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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."
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.
Great idea! Little Johnny is failing math, but he can tweet like a motherfucker now!
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
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.
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
If all they do is decrease the insane cost of books then its a win.
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
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.
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 think the immediate reaction is "stop wasting money." For some reason we can afford to buy kids laptops, but can't afford to make teaching a high-paying job. And yet we expect excellent results. The only way laptops can help students to learn is if they help teachers to teach more effectively. I.e., the laptop in the students' hands is a tool for the teacher, not the student. But that's not how laptops are being used.
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.
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.
There is no curve on the NCLB tests like the Gates foundation and others are trying to address. There is a standard that is set of minimal qualifications in each content area with multiple levels of achievement. Unfortunately, if your teachers aren't allowed to teach and must do what their administrators and legislators consider good curriculum (despite many of them being completely unqualified), you chances of actually improving scores lowers drastically.
When virtual reality is possible, the student can learn history by "being there"
I have family members who lived through *major* historical events. Being there didn't tell them why they were there nor why it was so important nor what was happening a few miles away and how that impacted them. They didn't really understand the big picture until I shared some of that old fashioned college book learning with them.
History is not merely a record of what happened, it also considers the various things that influenced what happened. The real work and study is often in the later.
Curved laptops? Doesn't Apple have a patent on that?
The learning process is driven by the teachers
I'd argue the learning process is driven by interest in the subject. IMHO, giving each kid a laptop doesn't generate interest in any subject.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
> 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
More importantly the grading process is driven by grades. If everyone gets a A+ your grading way to easy. So ideally you should grade to a sliding scale, so that some get A+ and some fail. This is normal and to be expected just like 100 IQ being the average should also gain an average grade, those below needing to do more work to pass and those above tending to cruise or work harder and achieve higher grades.
Latops in classrooms should ideally replace textbooks and allow more to be taught in the area of socio-economics, law and political understanding. Simulations can also be used to provide greater understanding of complex interactions.
The never ending problem I have found with computers is the majority treat them like a magic box and just like a magic box it will do the work for them, learn for them and understand for them. Beware the magic box will not make learning anything else easier, it fact it will make it harder because you also have to learn how to use the magic box. Computer make information more accessible they do not make it easier to learn (a higher IQ does that).
Computers can of course be used to more effectively tailor the learning experience to the IQ of the children, providing challenges for those with higher IQ and providing more help for those with problems. They could be used to accelerate the smartest through the education process, allowing them to graduate early and move on.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen