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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."
...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
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
Umm, have you ever actually interacted with teachers RE: technology?
I'm sure that there are exceptions who actually have the economic views you assert(and I've definitely met exceptions who simply know fuck-all about technology and really don't want to start now; but the latter group is, in the face of retirement and replacement by 20-somethings who've been using laptops for at least their entire undergrand, a self-solving problem); but my experience during the times I've worked in educational IT is that teachers are either very enthusiastic about technology, or simple technophobes without some sinister union plot motive.
There exists automated drilling and assessment software for, among other things, elementary mathematics instruction. The math department came to us asking for an implementation, and we can't keep up with the demand for in-classroom computers to support the stuff. The music department, for their part, has enthusiastically adopted a rather neat automated system that can analyze the deviations of a student playing an instrument from the desired waveforms for a piece. Art? We haven't been able to afford Wacoms for the lab; but they voluntarily branched out into digital raster-image editing...
There are some perverse elements of educational union politicking; but my work with the IT department never once ran into opposition on teacher-economic grounds.
I had a teacher in high school who'd simply send you out of the classroom if you disrupted the lesson. You needn't be here, you can as well be someone else, get the fuck out of my class. I'm your teacher, not your nanny, and I don't give half a shit where and how you learn what's up for the next test. You can learn it here, or you can try it on your own, you needn't listen.
His lessons were also by some margin the most productive ones. He didn't spend half the hour trying to calm down the class.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They're teaching Powerpoint.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Oh I am. Because you can teach concepts, ideas and topic, but not programs. That's why you teach carpentry, and not hammer. Computers are not different: you can teach writing and graphics design, but not Word and PowerPoint. The later are (poor?) tools for the former, but you have to teach the concepts, not the implementation, or you will never get anywhere.
But the real problem is that teaching computers is cheaper. Someone (no doubt a high level school manager) must have thought that with PCs everywhere, you can use cheaper or fewer teachers. The opposite is the case: you have to teach computers in smaller cohorts, and the teachers need better training. That is at least until you have reached some basic threshold knowledge, after which kids can (given enough skills, intelligence, opportunity and perseverance) learn a lot by themselves.
In the long term, we will get a lot better about using computers in the classroom. But for now we are the very beginning, and we are just testing different things. It is no surprise that most don't work.
> Define what you consider to be getting those three items right.
We know what 'right' looks like. A hundred years ago students knew a lot more than a student does now at any grade level. If you haven't seen it go find and watch Ken Burn's documentary on the "Civil War". Besides being a good program on the subject observe his use of letters from the soldiers. Not just officers from the landed gentry class but enlisted men writing letters home to their wives and sweethearts. Observe the literacy, the firm command of grammar and well developed vocabularies without spell checkers or even pocket dictionaries. Observe the advanced grasp of philosophical, religious and political theory. Observe their ability to reference and quote at length from the core works of the western literary tradition, again without aid of reference works or Google.
They were a people worthy of receiving the blessings of liberty. We lost both, there is a lesson here.
> I'll leave aside the problems of getting reading, writing, and math without technology to you simply not
> realizing the full impact of what you were saying.
You need no more technology than the printing press, pencil and blackboard to teach reading, writing and math in a K-12 environment. Do I think it possible to use technology to actually improve on the achievements of our forebearers? Yes, but not with the current school system in the grip of the educrats, politically correct dogmists and unions. So barring the political will to rip and replace a failed system I say at least waste no additional resources on a failure.
> The poor get disproportionately less benefits than the rich do.
The poor are also disproportionally less productive than the rich. Amazing how that works. Sitting on yer illiterate ass waiting for the mailman is a losing game. Who would have figured that. However there are NO poor in America. Look in the third world sometime, those people are poor. Our poor are obese. Seriously, obesity is the number one health problem for the 'poor' in America according to your beloved government's statistics. Sorry, but if you have a smart phone you are not poor. If you have cable TV you aren't poor. If you have multiple flat screen TVs in your house you aren't poor. This scam of defining a fixed percentage of the US population as 'poor' has to stop. We fought a "War on Poverty" and won. Too bad we destroyed the country in the process and now almost everyone is likely to soon be poor because of it.
Despite the governments' attempts to make America 'just another country' it is still possible for anyone who really wants to put in the effort to succeed. Being in the bottom of the wealth distribution isn't something you are born into and must accept until death. Stay in school, even if they are crappy, read the whole textbook including the parts the teacher never gets around to, keep yer genitals in your pants until you find someone of the moral fiber to marry and stay married to, get a job, any job and start clawing. Do those things and the odds are achieving at least the middle class are very good.
> Also, the country is not broke.
Spoke like a true product of the American education system. We are indeed broke. Our government is spending far more than it could possibly ever raise through taxes. Any attempt to even try would destroy what economic activity remains and result in less revenue than is coming in now. The problem isn't a lack of tax revenue, it is vastly increased spending compared too historical trends. And worse we have made commitments in social security/medicare, state pensions, etc. that can't possibly be kept. We can't just keep borrowing from China either because a) they won't keep loaning forever without a price we won't pay and b) they are boned too and won't be able to loan us much more even if they wanted to.
Democrat delenda est