and hope I pick add and not subtract. And then what happens when the customer decides to give me three more cents on top of that?
And, if I get it wrong I'm the guy who gets in trouble for it if I mess up. I also get in trouble if somebody runs by and grabs a stack of 20s from my drawer while I'm busy fumbling with 5th grade math.
I'd just smile and tell the customer that I couldn't accommodate them. I could really have cared less what they thought of my 5th grade math skills. I'm sure today I'm making significantly more than many of them despite their having a 20-year head start on me. My employer doesn't pay me to make change, as they're smart enough to realize that people good at math are expensive replacements for a cash register.
Sure, and that is why I was a mediocre "math" student up until Algebra, and afterwards I was exceptional by just about any standard. The best kids at math in elementary and early middle school were mostly people who really were careful with their homework and no doubt triple-checked everything lest they make a mistake. To be honest I don't think many of them really even were in the highest-tier classes at the high school level (back when they actually had different tiers based on difficulty/ability).
Almost every mistake I made in advanced math classes amounted to errors in elementary math. In the end they were inconsequential - maybe I'd get a 97% or 95% on a test whose next lower score was an 85%. In the real world a computer would be doing that part of the work anyway, or somebody else would be paid to check calculations.
We might call it all "math," but I see a vast difference between understanding and applying the concepts of mathematics to solve problems and spending years becoming very good at doing column arithmetic.
"Bottom line is that as long as we have people who say "I'm computer illiterate" and then laugh, then there is still work to be done to enable people to be successful in the world."
/. contributions.
NO! I hate those people too! But we don't WANT to eliminate them, they're the people that brought us Windows Uber Alles. Government supervision of the web. Censorship. The iPad. The endless September. 100MB a month data plans. The teleco monopoly. Banner Ads. Online pharmaceuticals. Twitter. MySpace. Facebook. Terrified wikipedia editors. Console "multiplayer". Flash gaming. The new Slashdot layout. Some of the new
We should never have told them how useful computers are. Nerds everywhere were happier when those people used PHONES and TVs and left us alone. It's time we stopped the madness! Send the Luddites packing!